What Up, Doc?

Today I decided which series-in-process was going to be cordially invited to get finished over the next 30 days.

I have always been fond of the Survival Games drawings, but I’ve also thought that something is lacking in them. They are too ‘one note’. Not only that, they’ve been on my studio wall so long that they have become precious. So precious, in fact, that I have been extremely reticent to try out any of the ideas I have for making them less shallow.

Letting anything achieve the status of Precious is paralyzing for an artist.

That’s why they are about to stop being precious. I must do whatever it takes to make big progress be it adding text, background setting(s), cutting them up, etc. Conviction aside, I’m not going to be rash about it. I don’t want to throw away all the work I’ve already put into them so I am doing some tests before I commit.

One of the plans was to add some text – dialogue or diagram notations or some such. This thought eventually grew to speech bubbles, referencing graphic novels. For the font I wanted to use some kind of scroll-y, manuscript-type lettering, so chose to go with pen and ink. I wanted something inconsistent and archaic and I wasn’t getting it with the commercial steel nib, so I rooted around in my magic supply stash and found some tiny goose feathers and I made my own (very tiny) quill pen:

It gave me more of the look I was wanting AND it has a much more pleasant feel when using it than the steel nibs do.

Unfortunately it is so tiny that writing with it for any length of time is agonizing (on the To Do list tomorrow is a walkabout to look for larger goose feathers that will be more ergonomic).

For the speech bubble content I used dialogue from vintage Bugs Bunny, with the twist of running the lines through Google translator from English to Latin (running them back through again from Latin to English resulted in some strange and appealing beat script, i.e. ‘Be very quiet…I’m hunting rabbits’ translated to ‘Loren ipsum dolor sit quietus…lepores venandi’, which, translated back to English became ‘Click images to quit hunting hares’.

(images appear hazy because I have a layer of tracing paper protecting the originals while I spatter ink everywhere).

Not certain whether I would keep the bubble outlines or not. Care to comment?