line art

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.

Week of Lincoln: Day Four

| Erika Schnatz

I’ve realized that posting every weekday is not something that is ever going to happen. I just can’t manage my time that well. But here’s the fourth post for this week, which is pretty rad.

This Friday Afternoon Comic is half Abe Lincoln, half Valentine’s Day-lovin’. The idea for this popped into my head a few days ago, so I’m glad I had the time to draw it today.

Enjoy it lovebirds/Lincoln enthusiasts!

Week of Lincoln: Day Three

| Erika Schnatz

Here’s another Lincoln drawing from a few years ago:

If you can’t read my tiny handwriting, it says:

Abe Lincoln actually looked a lot like this. Who else would be able to free the slaves single handed-ly and wrestle a 7 foot bear at the same time? Damn straight.

America has never been a place for sissies.

Fabulous. If you think this is weird, just wait until tomorrow!

Friday Afternoon Comics: AmeriComics

| Erika Schnatz

Welcome to the first installment of something that will hopefully become a permanent fixture of my sketch blog: Friday Afternoon Comics!

I created the comics below as a response to some personal reflection questions in my AmeriCorps mid-year report. For those of you unaware of AmeriCorps, it’s like the Peace Corps, but within the United States. There are AmeriCorps programs all over the place focusing on different themes and missions, this year I am working in a program called Oregon Campus Compact at Portland State University. Our focus is on student retention through mentoring programs. I’ve gained a lot of great knowledge and experience serving so far.

You don’t really need to know any of that to read these, but they probably make a bit more sense if you do.

AmeriComic 1:

 AmeriComic 2:

Materials: a pen!
I am pretty good at writing in ALL CAPS.