All gifts given during an occasion where gifts are exchanged fall into these categories:

• Genuine Gift: With minimal input from you the giver located the gift on their own initiative based on their perception of it as something you might like. In other words: you didn’t ask for anything but you got something.
• Line-Item Gift: The gift was something someone got you just so they could cross you off their shopping list. Gift cards fall into this category. Re-gifts also fall into this category but occasionally those can be disguised as genuine gifts.
• Trade Gift: You told the giver “I want X” and the giver told you “I want Y” and the two of you went out and bought the corresponding items for each other. This is dumb. You might as well just have bought yourself the thing you wanted and told the giver to do likewise.  This also applies if you gave a gift card and got one in return (dumb.)
• Anti-Gift: A gift that actually puts you through an inordinate amount of trouble and/or expense in order to actually use it. These are somewhat rare. For example: someone gives you early season Cubs tickets. After dropping money on parking, beer, and food while freezing your ass off you decide you would rather have watched the game at home.
• Self-Gift: Another rare one. At a grab bag gift exchange you select the gift that you contributed. This was your plan from the start. I suppose the phenomenon of people buying something for themselves, wrapping it, and putting “from Santa” on it falls under this category too.
• Self-Serving gift. These are not rare. Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday (with finger holes for himself drilled into it?) That’s a good example. Giving your wife a vacuum cleaner would be another one.
• Selfless gift: You gave something but expect nothing in return. This also counts as a “Genuine” gift but gets its own category since there was technically no exchange.

I’m sure I missed some but I’m out of ideas for now.

I’m starting to map out the workload for this project I’ve got in mind. It’s staggering.

• Writing (ongoing)
• Painting the static settings on canvas (and considering that I’m still learning how to paint this is the big hurdle right now.)
• generating art and/or models for characters and various dynamic elements
• Figuring out how to put it all together and present it

Notice I said “and/or models” I don’t plan on drawing pictures of every single thing in the comic strip. If, for example, there’s a strip where some planes bomb a factory I’ll simply use models of planes superimposed over a painted background. I own so many miniatures that I could generate some funny situations if I set my mind to it.

The character art is going to be the challenge.

I just spent an hour sketching. This was preceded on Friday by several additional hours of sketching at the monthly staff briefing at work. During those off-site meetings I don’t even try to disguise the fact that I’m sketching. I even had a little pile of pencil shavings on a napkin in front of me.

Anyway, an idea for a painting/drawing/modeling project is taking shape. It has the potential to be an insane amount of work so I’m approaching it with a certain degree of apprehension because I still think my painting skills aren’t up to snuff.

The Idea:

The “Comic” (I’m not sure what else to call it) takes place in an unspecified time but the period is analogous to the 1950’s. There are three superpowers: The Northern Republic, The White Star Union, and the Red Bloc. If you can’t figure out the analogy there then please go repeat high school and come back when you understand the Cold War.

The Northern Republic and the White Star are allies. The Republic and the Red Bloc used to be allies but had a falling out. For this reason the Republic and the White Star do not fully trust each other. The Red Bloc and the other superpowers are fighting a not-so-cold war. All of the nations are governed by pompous idiots,  mad scientists, mad lawyers, and various left or right wing nutballs. The whole lot of them are paranoid cowards with mutually assured destruction in mind and it is for this reason that the superpowers don’t engage in full-scale war.

Instead they attack each other with improbable, ineffective, often bumbling weapons of limited destructive capability.

It’s within this framework of global paranoia, hyper-nationalism, governmental idiocracy, and perpetual brinkmanship that I want to create some kind of project. Since mad scientists are involved there’s no limit to what kind of themes I could draw up. Time travel and space travel (both bumbling and misguided, of course) are both fair game.

The comic I drew in pencil today had a little spaceship looking thing crashing in a cornfield and emitting lethal radiation until the local radiation warden came to collect it so it could be shot back at the enemy.  “Don’t step within 10 feet of that enemy probe Timmy! It’s emitting invisible radiation that could lead to loss of appetite!”

I’ll keep thinking about this and write about some ideas for implementation tomorrow.

A long time ago, in 2007, we were sitting around at work making new years’ resolutions. We agreed upon a “blanket” resolution for both 2008 and 2009 so we wouldn’t have to repeat the conversation again the next year (which is now THIS year.)

The resolution was “Decadence in 2008. Rehab in 2009.” Of course, at the time, we were joking.

And god damn it we hit it right on the mark.

Merriam-Webster defines “decadence” as “a period of decline.” I would say that was well and truly realized. Nobody I know is better off now than they were in 2007.

Now it’s time for rehab 2009. We get a new president on the 20th day of the new year. Hopefully we’ll get a new governor here in Illinois even sooner than that.

We can rebuild it! Is it too much to hope that in 2010 I might be able to sell my sad condo and move into a house? I hope not.

This year I’m looking forward to Christmas in the same way that one might look forward to jury duty or a drivers license renewal. It’s coming up, it has to be done, and when it’s done it’s done. I haven’t bought a single gift yet nor do I anticipate doing so at anything other than the last minute. The reasons for this sour attitude? Well, 2008 sucked and I figure the holidays might as well be consistent with that trend.

Last night I sat down in front of the TV with my sketch pad and tried to work out some ideas for paintings or comic strips or whatever. I’m not going to draw the VTA anymore but if I get random ideas for comic strips I might draw one every now and then.

The first thing I drew was Vault Boy from Fallout 3.

(this is not my drawing)

I think I’m going to work him into a comic-artsy painting. I can paint a halfway decent line with a #4 flat sable so I don’t anticipate having any problems painting video game characters, comic book characters, etc. The real devil is in painting the backgrounds which I guess will be a hodge-podge of 1950’s style duck-and-cover type shit. If I can get used to doing stuff like that I’ll eventually come up with something that isn’t someone else’s IP.

The other thing I ended up at was a sketch of two satellites. One was vaguely Sputnik and the other was an American spy satellite.  In the one panel I finished the spy satellite was saying “It’s lonely over East Germany.” and the other was saying “maybe the next time we traverse at this proximity the Cold War will be over.” Not very compelling by itself but I was amused by the drawing enough to flesh the idea out a little more.

Part of my motivational problem when I used to draw the webcomic was that I enjoy drawing objects more than people. Maybe if everything in the comic was an object I’d draw it more often.

I’ve completed my fourth “trainer” painting. They turn out a little better every time. For my next painting I may put the book aside and use the techniques I’ve learned so far to do an original non-landscape painting.

For my fourth acrylic painting ever I think it turned out OK. If you went back in time to watch me at age 12 paint my fourth miniature ever I think you would agree that the acrylics progress has been much faster. I think the miniature turned out so bad that I just dunked it in turpentine and started over.

(click for full size)

The painting is out of Jerry Yarnell’s Painting Basics. Yarnell is along the same lines as Bob Ross. Mostly landscapes, some seascapes. Nothing super-interesting but he covers a lot of fundamental techniques. I’m not half bad at script lining and dry brushing. I need to work on keeping edges soft, especially in the sky.

Still, his palette is a little too purple for my tastes. It might be time to move on soon.

There are a lot of pictures in my head that I want to paint but I’m not good enough to paint them yet.

December has been very top-heavy so far but I think work will start winding down toward the holidays after next week.

Some people have been asking me about the seemingly random numbers I’ve been putting in my Gmail status messages. They DO mean something but don’t try to figure them out. (171, 90, and 3555)

If I threw a meaningful number in there like a latitude and longitude it would spoil the whole thing!

Did you know that Wednesday is named after the Anglo-Saxon pagan god Woden (Wotan)?

In turn, Woden was derived from Odin, the chief god of Norse paganism.

Does this mean that Thursday is named after Thor? Thorsday? Of course it does.

Lately I’ve been preoccupied with the idea that in a post-apocalyptic America there would be a post-apocalyptic Santa Claus. When I get an idea like this my usual instinct is that someone else thought of it first and it’s something I read and forgot about or it’s simply a case of me having the same idea as someone else.

This time, however, I can’t seem to find any evidence that this is a concept that someone else has fleshed out.

In fact, I can’t really find much evidence that Steampunk Santa has been fully fleshed out either although that concept seems like it would come together in a fairly obvious way (He flies in a steam-powered zeppelin, whoop-de-fucking-doo.)

So let’s go back and talk about Post-Apocalyptic Santa.

• He has a long white beard. Pretty much all men have long beards after the apocalypse but Santa’s is special because it contains few parasites by comparison.
• He wears a greatcoat made out of reindeer hides. Legend has it that Santa keeps a herd of reindeer in his compound. The bounty they provide is what gives Santa his jolly, fat appearance. It’s told that he weighs over 175 pounds making him one of the fattest men in the wasteland!
• He says “Ho Ho Ho” sometimes but mostly he just coughs.
• Santa carries a hunting rifle with a scope. Many a fool has tried to test his skill with it on a cold wasteland night!
• Nobody knows what month or day it is so Santa works all through the months when the days are short.
• Post-apocalyptic Santa brings coal to all the good boys and girls so they don’t freeze at night. He brings them homemade whiskey too. Bad boys and girls get unlabeled expired pharmaceuticals, broken appliances, and books (none of them can read so all they can do is burn the books for their meager value as fuel.)
• He’s drunk all the time.

Hmm…maybe I’ll try to draw a picture of Post-Apocalyptic Santa.