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Bird-Brained

| Erika Schnatz

Now that I’m finding myself with free time (almost too much free time – I’m still looking for summer employment because I need to work more than one day a week) I have more time to draw. I often have a hard time figuring out what I want to draw, which is why I really like Selfless Portraits – when you agree to participate, they send you the profile picture of someone else using the app on Facebook, so you get to draw someone else’s portrait. You need to do it fairly quickly too – within 48 hours.

It’s a good exercise, though I don’t know if my random stranger is going to like my portrait. I found his features to be quite birdlike (especially his hair), so I just turned him into a bird. It’s not a very representational portrait, that’s for sure:
The poor, random boy assigned to me
The resulting portrait

Pretty crazy. But it was a fun exercise. Now I’m awaiting the portrait some random stranger drew of me. Perhaps that artist has turned me into an animal as well.
Materials: Sakura pens, Prismacolor markers

Friday Afternoon Comics & More!

| Erika Schnatz

Hello dear readers!

I’ve been horrible at posting recently, and I apologize. I’ve been occupied with getting into the Ooligan Press Book Publishing Master’s Program at Portland State University (woo!) and I spent last weekend at Stumptown Comics Fest (double woo!). I also had to deal with some other way less interesting and more stressful stuff.

Blah, blah, blah, enough about me – here’s a comic!

This happened right outside my window the other night so I felt compelled to draw it. I like that the dude looks like Strong Sad from Homestar Runner. But Strong Sad probably wouldn’t yell at a cat. Also, the cat was unharmed. I don’t know what was going on but that cat was pissed.
Here are some sketches from the week:
Kids in sunglasses. The sketch on the right is from a photo of my little brother. I love little kids with big sunglasses on. It’s so great.
And some bunnies! Because who doesn’t like cute bunnies?
That’s it for now. I’ll get back on track with my posts next week. Thanks for viewing!

Comics Jam

| Erika Schnatz

My sincerest apologies for taking forever to post. Mea culpa.

To make up for it, today you get not one, but THREE comics. Of which I drew a third. So in total I drew one comic, but I drew panels in three different comics. It’s confusing, but you’ll see what I’m talking about in a minute.

The comics jam (or whatever you want to call it) was part of the first meeting of a comics-drawing collective I started in order to coerce me into drawing more. Our first meeting had 3 members, but after seeing these amazing comics, we’re going to have more people at our next meeting. I know it.

Each of us started a 9-panel comic and assigned a rule to the comic. We had 3 minutes to draw our panel then had to switch comics after time expired. As a result, each member drew 3 panels in each of the comics.

“Fill in the Middle” by Dan Duncan, Shane Hosea & Erika Schnatz

Dan started this one. He drew the first panel, Shane drew the third panel, and I had to draw the panel in the middle. It got really crazy really fast. Notice how the truck becomes anthropomorphic halfway through the comic!

“Everybody Dies by the End” by Shane Hosea, Erika Schnatz & Dan Duncan

Shane’s rule for this comic was that everyone needed to die by the end. As you see, it didn’t take long for us to start killing off characters. Shane drew the 1st panels, I drew the middle panels, and Dan drew the 3rd panels. The Shark Transformer is a stupid idea/theme song I made up in the shower earlier that day. I’m glad it was incorporated into the comic.

“Backwardz Comix!!! (Gay Penguins)” by Erika Schnatz, Dan Duncan & Shane Hosea

I started this comic, and we drew this story backwards. I love this story so much. I drew the 3rd panels, Dan drew the center panels, and Shane drew the 1st panels. We had to pause drawing for a minute or two because I couldn’t stop laughing after the “Timothy! Look at my new magic trick” panel.

I can’t wait to do this again. It was crazy fun.

Neil Diamond Background Conundrum

| Erika Schnatz

Hey!

So I have a frame hanging on my wall that is sans a picture. In an attempt to rectify this situation, I drew a picture of Neil Diamond last night, because, why not? The man has amazing eyebrows.

I was going to pick a background for him, but then I thought, “Why not put this up to a vote? Maybe people want to contribute to this amazing portrait.”

Dear readers, I come to you with a conundrum: which background looks best with Neil Diamond?

Option 1: All American Hero.

 This is the background I initially planned to use. Because Neil Diamond is a real American hero.

Option 2: Groovy-licious.

Neil Diamond is also a super groovy man, so this may be an appropriate background.

Option 3: Silver Fox

For some reason, Neil Diamond looks the most suave with this background. Or maybe that’s just me.

Drop me a comment to let me know what you think! Let the people decide! The winner will be revealed at some point. Maybe Monday?

Materials: Micron Pens, scrapbook paper

Friday Afternoon Comics: Drunk Bear

| Erika Schnatz
Your bear drinks beer!
A bit of back story about this image – I started using a free online program to refresh my Spanish a few weeks ago. The program’s called Duolingo, and it’s quite an excellent learning tool, especially since it’s totally free. One of the most entertaining parts of re-learning Spanish on Duolingo is translating the sometimes-wacky sentences they give you.
I’m not sure when I’ll ever need this particular line, but it makes learning a bit more fun.
Materials: pen

Serve San Francisco T Shirts

| Erika Schnatz
My apologies for the lack of posts. I’ve been traveling a lot in the past month and I’ve been slacking on my art stuff. Here’s something I worked on during the past week:
I am currently an AmeriCorps member, and I like to help my peers out when I can. When another member of my program needed help with t shirts, I volunteered my services. Her group is going on several alternative spring break trips, and they need to outfit everyone in t shirts. 
This is an idea from one of the students she works with. It was a basic design for their upcoming trip to San Francisco.
However, I wanted to try and give them something with a little more character than a city skyline. I find that it’s really hard to distinguish city skylines from each other unless there are strong visual indicators (like the Eiffel Tower in Paris), so I wanted to do something else. I drew a cable car, since I associate them with San Francisco.
Above is the basic sketch for the cable car, based on some old travel posters I found on Google.

This is was what I submitted to them for the front of the t shirt.

I didn’t veer very far from their original idea for the back.
So I submitted it, and none of the alternative spring break committee members preferred my cable car design to their idea of the city skyline. So I wound up going back and creating this for them:

Below is a rough idea of what the t shirt will look like:

So there you have it. I learned not to mess with a design idea they really liked, because it cost me time and energy (especially because it was all pro-bono stuff). Meh. I still like my cable car drawing.

DJ Ladle

| Erika Schnatz

DJ Ladel is “ladling out the hits!”

This is a dumb little sketch based on a dumb response I gave during a comedy game show I participated in last night.

My apologies for the lack of posts. I haven’t fallen off the earth, but I’ve gotten really into learning Spanish recently. I also have a short attention span and I’ve been out of town for the past two weekends.

I pinky swear there will be some good stuff popping up here next week.