Sir Goblin Gremlin, King of Dorks & Ukulele Villan

morpho books

figure drawing for all it's worth (+ creative illustration)

framed ink

will eisner comics and sequential art

will eisner graphic storytelling and visual narrative

understanding comics (+ making comics)

folder of various animation production art

burne hogarth drawing dynamic hands

perspective for comic book artists

michael mattesi force drawing

the animator's survival kit

color and light james gurney

of critters in clover

You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:

SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!

They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.

I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.

So first of all this one girl told us about a newer metaphor in Russian, "I have paws", which is something you say when you don't really want to do something, so you say you're incapable of doing it since you have paws instead of hands. Like, "hey, finish that report" "aw but I have paws :(" and I think that's adorable. It has "I'm just a girl" energy without the misogyny.

We also had the task to invent a novel metaphor and have the others guess what it means, and the teacher really liked my "she's such a capybara" = "everyone loves her". Capybara energy is like golden retriever energy except you're chill about it. You're just vibing and everyone digs that.

these deserve to become more

common in English

there are 2 main types of waves. wind waves and swell. wind waves (called chop when the period is short) are caused by present wind kicking up the surface of the water. this is where you see little whitecaps and generally pointy, uneven waves. swell is caused by powerful sustained wind whose waves have traveled a long way and developed into consistent self-perpetuating wave forms, and looks like long smooth waves; the energy is coming from the sea itself. swell is the thing that makes you feel like the entire ocean is heaving & is what throws ships around. the sea state is usually described as a combination of swell (the ground movement of the sea) and chop (the movement of the surface) so you might say we have a 4 foot swell (measured from the trough at the bottom to the crest at the top of a large heap of water) plus 2 foot chop (smaller waves closer together on top of the swell). swell is the hardest to get in photo or video in a way that shows its true size, especially if you're shooting on your phone for an instagram story from the bridge of a ship, but if you were say making a 70mm film adaptation of a story where the main character is being tortured by the ocean itself you would probably want to figure that out. because you generally need swell in order to get any kind of impressive motion going on*

*EXCEPT in storms, when the winds are so strong that the wind waves themselves "heap up" and can become mountainous without a preexisting ground swell (when the waves escape the storm or the storm ends these waves will sort themselves out and continue as swell). wind waves obviously behave differently and have different features in higher winds. the beaufort scale is the tool used internationally by mariners and meteorologists to determine wind speed in unprotected waters and describes the features of gale-force, storm-force, hurricane-force winds.

so for example when i'm driving a small work boat at my job, if i notice long streaks of foam starting to run down the backs of the waves, that's my cue to call in and consider ending operations for the day, because on paper my operational limit is sustained 30 knot winds (in that anything higher increases my level of risk). you can see how things get more impressive the higher the winds get, and based on this you can imagine the kind of things we'd expect odysseus to encounter. spindrift is when the wind is so strong that it breaks the surface tension of the water without interacting with any object and all the crests look like they're steaming, it's super cool to see. here's a really good video of the waves caused by "violent storm" winds so you can get a sense of what it might look like if the ocean was mad at you. we want mountainous waves blocking out the horizon.

here's a shot of a "storm" from the odyssey trailer.

so check the scale. this is literally described as a Gentle Breeze. like a Moderate Breeze if we're being generous. what else can you say. this is 2 seconds after a guy gets swept overboard by a wave. obviously the trailer doesn't represent the entire movie but i watched the whole three hours of that and i would say that the bigger seas occasionally got up to 3 foot swell with 2 foot chop, but usually just a 1-4ft chop on flat ocean. it's possible that it got up to force 6 but definitely not above that and im not sure it got that high, i mostly just remember confused seas with a lot of quick, smooth chop (this kind of behavior doesn't affect boats at all). occasionally it looked like they would try to use a powerboat wake to simulate swell but they shot way too close to the origin (and you can't get big swell that way) and just ended up with more sharp, confused-looking waves

as for the on-deck shots, the behavior of the ship and the conditions on deck were obviously totally inconsistent with the environment, but also comically inaccurate even for the conditions they were pretending to be in? so like first of all the ship was almost always rolling side to side, which IS the scariest and most dangerous type of motion especially in a boat shaped like that, but if you're in a storm you should be turning your boat to point into the waves so that you're pitching fore and aft instead of killing everyone on board. we should be seeing the prow dive into the front of a wave and have green water flood the front of the ship and then see nothing but sky a second later. in a ton of these "matt damon is wet and getting splashed with white water" scenes you can see the flat sea in the background and they often stop trying to make it look like the ship is moving at all from one shot to the next. the spray they throw at the crew is imo not enough to snatch someone off a deck like that, and it all looks like white water that comes from waves hitting the side of a boat and splashing up, but in a lot of cases the direction it comes from makes no physical sense. maybe that's poseidon idk. what you should see instead in this kind of situation is a whole wave breaking OVER the side of the boat and basically a solid wall of water sweeping people away, but you need big waves for that.

this is stuff that directors of maritime films work hard to perfect. even major directors like ridley scott (white squall), peter weir (master and commander), baltasar kormákur (adrift -- similar size ship to the odyssey btw), ang lee (life of pi) have developed and used strategies for showing us waves and storms that are exciting and impressive and scary. it IS understood to be an essential element of competence in this kind of film. of all these The Odyssey should be the most epic. it's The Odyssey. all maritime literature is descended from The Odyssey. but christopher nolan didn't seem interested in spending more than $100 of his thousand morbillion dollar budget on the main antagonist of the story.

main character, in awe and slightly terrified: what did you have to give up to be able to control storms with your mind?

powerful enchanter, fighting back tears as they pull down the hood of their cloak to reveal a knotted oily mess: my beautiful luscious hair….no matter how many times i wash or brush it, it always looks like this

other character, sympathetically: oh, had to trade good hearing for seeing the future?

however, soon afterwards, the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature realized the enchanter had been ecstatic to be rid of periods and didn’t care about not having biological children. the GSSFN felt somewhat cheated by this and ever since has had a strict no-trading-internal-organs policy

there’s the legend of the smooth-talking thief who managed, by describing a certain talent of hers as “the ability to form small growths out of her skin and then reabsorb them” with enough quick confusing descriptions to trade the ability to get pimples for the power to become invisible

there’s the boy who brought the GSSFN a bucketful of cold, liquid silver in exchange for the power to cure a certain sickness, only for the GSSFN to realize once the sun had come up that the bucket contained only water reflecting moonlight

A visual physics lesson at 80 km/h.

Enthusiasts launched a man from a moving truck in the opposite direction - at the same speed the car was traveling.

spectacularly showed how

relative speed works

“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”

“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”

it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.

but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.

hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.

“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”

“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!” 

hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”

“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”

he gave her a long, quiet look and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.

-

hank switched her team.

“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”

carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”

“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”

hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.

“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”

“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.

there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse. 

hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin. 

she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”

she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”

“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”

-

“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”

annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”

hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly. 

“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”

“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”

“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”

annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”

“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”

“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”

“no. he was dead.”

“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”

“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”

“hank, what the fuck.”

he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”

he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?

annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase. 

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.