New She Has No Head column up at CSBG. A review of Mark Waid’s mini-series The Unknown.
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I subscribe to The New Yorker, it’s one of my few genuine splurges these days, and every week without fail I read the short fiction selection and all the cartoons. I generally also read the tv reviews, movie reviews, and play reviews if they appeal to me and the Shouts & Murmurs section. And the rest is a how much time I have/how interested I am crapshoot. Which is a shame because almost every article I’ve taken the time to read in The New Yorker has been wonderful…but sometimes they’re so long and involved…I just don’t always have the time.
Anyway, all that to say that I ALWAYS read all the cartoons. And they’re generally pretty enjoyable…if not out and out funny, but this past week (the 2/8/10 issue) I found a lot of really great ones…here’s my favorite of the bunch by Zachary Kanin:
Learn more about the rules of and inspiration for Sketch-A-Day here.
What is it: Keeping in the Psylocke theme. It’s Psylocke.
How long it took: 24 minutes start to finish
How many sketches I did today: 2
Total time spent sketching: 49 minutes
Materials used: My Wacom Bamboo tablet and Photoshop.
Other notes/details: I did two of these drawings, and this “final” one I used the other as a base for…so it was a little like inking over a sketch, but the sketch was done in Photoshop on the Wacom. The goal today was simply to do a drawing of an entire character, rather than just the parts I like, like hips and waists, or heads and shoulders.
What I like about it: It’s okay. I like the face okay. It’s funny there are things that are better about this one than the base sketch, and there are things about the base sketch that are better. If I could combine the two I’d be a lot happier.
What I dislike about it: The posing is a little silly. I’m still skipping out on details like hands and feet. And it would be easier to tell what was going on in the complicated posing if it was colored. The legs are not in proportion to one another (and are very long…even for comic superheroines).
Learn more about the rules of and inspiration for Sketch-A-Day here.
What is it: Just a head and shoulders. Maybe X-man Psylocke’s head and shoulders.
How long it took: 12 minutes start to finish
How many sketches I did today: 3
Total time spent sketching: 33 minutes
Materials used: My Wacom Bamboo tablet and Photoshop.
Other notes/details: I left the sketchy lines, but it was done freehand, no base drawing.
What I like about it: I actually really like this one except for the fact that the hair should be coming over more…right now it looks like she has no second eye and eyebrow. FAIL.
What I dislike about it: Other than what I said above, I mostly like this one, but it’s of note that this was once a full body sketch, and I hated the rest of it and cut it off. So you could say I hated everything except the head. 
Learn more about the rules of and inspiration for Sketch-A-Day here.
What is it: A sexy superhero with her costume zipped all the way up. Imagine that!
How long it took: 21 minutes start to finish
How many sketches I did today: 2
Total time spent sketching: 46 minutes
Materials used: My Wacom Bamboo tablet and Photoshop.
Other notes/details: I left the sketchy lines, but it was done freehand, no base drawing.
What I like about it: I really like the looseness of it and the sketch-y exaggerated proportions. I like the overall feel of it quite a bit. The face is nice (ish), and I like the color on the suit.
What I dislike about it: My lack of skills with the Wacom tablet are still obvious though using photoshop instead of illustrator improved my control. Illustrator has a smooting effect that for someone with more skill (like Adam) is probably awesome, but for someone like me just means that the line looks even further from my intention.
Thanks to Jezebel for alerting me to this new ad by Planned Parenthood in response to the Tebow ad running during the Superbowl. The ad is respectful, informative, and open to personal freedom, like the Pro-Choice movement itself, which I’ve never understood why…continues to be vastly misunderstood.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utcxpuHF7jg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
I read an interesting piece in last week’s (February 1st 2010) New Yorker on The Tonight Show debacle. But I thought the author of the piece, Nancy Franklin, touched on but did not expand upon one part of this equation that in the future is going to be a very big deal.
First let’s start with the “facts” (as we know them).
1. I suspect very few people who are fans of Conan are also fans of Leno and vice versa. I’m sure there’s a crossover but I’m willing to bet it’s small.
2. Conan’s audience skews young and Leno’s audience skews much older.
So here’s the thing, Leno going back to The Tonight Show is going to work fine for a while…maybe even for 10 years…because his fans will come back and the show will default back to the way it was before…fine. But what happens in 10 years? Maybe I’m overestimating the grudge holding ability of the Conan fans (my grudge holding abilities are practically infamous in my land) but I don’t think those young fans are coming back…EVER.
I think they’re sufficiently pissed at the way Conan has been treated (there has been picketing, ad campaigns, facebook groups, you name it in support of Conan and horror at NBC’s behavior), that in 10 years when Leno is ready to be replaced (because he’s even older than he freaking is now) there will be nobody that NBC can put in that Tonight Show chair (short of Jon Stewart perhaps) that we would come back to watch, just based on principle.
Now, I’m not the best fan of late night talk shows anyway. I’m not a consistent viewer, watching only when the mood strikes, or when I remember to. And I generally feel about late night talk shows the way I feel about SNL – that there are always brilliant little bits and moments – but that I’m not willing to sit through an hour of average (and sometimes below average) entertainment for those small gems – especially when I can pick them up on the news websites the following day if they were good anyway. I just am not willing to invest in them consistently. I also have the problem of being both a Conan fan and a Letterman fan, which worked fine until Conan took over The Tonight Show, because I didn’t have to pick. I tried to watch more Conan once I had the option (and misfortune to have to choose between them) because I felt he needed the support since he was new to the timeslot. However I never watched Leno. The dude is just not funny to me. And because of that it hurts NBC not a whit for me to vow not to watch Leno, because I never did and never would have.
However, I CAN vow to never watch The Tonight Show again**
So in the end I think this is more short-sighted BS on the part of NBC. Sure, this might work now and they’ll get their “safe” Leno hosted Tonight Show back, but in the long run, they’ve shot themselves in the foot. Good riddance I say. Perhaps we should have just let Johnny Carson take the show with him when he left…it’d certainly be more respectful of his legacy than where we ended up.
As for you specifically Leno, while I don’t think that you are specifically to blame for all of this, your handling of it has been proof that I was right all along to dislike you. I had barely any respect for you left after your writer’s strike behavior in 2007, but that little I had left has been killed dead dead dead. You now seem like a ridiculous comic book villain to me. Congratulations idiot.
* Credits: Jack Ziegler cartoon taken from The New Yorker 2/8/10 edition
** Again, with the exception of a Jon Stewart Tonight Show host – which I don’t even want because I prefer him where he is – but I think Conan would understand and forgive me for going back on my proclamations in that one scenario.
Learn more about the rules of and inspiration for Sketch-A-Day here.
What is it: Woman in a red bathing suit.
How long it took: 8 minutes start to finish
How many sketches I did today: 4
Total time spent sketching: 41 minutes
Materials used: My Wacom Bamboo tablet, Illustrator, and Photoshop (for clean up).
Other notes/details: The sketch was done freehand with no base drawing to “ink” from (obviously, because it sucks!)
What I like about it: I like the abstractness of it…not much else.
What I dislike about it: Pretty much everything else. I need to have Adam give me another Wacom tutorial. I’m no great artist, but had I been sketching this by hand it would have looked about a thousand times better. I got almost nothing on this drawing the way I envisioned it. So while the Wonder Woman drawing of yesterday had some redeeming fun loose qualities that I could enjoy even though it didn’t turn out how I had planned…this one really doesn’t. Too bad. Wish I had time to go back and do another, but rules are rules (and I didn’t like anything I did today, so perhaps it’s futile anyway).
Welcome to the first Sketch-A-Day post. Learn more about the rules of and inspiration for Sketch-A-Day here.
What is it: Wonder Woman! I’ve been in a Wonder Woman mood lately so she seemed the obvious choice.
How long it took: 9 minutes start to finish
How many sketches I did today: 3
Total time spent sketching: 36 minutes
Materials used: My Wacom Bamboo tablet, Illustrator, and Photoshop (for clean up).
Other notes/details: The sketch was done freehand with no base drawing to “ink” from.
What I like about it: I really like the looseness of it and the sketch-y exaggerated proportions. I like the overall feel of it quite a bit. It feels fun.
What I dislike about it: My lack of skills with the Wacom tablet are obvious – there is little ability yet to do anything but something loose and sketchy – i.e. the hands look like little claw bits. Also, the face looks pretty dead and non-specific (that isn’t the expression I had in mind – I wanted something a little more playful) and doesn’t benefit from the fun looseness of the rest of it.
New She Has No Head! column up at CSBG. All about Wonder Woman and my long standing attempts to fall in love with her. Did it work? Click to find out.