Something Smells Fishy: "Roe-bots," "Pink Slips," "Natal Returns," "That One Salmon" and "Eggs Is Eggs"

There was a teaser shot of this panel as it appeared in this year's annual art faculty exhibition. Not that it was very visible, so I wanted to do a dedicated post of it separate from that event, as it merits distinction as the absolute worst - and by that I mean best of the baddest of the year... perhaps even years if not top three of all-time dumbest idea yet. 

In the above-posted image taken from an off-to-the-side doodle that shows the list of topics that this spawned from, then a counter-clockwise cycle of possible compositions, starting with a Robbie reference.

And yes, I still most Sunday early mornings run down to the corner store and grab a copy of the Sunday paper, and like a little kid on Christmas, eagerly rip through the wrapping to see which Nuggets cartoon ran. Never gets old, just like a cartoonist never really grows up (hey - a healthy sense of humor supposedly keeps you younger looking and maybe just a wee bit more saner too). So anyways, back to standing at the counter on Sunday mornings: I still love the look of the Ben-Day dots, seen here on a detailed close-up.

There are times when I wish I could be more serious. But that's just not who I am. Oh and the reason you'll start to see more and more of these multi-panel postings is, yes, I'm starting to try and run out the clock on posting here at Ink & Snow, which I'll announcing at the 18th-year anniversary postings. More to follow, but that's why I'm kinda pulling a clearance sale on cartoons, and doing these data-dumps whilst flushing out the backlog before taking a bit of a hiatus.

 

Now as to the reason this specific image is posted here, is just to simply and honestly illustrate how and why we should experiment, play with new toys, see what happens. Even if it leads to an abomination, or a complete visual train-wreck. For instance striking out on a series done as demos for a summer Intermediate Drawing course, where we work our way through different mediums. In this instance I was experimenting with various markers, some of which adversely affected the India ink, but I still went with the texture effect and used it as an excuse to continue ruining it, since it had already been scanned for the digital color/print version.

 

 As to that part of the process, I've still been making steady progress in deconstructing my over-Photoshopped effect and limiting the palette.

Not that anyone could easily ascertain the origins of this doodle, but it was observing a really, really long line while down at the local bagel shop for my habitual sketchbook sessions.

Seems like as of late there's been a lot of this corporation being used as cartoon content, and by "a lot" I mean three times in as many years (here and here). I often joke about this to other shoppers while doing the same dam thing in real life. I don't recommend anyone actually trying it, as all those expressions were based on memory. Just kidding.

This was also one of those panels that halfway into it I seriously started to wonder about my commitment, as in this quickly turned into a pain in the ass to render. There was a big breakthrough when figuring out how to draw those shopping carts - which were on the same level as the bait bags covered later at the end of this post. Turned out the trick was just super-simplifying it.

I'm gonna close out this epic 5-part post with one that there is no doodle or preparatory sketch for, which is comparatively rare. On top of that, was the fact that I sat and stared at this particular panel almost every dam day for months, trying to shoehorn another, different caption into it. In other words come up with a better gag, because bait bags aren't really part of any conversation outside of the mainstream (see what I did there). Turns out after endless idle flips of the mental Jacob's Ladder, I went full circle back to the starting point and let it go, like a cartooning catch-and-release. Though I polled some folks at the newspaper office, and a couple classes, and, yep, approximately 98% of folks have never heard of the obscure idiom "eggs is eggs," and 1% have, but don't know what it means.

"The View II" (Duck Redux)

So this one was ready to go, even submitted with the usual monthly batch and event invoiced. And as one would expect, it was to be a weekly Nugget but for the fact that it's posted here now on a Friday, so something somehow went wrong somewhere along the way...

A funny thing happened on the way to posting about this particular panel: upon searching the archives lo and behold another piece popped up that was the exact same concept, way back in 2012. Insert requisite King Crimson quote here: "I repeat myself when under stress, I repeat myself when under stress." So a quick substitute and revision rapidly followed... not quite a "stop the presses" moment, but it was a first as far as forgetting myself.

And for those of our viewers following along at home with us today, here's a flashback to a recent comics poem done off to the side as a demo: the landscapes are from the same series of slides, including the one repeat of Denali.

"Fabulous Mountaineering Ensembles" + "Returning Shopping Carts"

While these two particular panels were rendered many months apart from each other, the similarity in content more than merited a double-post. Besides, now in retrospect, with a comparison/contrast like this it's easy to ascertain that I have too much fun with my favorite color, pink.

Not drawing on my mountaineering experience because I never roped up, or used crampons either, but did carry  though I did carry one of the early Chouinard ice axes, mostly in the event of a slide down a snowy peak.

But I do have many, many years of firsthand personal experience dutifully putting back away my shopping carts. There's even a theory about such behavior and the psychological traits it reveals about someone's personality. I pretty much negate any positive aspects given my habit of playing Subie bumper-cars with any strays left out in the lot.

Folks are sometimes taken back at the number of corporate box stores that line our major roads across town. All the main chains greet arrivals upon deplaning at our humble airport, dispelling any illusions of the frontier from the quaint marketing campaigns that entice the tourists.

Ravens in the Safeway parking lot at forty-below zero

"uBRRR" + "Date Nite at the Mush-In"

Double-dog day: this pair was actually hitched to a whole team of mushing-themed panels that all ran over the course of a month in the newspaper. It followed the seasonal inundation of dog-powered sports events from the annual Iditarod to the Open North American. 

The mush-in theater brought back some memories, nostalgia for when life was simpler. Extra attention wa paid to the plastic tray that hooked onto your window. I thought about incorporating one of the very first cult films I ever caught as a kid (and from a favorite author at the time) "A Boy and His Dog." Never used an Uber either, more than happy to hear tales from a taxi driving sourdough.

One little sweet spot in the composition which is for my sweetie.

"Fair to Midden"

My personal favorite and also one of the best made panels I’ve ever created. It’s probably not very funny, since my initial test marketing revealed about 90% of folks know neither what a midden is nor are familiar with the original turn of phrase, which as several of my classic started out as a mondegreen than morphs into the usual malapropism. Typically a more colloquial version is heard/pronounced as "middlin'" which eases the grammatical sleight of hand (or mouth in this instance) that is being spoofed, but regardless it’s perfectly done.

The drawing itself is an ideal composition, with exemplary linework, the palette too. Every element is no more, no less of what is needs to be. There’s just enough cutting in of cast-shadow shapes for contrasting value (example: the slightly darker inside of the tails, and on the tree trunk), and not too much airbrush gradations to add a hint of volume (see the footpads) so the overall aesthetic isn’t too “Photoshoppy.” It also helps that the colors are not high chroma, so not very vibrant, almost pastellish (just a dozen colors: three shades of brown, three greens, a blue, pink, yellow and gray + b&w). The only texture is a lot of stippling, a touch of spot-blacks using gestural stickwork on the drunken forest. *Technically those three back spruce, the same ubiquitous species that comprises much of the boreal forest and is also supposed to be what the squirrel on the right is leaning against, since those are the trees which typically have a midden – but hey, there are also talking rodents, so…?

Speaking of speaking the speech bubbles are positioned just so: the first one balanced in the upper right corner of sky and set a tad bit higher than the second, which overlaps the tree and thus overall reading left-to-right/top-to-bottom it leads the eye down the vertical pointer of the trunk to the midden itself, the darkest area w/highest contrast. The lettering is simple, legible, balanced and occupying a perfect amount of real estate within the bubbles leaving plenty of breathing room around the letters, words and unit of dialog. So this relatively simple panel is a perfect example of sequentially processing the parts, both text + image, and arriving at the idea. 

And that completes our over-assessment of the cartoon in question for this episode of flogging a dead horse, aka "pole-vaulting over a moose turd."

Recent Gig Recaps

The Fairbanks Library Foundation's "Alaska Author Series" went absolutely wonderful: a full room with some literary luminaries amongst the crowd. I actually got a little choked up while dedicating the talk to the memory of my reference librarian mother, and reminiscing about the convoluted adventure my cartoon life has been leading up to now. Nevertheless there was much laughter and I did manage to maintain a pace that pulled off over a hundred slides in forty minutes, followed by questions and a demo and signing some books too.

As evidenced by the super-soaker sweaty tshirt shot while at the demo table, I was really nervous about this talk. Since I'm away from my comfort zone of a  campus classroom it reminds e how much I empathize with students in the my art classes who are nervous about not only putting their pieces up on the studio wall for critique and review, but oftentimes just the simple act of having to do it in front of agroup of people can be terrifying. In fact my energetic antics are probably nothing more than one long sustained panic attack."I'm a visual artist not a performing one!"

Seems like as of late been sitting & sketching at a lotta tables for so many venues, and that includes several gigs for the university, the college, and the department; I manned tables at three campus events  like for orientation, for a student job fair (hiring models) and  a celebration of the second week back for the fall semester. As it happened, I had just introduced a Life Drawing class to the concepts of Urban Sketching, and so half of the event was spent on the other side of the proverbial easel with a posse of aspiring talents, sketching around and about the crowds.

Faculty show 2026 opening: Just like last year's annual fall semester faculty show, this current one is also held over, so it'll be up for another few weeks (September 24th it'll come down). On display now I have another experimental printed canvas of a panel (that'll be posted about later on this year here), along with a couple other "best of the year" Nuggets that still haven't been printed or posted yet. But a nice 18x24" color poster of "Seasons" is up along with a framed print of "Fir Baby" are included in the suite.

This truly is an amazing assemblage of outstanding artistic ability + truly impressive academic instructors of all their respective mediums. It's a distinct honor to show alongside the work of my peers who all continue to inspire me on both sides of the easels after all these years, and this is the strongest faculty I've yet to see in this department.

READ!

Long-time followers of this blog (in fact one of the first-ever posts here) know well of my penchant for promoting literacy. While there are many other issues that I might personally care far more about, we wouldn't be in this mess as a society if we didn't have better literacy skills. Hence it being the sole cause that I donate art to.

The spot illustration was ostensibly intended just for a sticker + bookmarkers too. The QR code goes right to the home page for the group, but since some of y'all are reading this post on your phone, that's a bit of a logistical impossibility so here's a direct link.

It's a pretty slick-looking professional logo, as opposed to my beaver/book initial idea, but c'mon man, ya can't have Castor Canadensis on everything.

Behind the scenes was a funny (now) (in retrospect) situation where I spent some time recreating a concept it turned out I had already done. Soon as I found the preceding design I didn't even bother to clean up the admittedly superior version. Dam it.

Demo Day 2026 "MOX" Recap

Following up on that 1st Friday Demo Day VI gig down at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner (subscription here). No new subscriptions but couple dozen renewals along with a buncha regular subscribers showed up, and some friends & superfans, and some bonus art student kids and a handful of both aspiring & established artists dropped by. Even made a bit of cash from the stickers & books on the merch table. Of course as usual the whole newspaper staff all got an original. Grand total was around 35-40 pieces, and since I didn’t remember to do a batch beforehand it was non-stop from the start, from zero to eight-five all day.

Since it’s the beginning of the semester, my M-TH workweek hit fifty-four hours already, so I really needed a “day off.” Overall slower than any gig before, but I put it down to a combo of really horrible weather + timing with a holiday weekend and so judging by the downtown traffic there was quite the exodus all afternoon of folks bailing out in advance of a 3-day weekend (and moose season natch).

The only speed-bump occurred with a fellow who was gonna give me a few extra days before picking up a custom-ordered sloth. Which was not on the roster of critters, nor within my reach of rendering. No, I explained, on this gig’s menu there was a choice between the table and rack and floor of muskoxen. And neither was the second-choice order for some Sponge Bob fanart. Pro-tip: a really quick way to an artist’s bad side is to tell them to draw someone else’s intellectual property (I've gotten these at conventions before and it's like WTF man, can you not see the spread of my own merch before you?). People are so weird sometimes.

I used a dip-pen, the nib my usual Hunt 512 with India ink, on watercolor stock. For color, the four squares of the newspaper cartoon strip was by a set of bright, poppy Prismacolors; and the muskox using Derwent Inktense water-soluable watercolor wash pencils (a bark, tan, oak, shadow + an ivory borrowed from a set of Caran d’Ache Aquarelle set). Eventually I was able to stabilize the pace of production to where it would take approximately one minute to loosely sketch each piece with pencil; about two minutes each to ink it in (whereupon it would lay on the floor propped up in front of a little fan I brought along so as to expedite drying time); and then lastly a couple final minutes to apply the color, both marker + watercolor wash.

Here’s the last half-dozen, which were inked in but unfinished, so over the customary 6:30am breakfast at the café, I watercolored ‘em all in. Also on this set I did a little trick that Sandy Jamieson taught me: he would finish off his little watercolors with a couple passes from a can of gloss varnish. Really makes the blacks come back, and gives a rich luster and depth to the watercolors. BTW there’s one flagged with a yellow sticky-note as that’s my personal fave (only one with an expressive ear) of the whole day, and so it’s going in the little collection I have documenting the previous five years of this gig. Viewed this way the variations are so unique, they’re all the same but each one’s different. Watching someone not be able to make up their mind which one to pick is so much fun (“ooo but look at THIS one…”). Originally I intended it to be a baby musk-ox , but shortly into the session it occurred to me the horns were rather large for its age.

"The New Guy" + "The Roomate"

Not just another double-header post but this morning there's twice as much walrus on the table too. This first one was a real belly-flop of a demo. Every once in a while when doing the performing art thing in front of folks there's a subliminal pressure to if not make a somewhat decent drawing, then at least do it quick. I suppose for most folks watching someone pencil and ink a panel in is about as engrossing as a cooking show (which my classroom demos are structured like having pieces prepped at varying stages of development like making a quiche); similar to literally watching paint - or ink in this case - dry. After all, there's a big audience for fishing and golfing shows, and I know my own personal proclivity for falling under the spell of an entrancing artist in person or even watching documentaries (here's what I'm talking about).

Anyways, I messed this one up and it required a lot of digital editing ("I'll fix it in post"), like for example deleting the nostrils because they wound up looking like alien eyeballs. In retrospect the bath mat that's over the edge of the tub should be on the floor, and it ought to be a fluffy white towel as indicated on the sketchbook rough. But then again once you go down that road you lose sight of the fact that the roommate is a walrus and at what point does the illusion fall apart that this is a cartoon.

Next is an excellent example of the considerable evolution of an idea that can sometimes be fleshed out in imagination or at other times, as in this case, needed to be doodled out first then fermented a while in the sketchbook, and then tweaked on paper. The choice to swap out the scenario into a circus setting was a bit more complex, as evidenced by the advanced doodle done while at a faculty meeting, where I'm usually the only one without a laptop.