Bell

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     Whee! Cartoons are cartoons. This is the impression of how ringing a bell looks and feels. 

     I started making another one of these, an earlier version, and it had all of the physics correct, with all of the mechanicals of the little swinging yoke thingy, and with all the pulleys and mechanicals protected under the roof of the tower, etc. But it looked WAY too busy, and by the time I was starting to ink it in, you almost couldn't tell that there was a bell under all that visual noise. 

     So I tossed it aside. It was a drawing for an engineer or maybe it was a detailed construction plan for somebody building an actual bell tower. But the one thing that it was NOT was a cartoon drawing that was a clear read upon the first glance. 

     After a break, I came back to it with the idea that I would strip it down to it's barest essentials: Bell, Tower, Ringing mechanism (simple!), and a cartoon guy straining against the weight and sound of the thing. That's it! That's all it needed. 

     Yay. 

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Morse

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     "And then, just when we thought we'd never be able to pinpoint the location of the monster, we started receiving broadcasts from civilian radio operators who had visual contact"

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Wave

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     Ah, look at that. The two nice things about these vertical images is that 

     1) On my blog, I can post them as EXTRA LARGE. So that the vertical edges stretch almost all the way over to sides of the blog page. 

     2) The vertical format takes up alms the entire screen of my iPhone so there aren't big blocks of black on the top and bottom, and a small-ish image in between. So if I'm handing my phone to somebody ("I do this type of art") it represents well on the screen. 

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     I know I could just turn my Moleskine book sideways, and suddenly do a long horizontal format. But eventually I want to make short little YouTube videos of my hands flipping through the pages of my sketchbook, like the ones that I've seen, and I always kind of find it jarring when suddenly there's an image that you have to bend your head to look at. 

     These are individual works of art, but they are also a book. I find it jarring in regular books too, when the printer goofs up and there is a page in the book that is upside down, or sideways or out of order or something. It looks sloppy and careless. 

     So, I gave myself that limitation. No images included that you have to tilt the book (or screen) to see it's horizontal layout. 

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     I can think of an exception: If I did an entire book in the Horizontal format. That would be okay. So that the viewer could turn the book once, at the very beginning and flip through it from bottom to top for the entire book. Or the camera could be set up once that way and not have to turn. That would be more respectful to the viewer, I think. 

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Down Below

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     Hi. I'm in a hurry and kind of late for work so...have a picture! It's on me, brother.

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S.A.E.

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     Paul loved old American cars, and what they stood for. If other people wanted to keep a set of metric wrenches in the toolbox, that was okay. For them. But not for Paul. It was the principle of the thing. 

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Mountain Road

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     Janet and Bob had a strange feeling as they went through the tunnel. It wasn't just dark, it was ice cold. There seemed to be a dull sound like a wind or a distant roar. Worst of all, their thoughts kept being interrupted by sudden visions of extreme violence and despair. 

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The Dry Season

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     Riding a bike around town, you see a lot of happy things that you didn't used to see. You also see a lot of sad things that are hidden just slightly out of view of the passing cars. 

     It turns out that there are a lot of homeless camps in Los Angeles, though they do their best to keep hidden (they don't really build tree houses and wave at the passing cyclists). On a bike, you are down there at street level. You see, hear, and smell absolutely everything. It's magically uplifting and hauntingly depressing at the same time. 

     I guess that's just a good description of all mankind, really. 

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