My first comic using traditional media, at least partially. Lineart was done with brush pens, though it took a lot of  work to make it look somewhat decent.

Cheers!

–Pedro Arizpe

Disclaimer: The Tuna Lady does exist and I have no beef with her at all. I also don’t really have a strong opinion on tunas: I don’t really hate them, but I could live without them.

Lots of things have kept me away, like some really heavy freelancing translation work, a trip, getting into the habit of reading again, and the daily grind of an office job that’s slowly sapping the joy of life out of me.

On the positive side, I’ve finally been able to afford a scanner and lots of fancy pens to dabble on traditional media. I really suck right now, smearing ink everywhere and experiencing very shoddy linework, but I’m excited and try to practice often. I tried to post a new comic made with brush pens, but I just wasn’t getting it right, which just added to the ugly downtime.

Dinotales

Recently I posted to Reddit a drawing, inspired by a neat thread about Dinosaurs fighting unicorns.

A fellow redditor saw it and proposed we entered a contest to design a shirt, he being the one eligible to enter the contest and the one providing the design and concept, and me drawing it. I can always use the practice and the guy seemed legit, so I began to work on his idea: a dinosaur morphing into a DNA strand. My first proposal:

He gave me useful feedback on how to tweak it. This was the final drawing we entered, sans slogan:

Sadly, we didn’t win (so says he, and I believe him). It was fun anyway, and I guess I can share it here since it wasn’t used anyways. Midway through cleaning it up I came up with an alternate design, but I was pressed for time and I couldn’t develop it further.

There are times I really don’t have any good ideas of my own, so it was fun to just realise the vision of someone else. Only this first one was free, though.

Have a nice week!

–Pedro Arizpe

Hello everybody! We have a new address, new header… and we are tinkering some more behind the scenes. This will be an attractive and more efficient site very soon.

I might have more to write later, right now I’m exhausted…

See you!

–Pedro Arizpe

Test

A couple of weeks heavy with freelancing gigs broke my streak of updating every week. Can’t get too mad with money, though, especially if it gets me closer to a new tablet. By the way, I just cashed my first adsense check! Am I a professional artist now?

I have to update my About page, but what stays the same is that I still use Port Sherry as a learning ground. After losing most of my custom brushes on an OS reinstall (stupid me), I wanted to try my hand again at painting backgrounds without line art. It still looks crude and like don’t know what I’m doing, but in the end I learned a couple of new tricks. That’s what this is all about. That and wanting to make “real” the weird crap that usually only exists in my head.

I tweaked a loose setting on the host control panel and hopefully the site won’t go down as much as it’s done in the past. Sorry if you happened to notice.

Oh, oh! Also, last week I ran into two of my comics… translated into russian!: Tacos Johny and I’m sorry, Rudy. That was rad, and a very clean job, to boot. Thank you, “v-k”

Hope to see you all soon again!

–Pedro Arizpe

Not a comic, just a little piece I came up while doodling away.

I did this last sunday, I believe, trying to see how much could I improve on a quick doodle. It’s nothing special, but I do like to sketch variations on old comics, just because there are always several ways they could’ve gone, several details that I had in my head that weren’t needed for the story I meant to tell. And some of the images are just too fun to keep exploring from different angles. This time, I just wanted to see Pac-Man’s huge chompers, from the very first Port Sherry strip.

Hey, I updated every week of April! Just like old times!

Cheers!

–Pedro Arizpe

Yup, bear with me on these ones.

I’m thinking about upgrading my tablet when I get my first adsense check. I’m having a terrible time deciding if I should go for an Intuos4 or an Intuos3. 4 sounds amazing, what with all its sensitivity levels, but all the horror stories about the surface eroding the nibs in a matter of days give me pause. I read nothing but praise for the Intuos3, but it only has 1024 levels and is, somehow, $50 more expensive than the newest model. Also, apparently my little Bamboo Fun tablet had the same rough surface than the new Intuos, and the original nib is still going strong after nearly a year (although the surface is all smooth now).

Sigh… I’ll keep doing some more research.

Cheers!

–Pedro Arizpe

PS. Are you watching Adventure Time on Cartoon Network? I am: best thing ever on TV right now.

I know. I’m not crazy either abouth the mish-mash of styles. Truth is, since “Bedtime Story” I’ve tried to find a cartoony way of drawing water without it looking too busy and “line-y”.

I’m also not crazy about the fact that my first nude drawing on Port Sherry had to be of man ass.

But yeah, greek mythology, you gotta love it. Theseus was the hero founder of Athens, so the Naxos incident, as chronicled by Hesiod and others, made him look like a jerk. “(a) God made me do it” was a valid excuse back then, it seems, since it was used all the time to cover up human blunder. I knew about Crete but did not know about the ditching, even though at one time the painting “Ariadne and Bacchus” was thoroughly explained to me. It was an amused comment from my wife a few weeks back that made me look more into it so I could find out all about this silliness. I encourage you to do the same, it’s fun!

Cheers!

–Pedro Arizpe