12: Rocks

Just finished this comic up this morning and I'm so happy with it! It's really fun to experiment with adding photograph collages into the illustration to sort of jam two worlds together. Using this technique for pictures on the wall feels natural and funny. I've especially been loving this picture of my dog Pete incorporated into the illustration world. It's from his first vet visit - they gave him this sort of mug shot. He was really frazzled because he had hurt his leg and the pic is something that cracks me and Eric up. I also have been putting Sister Wives (the TLC show) promotional photos on the walls of my illustrated rooms because it's a current obsession. Seriously, watch it. I started with S1 E1 in April 2022 and it's fascinating. 17 seasons later, I'm still on the edge of my seat. 

Anyway, this collage-y element is a really fun way to world-build in these spaces. I've been trying it with ceramics through the use of decals - example here - and I'm realizing that one of the keys is to have real life photos vs scans of my own illustrations. What I mean is, in the example linked above, the painting on the wall above the women reading is a decal of a scanned illustration of Pete. Because the line quality and style is so similar to the line quality of the sgraffito drawing on the vase, it doesn't have the same contrast and humor potential that the photo of Pete in this comic does. At least that's where I'm landing with it. I'm curious if you have any thoughts! I intend to try to incorporate photos through decals and see how it goes - but it can be hard because of copyright infringement maybe. I guess I just have to take a ton of my own photos and I'm certainly not a photographer.

I got a fancy watercolor set from Case for Making and this beautiful, limey green won't scan! You'll notice it on the second panel, especially. Those are supposed to be limes, but the lovely green scanned to be a murky gray. Looks like it must contain pigments that are out of the scannable RGB color spectrum. Total bummer! Will not be using that color anymore. 

Also, do you have any special rocks? Something about collecting them is nice but it seems like a slippery slope towards becoming a hoarder. One time, I found fossils in the slate at Cuyahoga National Park - I kept some of those. It's cool because you kinda slam these pieces of slate and they split apart naturally and you can see some fossils if you're lucky and I'm pretty lucky in general (I feel like I always get lucky with seating on airplanes, for example).