Fun_Fische

Drawing in the Moleskine in some dreary building of dreary people in a dreary mood.

But Kingdom Hearts and the fish toothpick vibe always remains. Regains. Re-sanes.

3/13/16

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Fun_Intrepid

Finally! 2014 is in the backlogged books! Just one more year before we're caught up to being now three months behind schedule!

Sending off 2014 with a Moleskine sketch of our intrepid zeroes. Note, Zero is never supposed to wear pro-JE gear...

3/9/16

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Fun_Dooderr

Moleskine live-ink drawing at Immigration. Awful.

3/7/16

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Fun_ZeBros

Realized I haven't been posting Moleskine sketches--last one was posted in 2012?!.,;

Anyway, here's Zero and Nyao from my trip to the Japanese DMV.

She was always supposed to be more alien in her outfits for obvious reasons, while he inexplicably has all this custom clothing, despite apparently not having much money, though we never really got into that, actually.

3/3/16

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AV_INGLook

Here's the third and final ING illustration. Can you guess the verb? Tough luck, the answer is "looking."

I was really happy with the character design here. I think I finally landed the perfect leader of the crew. I want to call her Jinjin.

I was so happy with the postcardy version that I did a run of her for my chardesign practice exercise. So this was the version of her that conformed to our challenge's rules. That session went so effortlessly and it was so fun. I would love to tell a story with her. But it's about assembling a team, you know? Who is good enough to hang with her? That's tricky.

As for her powers, she has a compass that gives her different abilities and techniques based on the direction of the compass rose. So for example, she'd get cold-based powers from the north, heat-based powers from the south. She also has basically an auto-shield against suckerpunches in her compass. So no cheap shots. And she always looks out for her crew more than they will ever know. But who is looking out for her, when even she can't?

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Fun_VanIceCory

This is a char from the chardesign sketch sesh. This is Cory. Her full name is Van Ice Cory, but she rarely uses her first two names. Cory isn't her last name, it's just the last name of hers.

She can use peeps like walking globs of C4. She can use cold and ice through her hands and her breath. She can use heat and fire through her feet.

They say her "real" name is Corey...there are also some filthy rumors floating around...that she's Canadian.

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Fun_BilltedStilted

Billted is from our chardesign exercise. I want very much not to have a boy be the leader. So this guy started out as a girl but then as he became more evidently a boy, it became a struggle to make him not feel like the leader. So he aspires to be the leader. Or maybe he just leads a rival, but lesser or minor crew?

Anyway, he's hooked on placebos. And he knows it. But he can't function without them. He's looking for the legendary Panacebo, which will cure all his placebo-related issues. But for now, he remains functional thanks only the the thin shred of functionality granted by his placebraces.

Will he ever find the Panacebo? Or will he learn to overcome his crippling, entirely constructed dependency himself? One thing's for sure, he will never remember to zip up his pants.

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Fun_Skiddish

Skiddish tries so hard to make everyone happy. He hates himself because he blames himself for his ancestors' planetary destruction. So though he has the power to demolish entire celestial orbs, he has locked those centruries' etched programs and applications away in his memory. He can't actually delete them, though, so they're always there. But if they're permalocked, they can't ever be accessed again...right?

Short of recovering and unlocking his Critical Error files, he will stop at nothing to please and make things right with reals. Maybe he will redeem his kind and become a real himself. Maybe he will fall into the wrong hands and destroy us all.

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Fun_BeauxRoundOne

More from the chardesign exercise. I wanna call this guy Beaux (or Beauox) Piœίpe or something.

He's rich and fancy and looks like a girl if you squint a little cuz when I was drawing him I thought I was originally drawing a girl.

But this exercise was about being kinda spontaneous and following the sketch. So maybe it's a girl...we'd need to see some development.

Anyway, if you can manage to land a hit, just don't touch the face. I can't stress that enough.

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Fun_KanonKero

Another one from the CharDesign exercise. This one started with the froggy hoody which lead to the froggie poncho.

She has literary-based powers. The only spelling she always has cast is "Dunbar's Mask."

I want to name a character Kanon, one of the coolest names I've encountered here in Japan.

This one is exciting to me.

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Fun_AnnieWho

More from the Moleskine character design exercise. I think her name is Annie Who. She has comedy-based powers.

Although I didn't really like Annie Hall. It was so surprisingly sad, it hit me outta nowhere. I had to watch it for a comedy class.

I severely want to have a character wear one of those bucket hats. And suspenders. Not necessarily together.

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Fun_KumaTheKid_One

I've been doing a character design exercise recently. It started with this little sketch. The rules are: draw it in my moleskine with my janky writing pen, but draw it as cleanly and quickly as you can, make it fun, and make it evoke a story, as if I'm assembling my own Straw Hats.

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Fun_OnHarvardTimes

I know I already talked about a similar experience at Yale, but did I ever tell you about the time I went to Harvard and this one girl decided to go pee right next to me as I was sketching?

It started at The Game, of course, as there is no reason anyone would want to go to Harvard otherwise. I spent all day incognito, hiding from anyone who might recognize me bundled up in Yale hat and sweater and masked in layers of scarf, meanwhile I sketched scenes of socs schmoozing. The tailgate was pretty aight, in that the food was great. I loaded up on burgers and cookies and chocolate hot water. I felt torn because I wanted to go up to talk to people, but, well, y'know.

I couldn't afford tickets to The Game, so I just sat outside of the stadium sketching up the joint. My cover got blown as a JE '10 guy spotted me and insisted on the whole human interaction thing. Total emo buzzkill. So after he scoots off, and I stop wondering why I can't be more like him, I get back to sketching the stadium grounds from my solitary perch atop an empty staircase facing the busy scene.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a gaggle of Game-goers gathering on the ground floor. This one girl among them seems to be in a serious pickle, based on her antsy body language. She's consulting with the group, and they're all anxiously whipping their heads around, scoping out either a location or for a clear coast. It sinks in. She needs to pee. Bad. As she's frantically weighing her options for where to execute Order Sixty-Sick as privately as possible, she keeps looking in my direction.

So she bolts over to the left of the staircase where I'm drawing and jumps into a squat in the patch of bushes in my quiet corner of the campus. I'm sketching and sketching, hoping she goes away and that she's just joking around, but then I hear a trickling. A TRICKLING! I throw up a little in my mouth, chug it back down, and keep drawing the stadium like my insecurity depends on it. THE END.

To help cleanse the palate, these last few drawings are from after I left the staircase to explore Harvard's version of Old Campus. There was a girl wearing an incredible jacket that reaffirmed that females have cornered the market on aesthetics, a building called Matthews Hall, and what I believe is Prescott Street.

Despite the urinous sidequest, I'd say Harvard was pretty good games. Loved the architecture, loved Leverett House, loved seeing healthy Boston Terriers out and about while mine was painfully dying back home, loved feeling like a lonely Yalie again. Or something.

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Fun_AwYeah

My very last semester at Yale started about 365 days ago. I finally got into a class I had been vying for the past three years, "Literature for Young People." This class had the unfortunate side effect of helping me realize I had indeed chosen one of the girliest majors at Yale--literature.

Even in the brim-packed shopping period sessions of the class (where students may sit in on almost any class to see if they are interested in taking it), I was one of only a handful of males. The final class roster included perhaps three Y chromosomes, one of which decided to drop after the second class. If ever I was in doubt after a couple years of often being one of the only males in a given lichrachur class, I think this was a good sign that dudes don't do Derrida et al.

But in any case, I discovered that apart from her unfortunate and ironically thick, black glasses, one of my classmates was always impeccably dressed, with perfect hair, and the coolest jackets you've ever seen in your life. As I often ended up sketching classmates while my professors expounded upon anything past the first couple of pages of the assigned reading, I managed to sketch her incredible jacket one day.

Towards the end of the semester, the professor had us do group presentations, so I joined the only group I could, Ms. Z's singing group. I told them that I could never hope to match their singing talent--the cleverly-dressed girl's singing voice was so great, it was almost unfair!--so we decided that I would draw illustrations to animate the Huck Finn song we were writing. By projecting my drawings on the wall (there were some additional in-between drawings I've excluded here), I made a rudimentary animation! I knew I had to simplify my art style, so I studied Jinjin's comicsing style for inspiration.

Anyway, her singing was incredible, as was our ringleader's, so my inferiority complex was screaming sweet nothings to me about razorblades, wrists, and what magic they make. And one day a side conversation developed somehow where she told us she almost got a part in an upcoming Disney animated movie about some kind of ice princess--she made it past a couple interviews and even got to record her princess's song in a Disney booth!

I learned that not only is the snappy dresser legitimately and extremely talented, but that I also saw her dad at a Master's Tea a couple years prior (his casually comedic abilities are incredible)! For her final project, she showed the class footage of her maybe 5-year-old self telling ramblingly random stories to her mom. She told us she always wanted to be an actress. And now she's breaking out on HBO! Imagine that!

Chuck the haters, she deserves all good things she gets because she's got the talent to back up anything familial connections grant her. Her abilities are indisputable.

But I've said too much already.

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Fun_Roastmaster'sTea

In my comedy history class tonight, F-bombing Roastmaster General Jeffrey Ross visited and told stories from his life and from his excellent book, I Only Roast the Ones I Love.

Speaking from his own experience with hardship, in his unexpectedly quiet and relaxed off-stage demeanor, he encouraged me that comedy doesn't need to rely mostly on negative experiences; tragedy is just one aspect of comedy and it doesn't have to dominate inspiration. It's about diversifying, mixing experiences, good and bad.

"You don't draw comics about comics, you draw comics about life." -- Jeffrey Ross

So now I gotta go live life. Great.

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Fun_OnYaleTime

25 year old writer Nick McDonell came to speak to us in LC today, so I sketched him in my Moleskine while he read some selections.

McDonell, Harvard '06, knew Mark Zuckerberg's roommate. He told a couple quick stories about the Facebook creator, one of which was pretty interesting: Zuckerberg didn't draw and didn't know any designers, so he didn't know what to do about a logo for the new social networking site he was working on.

His pal introduced him to somebody who could draw and the artist sketched up a quick 3/4 profile of Zuckerberg and was promised something like a little over 1% of whatever the site would make. The artist agreed and the logo was greenlit. For that quick sketch of a logo, that artist reaped many, many millions, which is still only a little over one percent.

I've got two words for that artist: Oink oink.

So that story got me all fired up because I'm working on a couple of things for a couple of people here at Yale, so even if I don't make millions, at least I might play a part in history.

Anyway, here's another Moleskine sketch, this one was from some Summer Session meeting I believe.

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Fun_Takushi

I went to this amusement slash water park, Lake Compounce yesterday. I wisely emptied my pockets into my backpack in anticipation of their contents getting soaked, so my Moleskines survived quite well. The reason I only wear cargo pants is because they're the best for carrying around Moleskines.

Anyway, I drew this guy while waiting for some of the group while they rode one of those freefall rides, like (NorCal's) Great America's "Drop Zone," except they call it "Down Time." I really don't like those kinds of rides, but I eventually gave it a shot and it wasn't something I want to do again (despite riding it and a similar ride twice).

My favorite ride was a wooden coaster called "Boulder Dash." It was like Great America's "Grizzly" except it weaved around a forest-y setting and seemed longer. It was pretty nice, and I even posed for the little photo thing, which got some nice laughs (V's up).

Anyway, after class today, I decided to give coloring a shot after finding my way to the Saybrook computer lab, in preparation for a piece I'm going to work on for some dudes.

Also, I don't know why I decided to draw a guy in a suit yelling, "Taxi," but it is what it is.

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Fun_TickedGirl

I drew this moleskine sketch during our orientation meeting, first night at summer Yale.

So I'm writing this story for my Sci-Fi/Fantasy class, and it's kinda falling apart. I've got the backstory and the end, but only a sketch of the beginning and middle.

And the longer I think about it, the ending and the backstory aren't working, which then makes the beginning and the middle not work, as the details stop adding up. Frustrating.

I don't want to follow up on last week's Team Rocket-inspired story until next week, but I may have to if I can't at least finish the new story's outline by tonight...

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Fun_TheProfessor

This is a drawing of Professor Gerow, who led that wonderful summer session in Japan, an experience of a lifetime.

I sketched him during our final class dinner, the night before flying back (the Olympics' opening day). I had the fish carcass. It wasn't as good as the fish at Nikko, or even at our first dinner at the restaurant, but still good. The meaty kabobs were great.

That night I opted out of karaoke to go buy some Maximum the Hormone.

I wish I could return.

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Fun_ShoeGhost

Back from Japan, sadly, but the
Japan tag'll still accompany artwork started overseas, like these train sketches.

Stat news: 1988 and 2k over the weekend; thanks for the support.

Moleskine (mini-notebook) sketches are now tagged.

Also: If you'd like to "bump" me over at


then thumbs it up,

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