Episode 33 - School's Out! (But Is Color In?)

So it's taken me a couple weeks to get this one done, and I'm a little irritated about that.

To get things done faster, I've switched to pencilling and inking by hand. This works better because I can carry a drawing pad with me wherever I go, and if I have a few minutes where I'm sitting and waiting for the kids, like I did the last couple of weeks, I can whip out the drawing pad and get to work. I even bought a shiny new mechanical pencil for this purpose, along with some red leads to go in it. Using a red pencil lets me scan in the drawing without having to worry about erasing the pencil marks. I just drop out the red in the channels palette and voila! All I'm left with is my ink work. Pretty neat, huh?

But then I got to thinking (and this is where the trouble usually starts)...

Maybe, just maybe, I should try doing the cartoon in color. Yeah, it might require an extra step or two, but wouldn't that be cool?!

No, it turns out it would not. Manga Studio Debut is not cut out for colorizing cartoons. I tried to get it to work, and had lotsa problems. First off, I want to be able to publish these cartoons as a collection at some point, a print collection, and there are very few webcomics that come out in print in color. Black and white is far easier and cheaper to print. Fact of life. So I would still need to prep the cartoon for black and white as well as color, meaning I'd still need to put in all those gray scale tones I've been using. I though I could kill two birds with one stone by doing the tones in color, but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get the tones to come out in the colors I wanted them too. You can see that this week's cartoon is pretty washed out. It looks like a hand tinted photograph, almost.

So not sure what to do. I'll keep exploring my options, but hopefully won't allow it to interfere anymore with production. Meanwhile, you guys let me know. Color? Or no color? There are ways of getting that vibrant color I wanted, but I'd have to skip the toning to get things out fast.

Just Doodling

I'm schlepping Princess to camp at a local museum all week. The place is just far enough away, and her time at camp just short enough, that there's no point in me coming back home to do anything. So Pixie and I are spending the day hitting ALL the local museums and parks in that area. There are quite a few.

Yesterday, while Pixie ran amok in the Virginia Living Museum (where Princess' camp is being held), I squeezed in a little doodle time, experimenting with a new tool in my art kit - a mechanical pencil with red lead. I just can't drag myself to the computer anymore in the evenings to cartoon, so I am once again switching to doing things the old fashioned way, by hand. A friend suggested I use a mechanical pencil with red leads to do my sketching, then after inking and scanning in the artwork, I can just drop the red channel from the image, and voila! No erasing to do to clean up my artwork. This page has both red and blue pencil in it, and I can't get rid of both (it doesn't work that way), but I was able to experiment in Photoshop long enough to confirm that I can do what I want with the red pencil. So without further ado, here's my random doodles with the fancy new mechanical red pencil!

When you click on the image above, you'll get it in full size, which will be HUGE, but then you can see all the nifty detail. Yeah, I know, whatever. And yes, that is a talking toilet in the lower left corner. That was Princess' suggestion to draw.

Episode 32 - Laundry Karma

I know, I know. It's about damned time, isn't it? All I can say is I've been swamped... by laundry, among other things.

It seems to be a rule in my house - if there are piles of laundry waiting to be washed, dried, or folded, my world must be in total chaos. If, however, I can manage to get the laundry done and folded and keep up with it every day, then life goes smoothly. I call this laundry karma. It's sort of like feng shui, only instead of rearranging the furniture, I have to deal with detergent and dryer sheets and dirty socks.

So while the laundry has been piling up these last several weeks, I've been doing my damnedest to churn out stories for the Heat Flash Erotica podcast, make cover art for one of my publishing clients, and attend various conventions. I wrapped up convention season on Memorial Day weekend with Balticon, and what a blast that was! Viv and Chooch from Into The Blender hosted a webcomic/podcast novel party where people where invited to come dressed as their favorite cartoon characters. Guess who I went as?

Since Balticon, I've been going nuts trying to keep up with work and Princess' school. I swear, her class had more parties in the last two weeks than a high school graduating class on a trip to Cancun! Today was the last day of school though, and that means no more having to quit work at 3PM to be at the bus stop for a few weeks. We do have two weeks of afternoon swim lessons coming up, but I can deal with that because I can take the netbook or my drawing pad with me and knock out some work while Princess swims (Pixie will go into the nursery so I can have an hour of peace and quiet). But after that, we are home free of obligations. I'm keeping summer simple this year, with plans to garden, hit the local swimming pool, visit a few local museums, and in general get back on track with writing and cartooning. Here's hoping I can get into a cartooning groove and stay there!

Episode 31 - Inspiration

Ya gotta take your inspiration from wherever it comes, I tell ya.

This is something that often happens in our house, at least on the evenings that Michael is home. He takes the kids off my hands for a while so I can squeeze in a little more work. He's good like that. He gets the girls ready for bed and reads them stories and sings them songs and hands them monsters (we've been pulling imaginary monsters out from under the bed and handing them to children ever since Princess first started sleeping in her big-girl bed).

But the girls do not make it easy on him, and quite frequently there's lots of squealing and screaming and giggling and misbehaving, and that always leads to Michael shouting at the top of his lungs, at which point I usually step in to intervene because I honestly believe that only one of us should ever have to traumatize our children for life and that has been my job since day one.

Anyway, all of this is just the long way of saying this week's cartoon is drawn from real life and yes, I have actually heard Michael shout, "Get that bucket off your head and get into bed now!"

But only once was he saying it to me };)

Episode 30 - Obey Me!

File this one under "things that actually happened." In real life, it was a two-year-old Princess, not Pixie, who ran around butt-nekkid, refusing to squat on the pot and do her duty. It was one of those hair-pulling days where no matter how many times you yell, your kid still doesn't listen. After believing I finally had Her Royal Tookus ensconced on the potty-throne, I called up my best friend, Mary. Wouldn't you know it, just as Mary picked up the phone, Princess came streaking through the kitchen in her all-together. It's a phone call Mary says she'll never forget.

But Mary understands. Mary's been there with her own darling little boy (he has the cutest brown curls!). And many times when she calls me, she gets just as distracted by her offspring as I do while on the phone. Our phone conversations usually run something like this...

Mary: "Hey Helen, what are you up to?"

Me: "Just getting dinner to-- Will you put that down? No, Daddy did not say you could play with the steak knives! Go play in the living room! Sorry Mary, what did you ask me?"

Mary: "I forget. Probably wasn't important. Hey, have you seen the ads for the new display at the museum? I was thinking-- Young man! Get down off that table! I swear, you're going to crack your head right open and I'm just going to point and laugh when you do! Sorry Helen. What was I saying?"

Me: "Uh... The museum! Yeah, I saw the disp-- Pixie! Quit hitting your sister with the frying pan! And take that spatula out of your underpants! I need it to cook dinner!"

Mary: "No, you may not have ice cream for dinner. No, not for breakfast either. Because we don't have any ice cream! Mommy got so stressed out after you tried to feed the cat to the dog that she ate it all in one sitting!"

Me: "Princess! Quit swinging your sister around by the ankles like that! You're going to smack her right into the wa--"

CRASH!

Pixie: "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Mary: "--and quit sticking your finger up your brother's nose! There's no ice cream up there either!"

Me: "I don't care if you didn't mean to do it! She's your sister, not a crash test dummy! And look at the size of that hole in the wall! Could it be any bigger?"

Mary: "Helen, I have to--"

Me: "--go. The kids are completely out of--"

Mary: "--control. I swear I'm gonna--"

Me: "--pull out all my hair if they keep this up! I'll talk to you--"

Mary: "--later, when things quiet down. Maybe in about--"

Me: "--fifty years or so?"

Mary: "Yeah, that sounds about right. Talk to you then. Young man! Put that hammer down!"

Me: "Bye. Princess! Pixie! Put those scissors down NOW!!"

Click.

And that's what a phone call is like when you have kids in the house.

Episode 29 - Thunder Pants!

We are actually mostly finished with Pixie's potty training. She's been in "thunder pants" for a few months now, only wearing a pull-up at night. Potty training is one of those things that as a parent you never think is going to happen, and in Pixie's case I was starting to wonder if she'd still be in pull-ups on her wedding day, but we eventually got things straightened out. It seems that so long as she was in a pull-up, she'd pee in it no matter how many times a say I sat her on the potty. Once I switched her to underpants, that quickly stopped.

Regarding the potty, does anybody else have a singing potty? Ours sings all sorts of little songs depending on what the occupant is doing. There's one song for lifting the lid, another for sitting on the pot, a third for actually making a deposit in the pot, yet a fourth song for rolling the faux toilet paper roll attached to the pot, and then a final song for closing the lid and pushing the little fake handle. It's all a bit much, in my opinion, and the whole singing potty thing really started to creep me out when the potty developed a short circuit of some kind and started randomly singing in the middle of the night while the Hubster was away on business. Nothing like waking up in the dark to the eerie strains of "Let's all sit on the potty!" Needless to say, I didn't bother to switch out the batteries when they died.

I'm headed out this week for a visit to Arkansas to see my folks. We're really looking forward to the trip, but alas I'll have no internet access while I'm there, which means yet another wait for the next cartoon. I'm starting to clear stuff off my plate however, and hope to get back to a schedule where I can turn out a cartoon a week, or at least every ten days. I'll get there by this summer, I promise.

In the meantime, you'll be seeing some changes around this site and my other sites as I merge all three blogs and websites into one mega-super site. I'm just spread too thing between the mommy blog, the cartoon blog, the writing blog, and the supporting websites. I figure if I get it all into one place, I'll be better able to keep up with blogging and you'll have an easier time keeping up with all the crazy wacky fun I have to offer (insert canned laughter here).

Have fun over the next week or so, and I'll be back with another cartoon as soon as I can!

Episode 28 - Misadventures in Sex

This cartoon originally ran over on the Oh Get A Grip blog, where I post every Friday on various topics of sex and writing. Last Friday was my turn to talk about sex and humor, two things I know nothing about. If you want to know the details behind this particular cartoon (it's a TRUE STORY!!), check out my post at OGG.

This particular cartoon marks the first time I've drawn a toon on my desktop computer as opposed to my laptop computer. Manga Studio Debut 3, the first version of the comics program I use, wouldn't play nice with Vista (which is to say, it wouldn't work AT ALL!). But MSD4 works quite nicely on my desktop, perhaps even better than it works on my aging laptop. And with my Bamboo Fun drawing tablet hooked up to the desktop, that made for a really nice clean drawing experience. Hell, I didn't even have the usual crash and burn problems I've been having with the word balloons! I may make a permanent switch and draw on the desktop from now on.

It's been busy as usual over at la Casa de Madden. I went to EPICon and returned, more or less in one piece, and was totally freaked out by the number of people who saw my name tag and shouted, "I know you! You're Cynical Woman!" In fact, I wore my devil horns on Thursday night to the EPICon mixer, and then got scolded for not having them on during the day on Friday. I made sure to correct that error and wear them all day Saturday.

The most interesting thing to come out of EPICon 2009, for me at least, was a chance to sit and talk with Penny Sansevieri of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. I managed to snag a consulting appointment with her, and confessed to her that I'm suffering from blog schizophrenia, i.e. I have too many blogs and can't decide easily what content I should put on which blog. The fact is, I have three blogs - one for the cartoons, one for my day to day life as a working mom, and one for the explicitly erotica stuff. My life as a stay-at-home mom is so entwined with my work as a writer, that there are only very rare instances when I can separate the two, and most of what I do day to day as a stay-at-home mom who writes erotica could easily go into one general blog. It's just that occasionally, I really do like to stray into the very adult territory. Some days I like to blog about how I create erotic artwork, and I want to use explicit images for examples. Some days I like to blog about very specific topics on sex that aren't really appropriate for the general, albeit adult, audience that I think frequents my day to day blog. But these sexually explicit posts aren't nearly frequent enough to justify me keeping a full-blown erotica blog when 95% of what I blog about would actually appeal to work-at-home parents in general.

So Penny advised that I consolidate the blogs, as much as possible, AND she advised that I go with the brand name I have managed to make for myself - Cynical Woman. It's good advice and I intend to take it. Over the next few months, I'll be setting up a new website over at www.cynicalwoman.com (and getting rid of the flash site that's currently there), and I'll be putting the cartoons, the mommy blog, and everything else over there. I will offer separate pages for the adults only stuff, like the art gallery and the free reads I have at www.helenehmadden.com, but everything will be coming under one roof, hopefully by June.

So if you see a little construction going on around here, you know what's up!