Transcendental Geology

Did you think I'd given up on "Draw Two Panels"?

Oh, I'm still doing the project. Or is it a process, not a project, since I don't have a terminus in mind?

Anyway, I got stymied, because of a bad first attempt at this strip (I mean, a worse attempt; this set of results is still pretty bad) and because a note that Winter left on one of the other posts made me self-conscious about my plans for this strip.

Well, after much deliberation and a bit of clunky drawering, here it is.

Hopefully I'll be back in the saddle in a few days.

I Gave Myself Too Many Chairs to Draw

Here's yesterday's "Draw Two Panels" strip.

I like the two "drawn" panels (the ones that have appeared previously) enough that I am loath to remove either of them from the deck, even though I could certainly discard either of them now. The warning by "Elspeth Parks" was one of the very first random cards I created for the deck, and I feel like it's trying to tell me that this process has its own built-in pitfalls.

Maybe I'll just keep all four panels from this strip still in the deck.

Fzzzark! Woop! Woop!

Today's "Draw Two Panels" strip introduces not one but two of the robots I have drawn for Alphabots. I suppose that was likely to happen eventually.

It was fun to draw the Cooker again, though putting him into a panel automatically raises the question of perspective in a way that I have to admit I find a little awkward. (I'm not drawing these things in a space where I can get out a big ruler, and the original paper is only 4" by 3", so it's hard to be scientific about linear perspective. Hopefully the way I'm fudging it more or less works.)

Anyway, there are more of these coming up this week.

I Guess That Counts as a Background

Here's another deck-derived semi-subconscious strip.

There's some decent cartooning in a couple of those panels.

I was trying a new method of shading in that second panel, but I think I'd better stick to cross-hatching. It might be possible for long practice to improve that method, but I don't think it's worth it—there's a sort of fundamental conflict between the super-smooth surface of the bristol board and the crayon's preference for tooth and texture.

They're Sort of a Fantastic Four, I Guess

Okay, another of those random deck-driven strips.

Maybe it was a bad decision to take foreground elements from both of the deck panels and depict them as characters. Getting four monsters into panel #2 meant crowding it up kind of a lot. (These panels aren't a good shape for crowds.)

I'll be a little sorry to see the four-armed sea-monster dude leave the deck: I really like his face. On the other hand, I am finally getting to discard the line about the goldfinches that I swiped, perhaps unwisely, from a Patrick Kavanagh poem.

More soon!

Bowie, Pee-Wee, and Dick Van Dyke Walk Into a Bar

The panels that came out of the deck for this strip are in the least common "legal" configuration:

If you look at the rules or guidelines for "Draw Two Panels," you'll see that it's possible to deal the panels into slots #2 and #3, instead of having them separated by a single panel.

My idea for the legal arrangements is this: the strip will go into more interesting territory if the newly-drawn panels don't merely happen in between the panels that come from the deck, but they will be more constrained by the deck panels if you get no more than one new panel in a row.

If no more than one new panel can appear in a row consecutively, and the dealt cards must appear in the order they're dealt, there are only three ways to fit them into a four-panel strip.

Of course, these are only my principles or guidelines. If you're playing "Draw Two Panels" yourself, you can make your own decisions about your constraints.

Your Nimoy/Proust Pun of the Day

My spring break started this afternoon, and I was able to finish inking the strip I had drawn last night.

The first and third panels of this strip came from the deck. We haven't seen the first one before—it was a random-input panel that I drew a couple of weeks ago.

It's been a good month for cartooning here on the blog, thanks to this new process, and a good month for posts. But this February was really nothing compared to Mike's twenty-eight-day Lone Wolf and Cub read-along series. Those were good times.

More soon.

So That's What That Symbol Represents

Today's deck-derived strip seems to be going in kind of a dark direction.

The new character, introduced in panels #1 and #3 (which are the new ones this time) has his hair and beard modeled on the young Ezra Pound, though I have to admit I was working from memory and would up giving him too substantial a goatee.

I'm pleased to have been able to give one name to the symbol that has been appearing on and off in the strips for weeks. (If you look at the second panel of this strip, down below the path in the background, you'll see its introduction into the deck.) Of course, the way this process works, it may never be called that again.

See you again soon.

I Did Evade "Devo Dave's Ovid Video Void."

Here's another of the random strips that have been emerging from my "Draw Two Panels" deck-based process.

The first and third panels are new for this strip, and the first one is mainly aiming to amuse Tom Hart.

Is that weird enough?

(Seldom Is Heard) a Misunderstood Word

Well, this is a little silly...

...and I'm still not doing much by way of backgrounds. I did draw a panel with three characters in it, sort of implying that panel three (which came out of the deck) also has three characters in it.

But I think this one works okay. What do you think?

What Are the Chances?

I'm not sure what's going on with my deck.

I really did draw that same panel a third time in a row. It's possible that the card is a little thicker than some of the other cards in the deck, or a little thinner, in a way that leads it to come up when I cut the cards. Honestly, I was trying to avoid it this time, but apparently my sleights of legerdemain leave a lot to be desired.

I'm still not going to discard panel 1, but if it comes up again next, I'm definitely ditching it (after drawing one more strip with it).

I don't like the way the little demon in this strip turned out, and I'm really not happy with the placement of the speech balloon tail in panel 4. And maybe the joke doesn't "read" as clearly as it ought to. I don't know what I'm doing.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Apparently my deck read my last post and decided to give me the same panel again right away.

I'm going to put it back in the deck again and hope that I won't draw it for a week or so.

Greetings, Archy Buffo, Pratfall King

Well, I'm back to my deck, and back to my aleatory experiments.

I could discard panels #1 and #3 now, since they've both been used twice. But I think I'm going to load #1 back into my deck. That seems like a question I want to ask myself again, at least once.

Stay tuned. One day soon I will tell you what I'm doing with the discards.

Arrivederci, Arturo Aleatore, Gesturist Sublime

Well, I had hoped that Arturo Aleatore would be a longer-lasting presence in my deck, but the card that names him has come up again, so I'm discarding it after this strip. Instead, I seem to be doomed to the visual proliferation of my little buglike alien dude.

But if I could make choices about that sort of thing, then I wouldn't be trusting the aleatory process of the deck.

No idea what will happen next, but at least I drew a background this time.

One Way to Parse Those Three Left Hands

Here's the first strip in which I happen to use the panel that was my B Alphabots drawing.

I like the way that turned out, though I'm sort of starting to get self-conscious about using cross-hatching in lieu of a real background.

The Great Arturo Aleatore

Here's another of those randomly-generated strips.

The two dealt panels, #2 and #4, are both swipes. If I recall correctly, one is from the Land of Nod catalog and the other is from the first trade of Paul Grist's Mudman. This is probably another one of those strips that will look better when it's reformatted out of the 2x2 grid.

As ever, I welcome your comments and input.

If You Think of the Interlocutor as a Changeling

I'm not sure whether this one works, though I like the point it raises, and I really like the way the demon looks in the final panel.

When I say I'm not sure it works, I mean I'm not sure it really "reads" in and out of panel 3 the way it should. But here we are, and there it is.

And Now, Apparently, Outer Space

The pair of panels that came from the deck this time (1 and 3 below) seemed to pose a real conundrum. I'm not sure this is the best solution.

I'm also not sure about that ratio. How many birds in the bush do you think a bird in the mind is worth?

Random Breath of Optimism

This one has a single repeated panel, a couple of barely-hidden references to Devo, and a monkey.

As always, I welcome your input.

Are These Strips About Something?

Well, this one has a couple of re-used panels, too.

Maybe I should say a little bit about how I'm making these strips. Each of them has two panels selected at random from a deck, plus two new panels that connect them or make sense of them. That process of "making sense" is what the project is about.

After they're used once, the panels go back into the deck.

And what happens to them after they're used twice? Well, more about that in the days to come.