Category: Kids

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ACW Episode 243 – Jaleo!

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Webcomic!

Click on the image above to see it bigger!

The Hubster and the children inform me that I have drawn Uncle Paco perfectly. Paco is one of Hubster’s 4 brothers. His son, Jaleo, graduates from college this year. No kidding, that freakishly tall kid was an infant in poopie diapers at my wedding. And now he’s finishing college and already got a job lined up at computer software company. I feel old just thinking about it.

With regards to Hubster and his brothers… Hubster is the oldest of 5, Paco is the second child, and then there is Patrick, Carlos, and Chris, in that order. Chris has been in the webcomic once before. His son is Evenrood. Gabe is Patrick’s son. All 5 of the brothers are “saints,” thus the halos. They became “saints” when they were very young. Hubster’s parents traveled often to Puerto Rico, where my mother-in-law is from, and there was an artist in San Juan who painted plaques of saints.  The first year they met him, he painted plaques of my father-in-law, mother-in-law, and the Hubster all as saints. The next year, when they had another baby (Paco), the same artist painted a saint portrait of him. And the year after that, he painted one of Patrick. The artist disappeared after that, but when Patrick was older, he painted saint portraits of the youngest two brothers, Carlos and Chris. And their saint names are…

  • Saint Jerry, Patron Saint of Good Husbands
  • Saint Carmen, Patron Saint of Good Wives
  • Saint Michael the Magnificent (the Hubster)
  • Saint Paco the Perfect
  • Saint Patrick the Powerful
  • Saint Carlos the Crafty
  • Saint Christopher the Cheerful

And this is why when I draw the Hubster or any of his brothers, they all have halos. So now you know!

By the way, this webcomic was actually all done and ready to be posted yesterday afternoon. Then I discovered something very annoying about Manga Studio 5 and Photoshop.

Do you see the plaid pattern on Paco’s shirt? That’s a Manga Studio material/screen tone. It was originally yellow, but I wanted to make it a shabby sort of blue, so I check the option in the materials panel to make the plaid material a black and white screen tone instead of its original yellow color. I then set the blending mode for the material layer to “color burn” and painted a medium blue color on a layer underneath that. The result was the exact shade of blue plaid that I wanted for Paco’s shirt. Hurrah!

(If none of the above made any sense to you, don’t worry. I’m just being a huge graphics geek here. The basic gist of this is, I wanted to make a yellow pattern blue, and that was how I did it.)

Then I went to export the image as a flattened PNG. That’s the file format I use for all the comics. But for some reason, the exported flattened image lost the blue plaid on the shirt and left me with a gray-scale plaid instead!

“Okay,” I said to myself. “Maybe Manga Studio has a problem with flattening layers with blending modes. I’ll just export this sucker as a layered Photoshop file instead and do the flattening in that program!”

And I did that, and when I pulled up the layered file in Photoshop, I saw that I had all my layers but that the plaid material layer had been set to “normal” as the blend mode so it still showed up as gray-scale instead of faded blue.

Well, that was no big deal. I reset the plaid material layer to “color burn,” got back that lovely faded blue, and flattened all the layers in Photoshop…

And promptly got the same gray-scale plaid material again.

I then spent hours researching what the problem could be. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get Photoshop or Manga Studio to keep the blending mode of the plaid material set to “color burn.” The moment I flattened the image, I kept getting the gray-scale, “normal” blend mode instead.

How could this be?! I’ve been working with Photoshop for 5 years or so now. I know I’ve flattened images with blending layers before, and not had ANY problems! In fact, just about every image I’ve ever created with Photoshop used various blending modes  and I don’t recall having any problems with any of those images! So why was I having problems with this image now?

After hours of searching the web, I ran across a comment that pointed me in the right direction. It was a short comment, buried deep in the responses to a graphics forum post from someone who had had similar problems to me a few years before. The comment mentioned how someone at Adobe had really screwed up when the wrote the code for the “color burn” blend mode.

And that’s when I realized that I had never used the “color burn” blend mode in an image before. I know I’d tried it while working on some images, but the result was never something I liked and so I switched to another blending mode instead, like “overlay” or “soft light.” So I opened up the layered comic in Photoshop again and this time set the blending mode for the plaid material to “soft light,” and then flattened the entire image. And it worked just fine. “Soft light” works a bit differently than “color burn” so I got a different shade of blue, one not so perfectly faded. But hell, it worked!

So that was the problem. The “color burn” blending mode in Photoshop (and apparently Manga Studio as well) is pretty much all screwed up, at least in CS3. It was such a tiny little thing in the end, and it took me only 5 hours to figure it out!

You live and learn. Painfully, most of the time, but still, you learn.

Enjoy the webcomic. I’m getting started on the next one tonight!

 

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ACW Episode 242 – Gabe!

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Webcomic!

Click on the pic to see it full-size!

Soooooo, this is Gabe. He’s two. I love him dearly. He has very healthy lungs.

Seriously, though, Gabe is fantastic! He’s just like Princess and Pixie were at that age – very energetic, very bright, very determined to exert his will regardless of how many times you say, “No!” And I really do love him dearly. I’m also pretty fond of his mom, my sister-in-law Julie. She’s married to the Hubster’s middle brother, Pat, number 3 of 5. Pat’s very lucky Julie loves him.

Anyway, this week’s episode was late becaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuussssseeee…

We are shopping for a new car. And apparently that takes a lot of time to do. So much time that I lost of few hours of comics drawing time and so that’s why this is late. For once, it’s not because I’ve been ill.

But we’re getting a new car, or rather a used car, but it will be new to us, and the car we’re looking at is very nice. I’ll have to post pics when we get it. In the meantime, enjoy the webcomic!

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ACW Episode 241 – Evenrood!

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Cynical Woman!

Click on the image above to see the full-sized webcomic!

Evenrood is my youngest nephew. His mother, Heather, is married to one of Hubster’s brothers. Evenrood is A-DOR-A-BLE!! Seriously, cute cute cute cute CUTIE-PIE!! And whenever we go to visit his family, I get as much snoogling with him as I can. And I might even be willing to change his diaper. Maybe.

Anyway, about the previous post. I was hard at work on the webcomic. I had spent the afternoon upgrading from Manga Studio 5 to Manga Studio EX5 (and I am so glad I did that! MS5 is great, but the upgrade is even better!). I was just sitting down to do the inks for today’s webcomic when Pixie came in and asked me if I would play a game with her. And in all honesty, how could I say no to her? But I told Pixie I had to have something to put up on the website today, so I asked her for the drawing she had done earlier in the day and we took a photo of that and she dictated a letter to me and that’s what we posted for today.

Then we went to her room and she showed me the “cash register” she had made out of a Slim Jims box (which for some reason was stuffed with Lego characters) and then she handed me a card with a “Despicable Me” Minion on it as said that was my credit card and I could buy whatever was in her bedroom. So I gave her the card and said I wanted a kiss from her. And she laughed and ran my card through the Slim Jim cash register, handed me some change made out of bits of cardboard and foam circles, and gave me a big ol’ kiss. And then it was her turn to use the credit card and she told me she was buying 800 kisses from me!

And we went back and forth like that for a while. Eventually Princess joined us and we all played cash register until I discovered that one of our toilets was overflowing. That’s when we switched to a game called “Oh crap! Grab a mop! Go get your father! Tell him to bring the snake!” That’s a really fun game, let me tell you, and the whole family joined in on that until it was bedtime.

So I finished the webcomic this evening, and here it is and now you know the whole story behind Pixie’s drawing. The End.

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A letter from Pixie to you

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Dear readers of my mom's website,

My mom has decided to put some of my artwork on her website today. My mom's webcomic will be up tomorrow. We decided to play a game last night, so it's going to take her a little longer to do her comic.

Until then, here is my drawing. It is a picture of Smaug the Great and Powerful from “The Hobbit – The Desolation of Smaug.” Bilbo Baggins is running from Smaug. Smaug is breathing fire. He's chasing Bilbo.

From Pixie

Smaug the Great and Powerful by Pixie, age 7

 

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ACW Episode 240 – But is it edible?

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Cynical Woman!

Click on the thumbnail above to see the bigger webcomic!

I swear to high heavens, this is exactly what Princess said. I do NOT make this stuff up.

The next episode of Bitchcraft is in the works. I had 3 Girl Scout events this weekend, including the start of cookie season. Yes, it’s that time again. Here’s hoping I survive another year.

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ACW 236 – Oh yeah, it’s Christmas

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Webcomic!

Click on the thumbnail to see the full-sized holiday webcomic.

Oy vey, have we been having fun here. Hubster was away on a business trip for a week. Those things are brutal for both of us. Him, because he’s away from home, in a dry, life-sucking hotel room. Me, because I’m home doing double-parenting duties. Anyway, Hubster came home from his trip in time for me to get the house ready for our monthly Girl Scout troop meeting. The day of the meeting, my back started to spasm. All I could think about was how I was going to take a pill once the meeting was over and just collapse in bed. But the Hubster’s back went out before that could happen and I had to limp along to take care of him.

Then Pixie came down sick, so I had to take care of her and Hubster. Hubster finally made it back to work, just in time for me to get sick. So now I’m on the couch, struggling to finish off a simple one-panel cartoon with accompanying blog post.

As for Princess, that poor kid spent the last couple weeks working on a book report that involved writing a synopsis and opinion of the book, writing a letter from the POV of the main character, and completing a poster that showed a picture of the main character, a time-line of his life, include pictures of 10 items that appear in the book, etc. Then while we were in the middle of that, she got an assignment to write a report on Hurricane Isabel, which had to be turned in the same week. So she was kind of fried by the time she was done with all that.

So now I’m sick in bed. I’m missing out on all sorts of things I was supposed to do this week, but it was all volunteer work so I don’t care. I am allowed to take sick days when I need them, and boy howdy do I need them this week.

Hopefully, we’re all better by next week. We’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy the webcomic!

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ACW Episode “This is not a webcomic” – joint pain, priorities, and MEESMo

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No webcomic today! Although I promise you there will be some fun cartoon art later down in this post.

But first, let me 'splain…

Over the past few months, I've been having increasing problems with joint pain. It actually started years ago, after I gave birth to the Princess and then had two knee injuries in a row. My knees hurt for months, but eventually the pain faded away to the occasional twinge when I went up and down the stairs. After Pixie was born, my knees began causing me so much trouble, I ended up going to a physical therapist for a couple months to strengthen them and reduce the pain. That seemed to help, and again, the pain faded away to the occasional twinge when heading up or down the stairs.

But the knee pain kept coming back, off and on throughout the years. I realized certain types of exercise – yoga, biking, swimming, water aerobics, and Wii Fit – seemed to keep the pain at bay. Other exercises – high impact stuff like running and karate – seemed to make it worse. I eventually gave up running in favor of water aerobics. As for karate, I started learning how to do things with as little impact on my knees as I could achieve (no more deep knee bends for this karate woman!). I figured it was osteo-arthritis, and it was only natural for a woman approaching her mid-forties to feel aches and pains in her knees from time to time.

Of course, there was also the occasional time when I'd come down with what I thought was the flu and I'd wind up stuck in bed for a day or so. Only I didn't have a fever… Or any congestion… Or any nausea… Or any other symptoms except aches and pains in my joints that put me under the covers with the heating pad for a while.

All of this was okay, though. The knee pain slowed me down a little, the flu-like days were a minor pain but nothing more, and none of it was enough to interfere with my daily life. Then last November I tore my meniscus and ACL in my right leg, and it was all downhill from there.

Let me say up front that I had a very successful reconstructive surgery and that my physical therapy, while it lasted months, did miracles for me. By the time March came around, I no longer limped and I could walk, swim, bike and hop on the elliptical with no pain. But during the months from January to March, I had a couple more instances of those flu-like days. When I went to see my orthapaedist, I told him it felt like I had sick knees; they felt feverish and achy and kept me in bed. The orthapaedist had no idea what it could be, since my knees seemed to be working just fine. He suggested I talk to a specialist, and I said I'd look into it.

I decided to start with a physical first. It had to be scheduled months in advance. The earliest date I could get was in November. Since I was back to normal activity, mostly, and had started easing back into karate classes, I wasn't in any hurry and I figured that was okay. Once the summer started, with all that warm weather, my knee problems mostly seemed to disappear. I was still recovering from the torn ACL, so it seemed natural to me to have problems getting up and down the stairs at the end of a long day. I was in the pool and on the bike with the kids everyday, too, so I expected to be tired. The girls learned to come downstairs to kiss me good night before they went to bed, so I wouldn't have to haul myself upstairs with my tired, aching knees.

And so it went, right through to September. Then sometime in that month, the back ache started. I developed this persistant pain in my lower back that dogged me all day and night. At first, I thought it was because our mattress was overdue to be flipped, so Hubster and I flipped it, but that didn't help. Then I thought the problem might be with our couch. I spend a lot of time there when I draw and crochet, and our couch is over 20 years old. I got some firm pillows to put against my back and made certain to sit with good posture, but that didn't help either.

The knee pain kicked in as well. And then the hip pain. And then the foot pain. That last was especially bad in the morning. In October, when my parents came to visit, I got the shock of my life when I got up early one morning and I met my mother in the hallway. We were both shuffling along with that same, painful, arthritic gate. Only my mom is in her late seventies and I still haven't hit 45 yet.

By that point, I was trying everything I could to get the joint pain under control. I ate gin-soaked raisins and took supplements of tumeric and fish oil and vitamin D. I swallowed huge capsules of OTC pain-relievers. I slept with my heating pad and took plenty of hot baths. I did yoga until I could bend myself completely in half without breaking a sweat. None of it worked.

Finally, November hit and I went in for my physical. I told the doctor everything. She ordered lots of blood tests and prescribed Gabapentin, which is an anti-seizure medication that also works with rheumatoid arthritis pain. I spent a week waking up completely loopy because of the medication I took the night before. When the blood test results came back, everything was normal.

So the doctor forwarded me to a specialist, who I will see in January. In the meantime I am doing everything I can to manage my symptoms. Some days I am so pain-free, I feel 15 years younger. Other days I am back in bed with the heating pad by 6PM. I've learned to pre-set my bed before I head out to pick up the kids from school in the afternoons. I gather up everything I know I'm going to need in the evening – paperwork, iPad, Surface tablet, crochet project, whatever I need to work on – and I lay it out on one side of the bed, along with a comfortable set of sweats or PJs. My work hours have been drastically reduced to 1-2 hours in the day and another 1-2 hours in the evening. I've learned to take advantage of the morning hours, when I have the most energy, for things like exercise and Girl Scouts paperwork (which is probably the most exhausting task I have to face on any given day). I try to save the evenings for drawing and crochet, activities that I can pick up and put down as needed whenever the girls need my help with their homework.

Because of the drain on my work hours, I've also found myself having to make decisions everyday about what I'm going to work on. Last week, I finally emailed the staff at our Girl Scout service unit and told them i needed to step down from the Volunteer Support Team and any committees I was on due to health issues. This weekend, I had to choose between taking a karate test for 4th degree black belt and cleaning the house (no way in hell were both of those tasks going to get done!). And I also had to choose between drawing today's webcomic and drawing a new Christmas card design, something I've been trying to get to for weeks now.

It's probably too late for this card to be done in time for anyone to buy it for is Christmas. I still have several hours of work left to do on it. BUT it will be done in time for any after-Christmas sales that Zazzle may do, so if you're the kind who likes to buy your Christmas cards on sale a year in advance, this one is for you.

(And this is the part where I show you that fun artwork I promised at the beginning of this very long post.)

Ta-DAA!

I'll do a big reveal on the final artwork once it's done and posted to Zazzle, but for right now, the point I really want to get across is this…

I am doing everything I can to draw as fast as I can to keep the webcomics coming. But there are other projects that I need to work on as well. I have a TON of evil greeting cards that I want to draw, and I have promised both my girls that I will illustrate two stories they've written (that's one story per child!) and get those stories epublished somewhere. If for some reason, I don't get the ACW webcomic up on time every Monday, I will at least post something that I'm working on, be it artwork from a greeting card or calendar or an illustration from one of the kids' stories. And you may see more single panel webcomics from me. Honestly, there are plenty of events that happen around me that would make perfect single panel cartoons, and I may even turn some of those into greeting cards as well, if they work out that way.

So what I'm saying is be patient with me. I'm going to see a doctor, and in the mean time I will keep plugging away as best I can. I will even eventually finish setting up the Etsy shop I started working on last month. It will all happen, slowly, over time.

I promise!