Category Archives: Drawing

Well, I’m back. Also: Solarpunk! Ecotopia!

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I handed off a rough draft of Volume One of my book at the writer’s retreat. Now I can think about other things and then get back to writing.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is a hopeful vision of the future. We live in authoritarian times. But fighting against authoritarianism, though necessary, is not sufficient. We need to supersede it. We need to look beyond dystopia. We need a vision and a direction to go in.

And that’s where the vision of solarpunk comes in: people living in harmony with the world, but with all the things we have learned as well. An early effort towards this was “Evelyn’s Story“, an assignment I did in animation school.

It seems to me that the biggest difference between the solarpunk world and ours might be the solarpunk reduction in short-term thinking and profiteering. Wikipedia on solarpunk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk

Solarpunk artwork tends to be green and sunny. There are related artistic styles in cozy animation and certain outdoor sketching communities, which have also inspired me:

Screenshot
Screenshot
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Stepping back to write

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For the next few months, I will be stepping back a little from social media to concentrate on writing. It’s time to finish my novel!

My editor (Akosua Brown) and I have come up with A Plan. I have been working on a three-book science fantasy series set here in Ontario, involving a family that grows up in authoritarianism, and then flees. (And then their son wants to go back?!!! Also includes a hidden city under Algonquin Park and lots of cute bunnies.)

This started as a short story, “The Rabbit Hole” (included in the recently published “Rabbit Trap Sampler”) and has grown into a three-volume epic.

Our plan for Volume 1:

* July 1–Sep 1: Create draft 1 (rough, for Scott only).

* Sep 1–Oct 15: Create Draft 2 (shareable version).

* Oct 15–Nov 15: Manuscript review.

* Nov 15–Dec 31: Final manuscript.

* Jan 2027: Design. This is when the cover will happen, plus things like trope cards.

* Feb 2027: Uploads.

* Target Launch: March 15, 2027.

Volumes 2 and 3 will follow at six-month intervals.

Story Outline of Volume 1:

* Red is rescued from an abusive home by apparent social workers. He recovers in a guest home. One of the workers introduces him to the intelligent speaking rabbits who actually run the place. He is invited to live in the rabbits’ home, a great underground city.

* Red meets Darlene there, and they form a family. They live in the rabbit city, enjoying a rich if regimented existence… but then they starts to notice things that seem a bit off: strange conversations overheard, odd video programs in the distance, things suddenly hidden by the rabbits as they approach.

* Then Red and Darlene discover the enslaved humans…

I’ve gone through my outline for Volume 1 and identified at least 18 writing segments in the story that I need to create or expand. This means that I need to do three segments per week to get the draft done by the first of September.

I’ll also be working on two limited-animation book trailers.

Let the writing begin!

Adventures in Merchandising

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So, last Saturday, I may have …built an online store to sell shirts!

I found Printful, a print-on-demand merchandise maker: shirts, mugs, towels, all the things to put my artwork on! They print to order and ship to the customer… and they have a plant in the Toronto area!

Unlike book printer and distributor IngramSpark, they don’t distribute a catalogue to existing retailers. They need the artist to build an online store and connect it to them.

There was a long list of premade stores they could connect to: Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, BigCartel, Square, Ecwid, GumRoad… want a minute! Square? Oh yes!

I signed up for a free account at Printful, to see whether this would actually work. I enabled the online store in my existing Square account and connected it to Printful. In Printful, I selected a shirt, uploaded my artwork, and chose variants.

Printful pushed my chosen shirt to Square Online, and shirts appeared! I had to choose various options–I didn’t want my books to appear in the online store, for example, because they are distributed in a different way, and I only want to use the Square account to sell them in person with my little payment terminal. On the other hand, the shirts will be sold online on-demand only.

There are endless details. Getting the payment going from Square Online to Printful Customizing packing slips etc. Choosing shipping options. Providing a way for Printful to get paid. Uploading a logo to Printful to be used on their labels and packing slips. Likewise, uploading a logo to Square Online for the online store. It wasn’t quite the “easy setup” described in their comparative review of store systems, but it wasn’t bad.

So then I tried to order a shirt.

It let me choose a size and colour and presented a price with shipping cost. I paid. The money went into my Square Card account, from where Printful debited it.

I got an email thinking me for the order.

Meanwhile, in my internal control panel, I could see the order. As days passed, it went from “awaiting fulfillment” to “being fulfilled” (printed) to “shipped”! Outside, I got another email with shipping info.

Now I’m waiting for my shirt, to see what the quality is like. Printful has all sorts of options for shirts that I haven’t seen before, like custom logos inside the collar!

Hopefully I can get all the bugs out and get this working smoothly. If so, The Lonely Little Fridge shirts (and towels, mugs, stickers, etc) here I come!

Crappy Drawing Tuesday!

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The first drawing is an attempt at working out how the fancy rabbit restaurant “Tastes of Human” might work. This is one of the few rabbit restaurants that has human servers. It’s a special treat for the rabbit rulers to see the subservience of humans.

I think I’m going to make another break with the canon of the old writing group and give the rabbits an upright bipedal gait, where they can carry things. It will make things so much easier. (This was handwaved past in the old group.)

The second drawing is a sketch of the moment where Darlene realizes the rabbits are Not Her Friends. She was rescued from a crappy life that included being leered as a waitress in a crappy donut shop, and now the rabbits want her to serve again?!!

A Tiny Computer!

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My friend gave me a Tiny Computer. Yes, that’s the whole computer in the first picture (it’s upside-down). It is running Ubuntu Studio, which includes audio, video, graphics, and publishing software. There is a very good chance this could replace my Adobe suite. I will have to experiment. The video is me scanning a drawing into The GIMP, a raster image editor.

The Tiny Computer!

And this post is being made from Linux! Getting images out of my Mac onto Linux required some setup… accessing my Dropbox account from both machines turned out to be easiest. (I kept wanting to cut and paste…)

This Linux distribution is Ubuntu Studio. It includes The Gimp (like Photoshop), Inkscape (like Illustrator), Blender (a 3-D animation app, like the control panel of a 747), Scribus (maybe like InDesign, but we’ll see), Calibre (for ebooks, but annoying because it wants to manage your files), and lots more. There are audio and video editing apps; I’ll have to see what corresponds to After Effects for editing limited animation. Alas, Scrivener is not available on Linux. If I can make and publish a book on this platform…

The trickiest part so far was configuring my scanner. The Epson scanner requires a driver, which Epson provides, but that driver requires further software. I had to go into the command line to install it (fortunately this is the kind of thing I used to do at my old job). And I had the help of my friend Mike, who is a born troubleshooter.

Another writing challenge!

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So now the Write Now Club is starting another challenge! This time, it’s Sixty Thousand Words* in Sixty Days!

But I put an asterisk beside the word “word”… because it’s not just words this time. There are many tasks involved in creating a book beyond just putting words down. What about doing research? Marketing? Illustration? One of our members is an incredibly-talented cartoonist. His stuff just doesn’t have many words. Should he be penalized even though he is doing as much work?

So another member came up with a list of tasks and word equivalents. You can get points for how much time you spend on a task, instead of for how many words you create during that time. Of course, if you’re mostly creating words, that is fine too.

This is great, because I’m doing a lot of illustration and drawing research in support of my story. It helps me figure things out.

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Diane Visits Algonquin Main

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The Bunnies decide to let a few carefully-selected Humans visit their home.

This is a segment that may or may not make it into the final version of “The Rabbit Trap”. It’s really part of the backstory, explaining how the conditions arose that let Red and his family live in Algonquin Main.


It was happening! Diane was excited. Caramel had bounced up to her during the weekly closed-doors Rabbit Meeting and announced the news. She, Diane, had been selected to visit the rabbit city of Algonquin Main!

It wasn’t going to be a long visit. Caramel had said that the warrens were thinking of expanding their contacts with human society — carefully-selected parts of human society, anyway — and this visit was a trial run.

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Holidays. And Writing…

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I’m working on some things for The Rabbit Trap suggested by Akosua. One of them is rewriting a tentative first scene to be from the viewpoint of character Darlene rather than character Red. This turns out to be surprisingly tricky, given that the main actions in the scene are performed by Red. This is something I have tried for the first time.

Another request is rewriting the story outline to follow the internal emotional events of my protagonist rather than the external events. Again: tricky, and new to me. But it makes sense given that everything my protagonist (or any other character) does has to make sense to them at the moment. It has to be the option that appears to move them toward what they want with the least effort. Appears to them, that is. To the rest of us, it could appear completely crazy.

So I will have to dive into the emotional arc behind my character…

In other news, Happy New Year! I made a commemorative drawing for the New Year with many of my characters!

“The Ornament” sees the light of day…

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A couple of years ago, I drew a short story called “The Ornament”, to be included in a wintry holiday compilation. That compilation did not appear then, but it has just been published now!

The compilation is called “Snowflakes, Secrets, and Other Winter Reflections”.

It is available now from Kipekee Press as an ebook. Print books coming soon.

But that’s not all! There’s an advent calendar: https://hi.switchy.io/WinterTales2024

…and a contest!
https://kingsumo.com/g/1ggoez1/winter-tale-advent-calendar-and-book-launch

Versions of the First Book Trailer

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The book trailer for The Rabbit Trap went through a lot of evolution.

It’s technically an ‘animatic’, a kind of draft animation that can be quickly produced and adjusted as ideas change. A fully-animated work would follow on from it.

I started out by drawing a few rough sketches on paper and putting them in order.

Then I decided to try Boords, the online storyboarding service.

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