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Now we find out what happens when you drive your car-sleigh inside your house. Of course, it crashes and you get blown out of it. Santa wants to go back to the reindeer after this, but will he drive the sleigh in the house with them?? I hope not.
There'll be no Christmas if they don't find Nemo? Don't worry, Santa's on the job!
There is an ongoing story here involving Nemo being lost and King Morpheus trying to find him, though I guess the king doesn't care much about Flip or the imp. I love Santa's awesome car-sleigh.
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It's interesting to note that McCay's Santa Claus is not colored consistently. He wears red, blue, and green in different strips. These days, we wouldn't dream of having Santa wear anything but red and white, but it wasn't always so. McCay was probably just following the trend. His hat, and the hats of his elves, are also far pointier, and not as floppy.
I like the fact that Nemo glances at the Ladies' room and the lady tells him to keep moving.
Also... what is that outfit Nemo is wearing...??
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I imagine it would be exciting for a little kid to get to drive Santa's sleigh, but at the same time I think it would turn out just as well as it does here. I don't know if every kid would get caught on a windvane, but the sleigh would certainly be lost. Nemo lost the second bag of toys, too! Good thing it was only a dream.
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Looking at Winsor McCay's work, and especially Little Nemo, has always impressed me. It's amazing to think that this appeared in a newspaper. Look at where Santa Claus lives! I guess he would need a place that big to house all of the toys for all the children in the world.
The lettering is difficult to read, but you hardly need to. It's nice enough just to look at.
I haven't updated this blog in quite some time, and when I did it was to whine about Facebook and a single musing about my art. My end of year resolution, as it were, is to do more to share things that I'm passionate about. If there is a single thing that I could pick that I've been passionate about for the longest time, it would be comic strips. Since it's December, and I happen to celebrate Christmas, I figured it would be appropriate to post some Christmas (and New Year) comic strips from cartoonists that I admire and have influenced me, namely Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, and Richard Thompson. I hope they are interesting to you, even if you don't happen to celebrate Christmas.
There is no shortage these days of illustrations and designs that are clean, smooth, and flat. Vector drawings are popular because people like this look. It works well on websites and in apps. I can't deny that it looks very nice, and it's what I've come to expect in app and web design.
That said, I don't do that. At least, I don't do it often. I like to make things a little more messy. One reason for this is that I'm not very skilled in vector drawing. The main reason, however, is that I want to make it look like an actual person made it. I don't want it to look like it could have been made by a machine. I like any art with a discernible human touch.
In college, in drawing class, it seemed that everyone, including the professor, was obsessed with clean edges. The edge of the drawing had to be taped so that it was straight, and there couldn't be anything in the margins. Besides the fact that I didn't want to deal with the annoyance of measuring and taping and wanted to just draw something, I like fuzzy edges. It's fine to have a clearly defined margin and a clear edge of the artwork, but it doesn't have to be entirely straight. It can be fuzzy. Yes, fingerprints in the margins are normally frowned upon, but it wouldn't kill you to have a little bit of graphite or charcoal or ink in your margin. If you think your piece is that important, you're probably going to frame it anyway, so no one will even see it. Let it be a little messy. People will know that someone, a human, made it.
This is one reason why I have an aversion to photorealistic paintings. We have cameras. They can capture an image almost exactly the way it would look in real life. Therefore, while I respect the skill that photorealistic painters have and the time they put into their pieces, I don't see the point of them. While I do like a painting to have a discernible subject, I want it to be a little messy. I want things to be a little distorted, a little abstracted. Let me know that it's something you made, and that a machine couldn't have done. Infuse it with your humanity.
The point is, we have machines that do all kinds of things for us, and eventually they'll be doing art for us, to. If you, a human, are going to create an artwork, let me know you did it. Don't think that just signing your name will tell me that. Give the work your human signature. Embrace messiness.
Over the past several months, Facebook has been reducing the organic reach of Pages. A recent study found that companies' posts dropped from reaching 12% of their followers in October to just 6% by February.
At some point, Facebook will just stop the charade and make having a Facebook page a paid perk. I'm not sure what the algorithm is that determines who gets to see your page's updates, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's entirely random. I'm not sure what the point of having a Facebook page is anymore. I've never had a whole lot of success with mine, but it wasn't bad. Now, not knowing who will see it, I might as well just forget it. I don't have money for advertising, and this shady move by Facebook isn't convincing me that I should pay for it.
Besides that, what if I'm a consumer who wants to get updates from a particular business or interest? I don't get to see them. There are pages that I forgot that I liked and actually thought, \"Hey, why haven't I liked this on Facebook?\" only to find out that I did already. I only forgot because I hadn't seen an update from them in months, and it's not because they haven't posted any updates.
If my friends would just move to another social network, I wouldn't use Facebook. Each day, though, I consider just leaving it regardless of what my friends do.
I work at a company that sells books for children and young adults. One of the perks of working there is the ability to buy any book the company sells, or at least has previously sold and had returned, at an extreme discount (in most cases, about a 90% discount). Therefore, I've had occasion to buy and read many of these books, most of which I've enjoyed. Now, to be clear, I'm an adult and I've read books written specifically for adults, and I like them, too. I've even read and enjoyed the kind of books that some adults fear to read because they're, well... esoteric, to say the least (I'm this close to finishing Finnegans Wake, really). Of course, I've also read the kind of books meant for adults that are basically literary candy. While some books may be a full meal, or even a feast, these are good for a nice treat but not satisfying in the long term (Michael Moorcock, I'm looking at you). No matter how you classify them, however, they're all books. They all require the ability to read for one to understand and enjoy them.
A recent discussion that I read on reddit made me think a bit about this, though, and about how picky some people are about the kind of books they read.
I don't mean what genre, because I'm picky about that, too. What you want in your book or what kind of characters you want or what setting they're in... it's all fine to be picky about. What I mean is when people feel they must only read books that are incredibly intellectually stimulating to the highest degree, things that will work their brains, and make them really think. Or, at least, the kind of books that the \"educated masses\" think that are the most intellectually stimulating. Also, that have the author's name and the title of the book in really really big letters on the cover, so people can read them from far away. In other words, books that make them look smart. These people would, of course, never be caught reading a children's book, or a book that is \"pure escapism,\" or, heaven forbid, a book with pictures in it. What would people think?
Well... what would people think? That you're not smart just because you're reading a book that people who think they're smart think that smart people shouldn't be reading?
Look, we all read books for different reasons. Sometimes we read them to just have a plain old enjoyable experience. Sometimes we read them for intellectual stimulation. Sometimes we read to turn our brains on, and other times to just turn our brains off for a while.
However, I think some people read books just so they can show other people that they read books. Sad, but true.
Ever wonder about the real difference between formal and informal language? I mean, the real difference? The real difference isn't that certain words are inherently more formal than others, it's that certain words are just generally accepted as more formal, even if the formal word and the informal word mean the same thing. Take the phrases "adhere to" and "stick to." One is far more formal and business-like than the other. However, when you really look into them, I mean really look into them, they mean exactly the same thing. Seriously, to "adhere" means to "stick." But in a business context, you'd never use "stick to" if you wanted to sound professional. You''d always use "adhere to." How and why did this happen?