Boooooooks

I drew this last night. Part of a little somethin' somethin' I'm working on.

I made a library card!

There was a contest at work to submit a photo or illustration that might appeal to children for a new library card, and I won! I'm so excited about it. Last weekend, the first batch of cards arrived and I tore the box open with reckless abandon.



That orange cat with an eye patch has absolutely no relation to my own orange cat who may or may not be missing an eye. None whatsoever. No.

Digital paintin'

Today I decided to take a genuine jab at digital painting. It's my first attempt, aside from a few times where I've opened up various programs, drawn a squiggle or two, looked at the examples, felt discouraged, and quit, deciding instead to lay in bed eating grapes and watching YouTube videos.

I think the thing is, I have no idea how art actually works, or how shading or shadows or lighting or noses happen. It's like a tiny miracle whenever I see someone who can so effortlessly draw realistically or semi-realistically. I've never had much luck with Wacom tablets, and everything I've drawn on a computer in the last two years has been with a laptop trackpad and my pointer finger. Since any sort of good painting in Illustrator seems to more or less require Wacom-ing, it hasn't happened for me.

This was made using the Procreate app for iPad, which still let me use my pointer finger. It is based off of this picture of my favorite one-eyed feline, Oliver, who I adopted in May. I LOVE HIM.



Anyway, it's a little wonky in some places (okay, most places), but for a girl who doesn't understand how realism works, I think it's a step in a direction. Some sort of direction. Somewhere.

Bread Tag Collection Update!

In December, I posted my bread tag Christmas tree, and mentioned my growing collection of everyone's favorite bread closures (pssh, twist ties are like, SO prehistoric). Since that post, my horde has evolved pretty significantly, and I recently had the time to assemble the masses and take inventory of what I have. I see pretty elaborate Excel spreadsheets in my future.


The tags before being organized. I keep them in a glass jar most of the time.


I have a little sheet where I mark off new dates when I get them, but it's nice to be able to lay them out from time to time and look at them lovingly, as well as see if there is anything I missed, or any unique patterns emerging.


I finally obtained my birthday tag from a co-worker, and was happy to get a February 29th tag this year – if I had missed out, it would have been another four years before I'd see another one!


Here are all the different shape variants I have, the one in the upper left hand corner being the most common. I am particularly fond of the green one with the heart-shaped closure. The two larger ones I found on my street on the same day, a few blocks apart, and I haven't managed to get any others of that size since.

There is a stretch of road a few blocks up from me in front of an apartment building where I am guaranteed to find 5-10 bread tags on the sidewalk a week, as well as a gas station in the opposite direction that always has some in front of it, though not as many. It's amazing how many you'll see on the ground when you're out and about when you're looking for them.

That is all.

Future City!

Many forevers ago, I posted this, referring to something about a book I was illustrating that had something to do with robots.

Fast forward a year and a half, and I'm very excited to say that the book is a reality. "Stephen Swank's Adventures in Future City" is story about a boy, his robot best friend, and his father chilling out, maxing, and relaxing all cool in a city where the buildings are living, breathing robots and adventure is always just a bolt away! Or something like that.

It took so long because I had to illustrate it twice! Here's the tragic tale: So, I had finished it. We're talking, freshly made PDF sitting on desktop, feeling good, high-fives all around. Then, something happened. I think my laptop battery, charger, and hard drive all died at the exact same time. And basically, I hadn't backed up a single thing.

A year passed. I kept telling myself I'd go to the Apple store and try to restore my files and finally be able to print the book. But as it turns out, I would rather just re-illustrate the entire thing than helplessly step foot inside an Apple store.

So that's what I did, doing the bulk of it in about four days last month. And somehow, my illustration skills have improved pretty significantly. I guess it's a good thing I lost those files to the void of time and space.

While the Illustrator files are no longer, I had saved and emailed a few JPGs of the pages early on, so I still had those. For your viewing pleasure, here are the (sometimes embarrassing) before and after pages of some of the first couple pages of the book:


This is the first page of the book. The original page is on the left, the final one is on the right. I think that more than anything, our hero Stephen Swank looks a lot more human and a lot less like his parents were hoping for a girl. I also made his background more reflective of the kind of kid I knew him to be.


This is the Cityscape of Future City!


This is Stephen's dad, who is the engineer behind Future City. I'm pretty pleased with his re-design, because while the old and new share some similar aspects, ultimately I think we can all agree that he looks a little more scientist dad-like and less serial killer writing his manifesto-like in the final version. Maybe I'm wrong.
Question about the top picture… Where do those doors attached to the glass go?!


Okay, this one is especially bad. I don't even want to talk about it. Oh, Stephen. What a little thing like ears can do for you.

I'll be posting some more illustrations and photos of Future City here and there in the coming days, but if you were interested in learning more or buying a copy, hardback versions and paperback versions are available for sale on Lulu. You're supporting a good cause: Giving me money to buy the materials necessary to make grilled cheeses. Plus, the book really is pretty good.

Bread Tag Christmas Tree

Since last March, I've been collecting plastic bread tags. My hope is that by the time I am sixty, I will have amassed a collection that has one dated tag for every day of the year, which I will enter into the Puyallup Fair Hobby Hall and win a moderate-sized ribbon. So far, I have a little over 400 tags, with something like 130 unique dates.

To let a selected few out of the jar for some fresh air, I decided to make a Christmas tree out of them for my wall.





Thanks, double-sided tape!

Overdue: The Unicorn From a Planet Far, Far Away

About a year and a half ago, I started drawing a comic written by my eight-year-old self called "The Unicorn from a Planet Far, Far Away". For one reason or another, I never finished it. After rediscovering the old notebook the story was scrawled in, I decided that leaving the comic incomplete was the worst thing I've ever done in my entire life, ever.

I couldn't tell you where my obsession with people getting divorced, people getting in car accidents post-divorce, or dead parents came from, but they run with reckless abandon in this story. So, better late than never, here it is: The entirety of "The Unicorn from a Planet Far, Far Away," written by Susanna Ryan, age 8. As I said in my old post, the only things changed are misspellings and wayward punctuation for clarity. Enjoy! I'm sorry to anyone reading this on my actual blog that the pictures run into the sidebar a little bit. Whatever.

A drawing

I just wanted to share an illustration I made this evening. It's my boyfriend and I riding an over-sized Jack Russell Terrier, for whatever reason. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.



I suspect that yarn may not be the most effective method for staying atop a giant canine, but it is what it is, I suppose!