Night Shopper

Other Cartoons in Ivan Brunetti Style

An Unfortunate Event

A Sad Story

An Unfortunate Event

I am learning a new technique for drawing comics from a book by Ivan Brunetti. This is my second comic story.

Here is the first one.

A Sad Story

A Sad Story

As those of you who follow my blog know for the last year or so I have been working my way through a book by Lynda Barry that encourages everyone to draw comics.

Now I have started a new book by Ivan Brunetti which guides you through a different way to tell stories in simple drawings. This is my first attempt with the Brunetti style.

Other posts……….

Don’t Be Scared To Be Creative

Neighbours

Betty Boop

Neighbours

As my regular blog readers know I have been working my way through a book called Making Comics by Lynda Barry. This has been a year-long project and I’ve been negligent about attending to it of late so I decided it was time to do another assignment.

Lynda’s premise is that everyone can draw and everyone should draw and that too many people have been turned off from the creative experience of drawing by criticism they have received or expectations that they need to be expert at it. Drawing is a way for everyone to express themselves, share ideas, reflect on experiences and cultivate creativity.

The latest assignment in Making Comics was to think about your neighbours in the various places where you have lived and create an image to illustrate something interesting about that neighbour. So here are my three drawings…………

My parents rented a house on Kroeker Avenue in Steinbach in the early 1960s and just one house over from ours was the home of a widow named Agnes who had ten children. I remember wondering how she kept them all separate from each other in her head and how they all fit around a table to eat. My Mom and Agnes became very good friends and stayed friends for the rest of their lives.

When I was in grade two my family lived on Beaverbrook Street in Winnipeg. I went to Sir John Franklin School several blocks from our house. I remember coming home from school for lunch one day and seeing that a car had driven right into the living room of the house next door to ours. I have no idea how it happened but the next day there was a photo of the car inside the living room of the house in the Winnipeg Tribune and you could see a little bit of our house in the photo.

My husband and I owned a home on Westwood Street in Steinbach for many years and we had a neighbour who collected Christmas trees. In January when people had taken down their holiday trees and left them with their garbage to be picked up by the city sanitation trucks, this neighbour went around and ‘rescued’ all the trees and then ‘planted’ them in his backyard till spring. He would make mounds of snow for each tree to stand in. When the snow melted in spring the trees toppled over one by one and then our neighbour would haul them away. From January to April however he had a whole forest of pines in his backyard.

What interesting neighbour do you have a story about?

Other posts……….

Attending a School Named For An Explorer

My Mom’s Friends

Nicest Tree Ever

 

Pick a Scene and a Perspective

I have been continuing to work my way through Lynda Barry’s book Making Comics.  Our latest assignment is to do four-section journal entries illustrating specific scenes from one day. We have to write about each of the four sketches we do. Here are my four entries for Sunday.

I am enjoying this particular exercise in the book because it makes me review my day and select the events from it I want to illustrate. I also have to decide what I want to write and there are many different options for what I could say about each drawing.  I am realizing that my days are filled with many more scenes than I might think and each one can be viewed from different perspectives. 

Other posts………

When Did You Stop Drawing? 

My Day in Comics

Thanks Lindsey

 

 

Apple Pie, Comic Stories and Fresh Air in a Time of COVID-19

The getaway car just after delivering some pie to our condo doorstep

Yesterday morning our friends Jim and Bonny provided curbside drop off of two pieces of scrumptious apple pie.

This card came with the pie. You can tell our friend Jim is artistic and has a sense of humour as well. Check out his various designs for the coronavirus and his message not to drink Clorox

Then Bonny and Jim were off to do similar drop-offs at the homes of three other couples who are all part of a small group of friends that formed because of a church connection nearly two decades ago.

Some of our small group at one of our get-togethers last year

Many changes have happened in the meantime, but we are still gathering regularly. 

Dave and I are ready to zoom. 

We had a Zoom meeting set up for last night and Jim decided to bake a pie and deliver pieces to the other four households so we could all be eating apple pie as we visited. All ten of us managed to get on Zoom for a nice long conversation. 

Our group some 15 years ago at a lakeside cottage

Jim’s pie was fabulous as was the chance to be together with long time friends even though it was done virtually.

As my regular blog readers know one of my isolation projects is working my way through the lessons in the Lynda Barry book Making Comics.  My assignment last week was to take a character I had created the week before and have them star in a four-section comic. So I took Opal the Opera singer and did a little story of her swallowing a fly. I also used my character Henry the Hairdresser to tell a story about getting a COVID haircut.

Our book club in Hong Kong. Our friend Leigh who is eating peach cobbler rather than holding a book lives in Lima Peru now

A friend, former colleague and fellow book club member living in Lima, Peru posted on Facebook yesterday that even though it hasn’t been officially sanctioned yet parents are starting to take their children outside on playgrounds for short periods of time. She said after spending forty-one days cooped up in their apartment her daughter ran around in the fresh air of a small park as if her life depended on it.  According to the Washington Post  Peru is experiencing a devastating outbreak of coronavirus despite early aggressive measures to stop the spread. 

Seeing the musical We Will Rock You in Hong Kong. Our friends Erik and Heather who live in Saudia Arabia now are the second couple to the left

In Saudi Arabia, other friends have been on a 24 hour a day lockdown.  They report the only time they managed to get some fresh air was when the fire alarm went off in their home, forcing them outside for a bit.  The round the clock curfew has now been eased in some places in the country according to Reuters news service. 

Other posts…….

My Day in Comics

A Handel Meat Pie

Cocktails in a Stable

Back to Work and Betty Boop- Self-Isolation -Day 8

Here I am with a group of my student teachers and the staff members who supported them taken several years ago.

• Well, it’s back to work for me!  Yesterday I received instructions about what I need to do to make sure my university education students qualify for completion of the practicum course I supervise.  Although I can’t go out to schools to visit them they will be writing up unit plans and lesson plans for my approval and composing reflective essays about their teaching philosophies.  I get to read and grade all this material and then write a report of my own.  
• In talking to friends and family I realize there are many university students out there whose future is uncertain because of COVID -19.  There are medical students who won’t be able to write their final exams and accounting students who won’t be able to complete their certification and future veterinarians who won’t be able to do their community placements. They say the virus may not be as deadly for young people, but it is going to be very hard on them in lots of other ways. 
• Does anyone else have rough hands?  Mine are red and sore and dry from all that handwashing.  I’ve been putting Vaseline on them at night?  Any other good suggestions?
• I finally finished the puzzle I’ve been working on since the second day of our isolation. Puzzling is a bit of a family tradition and I’ve done so many puzzles with my parents, my kids, my grandkids and my sister.  Often when I was working on this one all by myself I was thinking of the fun family times we’ve had puzzling.
• I saw this sign on our evening walk.  I am not sure what it is for but it expresses my sentiments very well.  Yes I am hearing what they say on the news but my mind can hardly grasp the enormity of it.
• The Lynda Barry course I’m working through called Drawing Comics has me drawing different versions of a 1930s cartoon character named Betty Boop. By the way, Lynda Barry was interviewed recently on the CBC show q by Tom Power. Give it a listen. 

Laura Branigan

• I am a bit sad that I finished all the Mobituary Podcasts yesterday.  I just love them!  One of my favourites was about Laura Branigan a popular singer from the 80s.  Although Laura has passed away she returned to centre stage in 2019 when her hit tune Gloria became the victory song of the St. Louis Blues as they made their historic mid-season turn around and won the Stanley Cup. I just can’t get Gloria out of my head now.
  

  Lunch at a tea room with the women I work with at the MCC Thrift Store on Selkirk Avenue

• I can’t volunteer any longer at the MCC Thrift Store because it has closed its doors.  I work there with a group of women from my church.  Our fearless leader Marj sends us a weekly e-mail update but now during the crisis, we’ve all chimed in on the e-mails keeping each other informed about how we are doing in isolation and how the pandemic has changed our lives. It is so nice to keep in touch with each other.  
• We watched the Gordon Lightfoot special aired on CBC last night. The very first music concert I attended as a teenager was one Gordon Lightfoot gave at the Centennial Concert Hall in Winnipeg. I used to teach his song The Ponyman to my elementary school students and then they would draw illustrations for the different lines of the song and we would make a book out of them. 
• My husband made homemade biscuits for breakfast!  They were great!  I wonder how many pounds I will have gained by the end of our isolation? 

Other posts………..

Going on a Field Trip

Mobituaries

Puzzling- A Family Tradition

You can read all my Self-Isolation Diary Entries Here

 

 

 

Drawing Comics

I bought Lynda Barry’s Making Comics as a Christmas gift for myself.  Lynda is a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator and playwright and an associate professor of art at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Lynda believes drawing is one of the oldest, most natural, most spontaneous ways of communicating.  You don’t need to have artistic skill to express yourself through drawing.  According to Lynda you just have to be brave and sincere. She teaches a university class in making comics and in her book she leads you through the same lessons she does with her students. Lynda says most people quit drawing around age nine or ten because they think they can’t draw realistically enough. Lynda introduces you to the Ivan Brunetti style of drawing people which she claims any one can do.  My first assignment was to give myself a name and draw myself as that person.  I decided to call myself Miss Renaissance and draw myself doing things that are part of my everyday life. Next I had to pick from a long list of suggestions and draw myself doing certain things or becoming something else. I showed my grandson the list of suggestions when he visited me at Christmas and he asked if he could draw himself as a God of Fire in my notebook. Here’s his drawing.  I loved it!  

I am well along in the book by now and have had to complete all kinds of interesting assignments. I had to draw these things with my eyes closed. I had to draw this person with a felt marker in each hand and always have both hands moving at the same time. Right now I am in the diary portion of the book. Everyday I have to write down seven things I see and do, something I hear and a question about my day. Then on the next page, I have to draw myself doing something and write about it. On this day I wrote about going to a yoga class. Here is the drawing I made when I went to the Thermea spa one evening with a bunch of other people. 

I am really enjoying my course.  I am on page 75 of the book and am looking forward to the other drawing challenges Lynda will give me and what I will learn about myself while doing them.  

Lynda believes anyone can make comics and she thinks the best ones come from people who gave up drawing a long time ago like I did. She says drawing comics can bring lots of enjoyment and surprise and meaning into your life.

Other posts……….

When Did You Stop Drawing?

I’m Trying to Draw Cartoons

Don’t Be Scared To Be Creative

Good News- Part 3

It’s true. 

Good News- Part 1

Good News- Part 2

Good News- Part 2

 It’s true. 

Other good news……..

Ozone Hole