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Finn and Rey's Cat Cantina and Pizza Parlor (The Fanfic Social Thread)

Discussion in 'Fan Fiction and Writing Resource' started by Briannakin , Nov 12, 2015.

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Page 233 of 401

Ewok Poet Force Ghost

Registered:

Jul 31, 2014

OK, the gun guy will be the first person to use the axe on. Stick and stones narrative and all...

And I like that T-shirt. But once again, they're enormous. This is big enough for a beach dress.

I might be slightly violent today because, for the second time this year, people owe me beaucoup money and I have something like 600 dinars on one of my accounts. And taxes are due Monday. Freelancing is male quadruplets that pee at the same time while being changed. Perhaps genetically altered ones with two members each. And they pee against the wind.

Ewok Poet, Nov 11, 2016

#5801

leiamoody likes this.
mavjade Former Manager VIP - Former Mod/RSA

Registered:

Sep 10, 2005

Yeah, I don't think this guy is a hunter. I could be wrong, but it came across a bit as though he wanted me (and others, though no one else was talking other than the three of us) to shut up.

mavjade , Nov 11, 2016

#5802
TrakNar Jedi Grand Master

Registered:

Apr 4, 2011

Currently wearing this shirt. My local Hot Topic had it in stock.

TrakNar, Nov 11, 2016

#5803

Sith-I-5, jcgoble3, JediMaster_Jen and 1 other person like this.
Ewok Poet Force Ghost

Registered:

Jul 31, 2014

mavjade - That's wrong in so, so, so many ways.

Here's a cool word association game for everybody to try:
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/11/test-your-creativity-with-this-word-puzzle.html

Ewok Poet, Nov 11, 2016

#5804

mavjade likes this.
whiskers Jedi Grand Master

Registered:

May 19, 2005

mavjade said: ↑

Yeah, I think 2016 is going to be the year everyone just tries to forget. Here's hoping 2017 is much better!

I'm sorry about the kitty, Bri.

Happy Veterans Day Jedi_Lover! Thank you for your service! And thank you to anyone else who has/is serving!

I had an interesting encounter today. We were discussing the election at my job this morning and it was going pretty well (other than the gloating which I was ignoring). One guy said, "But we can have a conversation about it." I said, "Certainly. I'd like that." A third guy says "I'd like to get my shotgun."
I don't think he intended it to be directed toward me specifically, but I was really taken aback. I didn't say anything else and he just left.
Click to expand...

Holy crap, I wouldn't know how to take that either.

whiskers, Nov 12, 2016

#5805

mavjade and Chyntuck like this.
Sith-I-5 Force Ghost

Registered:

Aug 14, 2002

We lost Robert Vaughn yesterday at 83 - one of the original two Man from U.N.C.L.E. agents, and apparently the last surviving member of the Magnificent Seven.

My work had a "town hall", gathering of staff to discuss company targets, current and future matters, and we covered the Trump victory. His statements or intentions on trade agreements mean that we have to review our investment strategies.

The animosity and despair I still feel towards the winning opposition voters in the Brexit referendum, I can definitely empathise with the US voters shell-shocked by the election result.

Nice to see Facebook scrambling to deflect any blame in the result.

Sith-I-5, Nov 12, 2016

#5806

Gamiel likes this.
Mistress_Renata Manager Emeritus VIP - Former Mod/RSA

Registered:

Sep 9, 2000

I took a long walk in the woods this afternoon. I wasn't in it for the exercise, really, but I realize I really needed it. I guess that's why Hillary went hiking afterwards. There was something healing for the heart about completely surrounded by nature, breathing in fresh air. I don't think I've been taking very good care of myself. I think I need to work on that.

Mistress_Renata, Nov 12, 2016

#5807

ShadowofLures, Gamiel and Chyntuck like this.
Mistress_Renata Manager Emeritus VIP - Former Mod/RSA

Registered:

Sep 9, 2000

And yes to the RIP for Robert Vaughn...I had a friend who used to have such a HUGE crush on him!

Mistress_Renata, Nov 12, 2016

#5808
Chyntuck Force Ghost

Registered:

Jul 11, 2014

I'm sorry I'm limiting myself to distributing "likes" of sympathy, but this whole story has left me speechless.

Just so you all know that 2016 sucks in the rest of the world too, Mahmood Abdel Aziz passed away. He was one of the most talented and unusual Egyptian actors of his generation.

And now... obligatory pic of baby platypuses wearing fedoras. Just because.

.

Chyntuck, Nov 12, 2016

#5809

Lady_Misty, mavjade , divapilot and 3 others like this.
Raissa Baiard Favorites of FanFic Artist Extraordinaire VIP - Game Host

Registered:

Nov 22, 1999

Chyntuck said: ↑

I'm sorry I'm limiting myself to distributing "likes" of sympathy, but this whole story has left me speechless.

Just so you all know that 2016 sucks in the rest of the world too, Mahmood Abdel Aziz passed away. He was one of the most talented and unusual Egyptian actors of his generation.

And now... obligatory pic of baby platypuses wearing fedoras. Just because.

.
Click to expand...

Oh, there you are, Perry.

Raissa Baiard, Nov 12, 2016

#5810

Lady_Misty, Briannakin and Chyntuck like this.
Briannakin Former Manager VIP - Former Mod/RSA

Registered:

Feb 25, 2010

PERRY!!!

I'm at my mom's and according to my brother 'that is the best thing ever'.

Briannakin , Nov 12, 2016

#5811

Lady_Misty and Chyntuck like this.
Sith-I-5 Force Ghost

Registered:

Aug 14, 2002

I have no idea who Perry is, but those two guys look absolutely adorable, and somehow familiar.

Sith-I-5, Nov 12, 2016

#5812

Chyntuck likes this.
Raissa Baiard Favorites of FanFic Artist Extraordinaire VIP - Game Host

Registered:

Nov 22, 1999

Perry the platypus from the cartoon Phineas and Ferb; you call him Agent P

Or if you prefer his GFFA counterpart, behold Perry the Rebel-pus:

Raissa Baiard, Nov 12, 2016

#5813

Lady_Misty, Chyntuck, TrakNar and 1 other person like this.
Gamiel Chosen One

Registered:

Dec 16, 2012

And he has even his own theme song

Gamiel, Nov 12, 2016

#5814

Sith-I-5 likes this.
Gamiel Chosen One

Registered:

Dec 16, 2012

from http://schweizercomics.tumblr.com/

My favorite parts of history (as might be obvious from my choice of subject matter when making books) are the ones that fall into easily-categorized genres, genres with associated visual iconographies. This is the sort of stuff I loved as a kid: pirates, knights, cowboys, explorers, romans and Egyptians and flying aces. Stuff you could find featured in a bag of toys or a generic costume.

For Black History Month, I thought I might visit some of these adventure-leaning periods and pick a few historic black people from those eras to draw, just for fun. If you’re doing a project or report in school this month, you could do worse than to tackle one of these toughies. Feel free to share some of these with youngsters that you know. And call them youngsters, they LOVE that.
(longer write-ups under the break)

Amanirenas was the one-eyed queen of the Meroitic Kingdom of Kush. To forestall the Roman Empire’s push into Africa, she led Ku****e forces in an attack on the Roman colonies in Egypt, defeating Rome’s forces and holding the colonies for a year, which began a five-year war with Rome that ended with a treaty stipulating that the Romans evacuate their capital and that the Ku****es did not have to pay the Emperor tribute (they did agree to permit a Roman frontier border occupation in their lands). This began two centuries of peace between the Kingdom of Kush and the Roman Empire.

Matthew Henson was an explorer, the first man on record to reach the North Pole. Growing up a sailor, he became friends with Commander Peary while they were exploring the jungles of Nicaragua. The two joined forces for a series of arctic expeditions, during which time Peary became the only non-Inuit explorer to learn the language and knew how to train and drive sled dogs.
When he, four Inuits, and Peary made their final push to the North Pole, Peary was unable to continue (he was ill, worn out, and had bad frostbite), and Henson struck out on his own. Finding his way to the Pole, he planted the American flag, later returning for Peary and the Inuit sled team to escort them to the Pole (Peary was not able to get to it, being confined to the sled).

Colonel Tye escaped from slavery at age 21 during the American Revolution and joined the British, who promised slaves their freedom. Tye fought in the “Ethiopian Regiment,” a black unit, at the Battle of Monmouth. Quickly showcasing his skill for forage and guerrilla tactics, he was offered command of a group of 24 commandos, hand-picked from among the British’s black troops. Sometimes teaming up with the Queen’s Raiders (another guerrilla unit, this one white), they struck along the land from New York to Virginia, taking rebel prisoners, killing rebel military commanders, and capturing much needed food, fuel, and ammunition (contributing in no small part to New York’s survival during the siege of 1779), and freeing any slaves they encountered.
I made a comic story with Tye in it called “The Black Brigade.” It can be found in the comic textbook “Reading with Pictures,” and in Oni Press’s Free Comic Book Day offering from 2013. I’ll try and post it up soon, I’ve been meaning to do so!

Bass Reeves was one of the most prolific and respected lawmen of the wild west. Born a slave, he escaped as a young man into Indian Territory during the Civil War, where he learned to speak a number of Native American languages, living amongst the Seminoles, Creeks, and Cherokee.
After the Civil War, his knowledge of Indian country landed him a position as a deputy US Marshall, working for Judge Parker. If you have read “True Grit” (the finest American novel ever written, I genuinely believe), or seen the film, Reeves basically had Rooster Cogburn’s job: riding out into lawless country to bring back dangerous fugitives (and for the same court).
A crack shot, ace detective, and master of disguise, Reeves successfully apprehended more than three THOUSAND fugitives, many of them notorious outlaws, gun killers, and murderers. He never received an injury, though over the course of his career he was in fourteen shootouts in which he killed fourteen men, all of whom drew first (Reeves would not draw his gun unless he felt he had to use it, feeling that it would increase the likelihood of a violent outcome).

Queen Nanny was the leader of the Windward Maroons, a community of escaped slaves in the Caribbean in the early 1700s who were at war with the British. Heavily outnumbered, Nanny built her capitol on a high mountain in Jamaica (from whence we get Blue Mountain coffee), and they were able to defend their towns against attacks from British soldiers on numerous occasions, and built a series of politically connected villages under the protection of a central government built on the Ashanti tribal model. They grew crops, raised livestock, and traded with other islands. They would make regular attacks against towns and plantations to free the slaves there.
An excellent strategist, her troops became gifted in jungle disguise (which Nanny created from branches and leaves to serve as both camouflage and close-quarters armor) and often succeeded in ambushing the British troops when they would attempt an attack.
She reined for three decades, and freed more than eight hundred slaves, and in 1739 signed a peace treaty with the British which permitted the Maroons to keep their five towns and conditioned that they would fight alongside the British should they be attacked by foreign armies.

St. Maurice was a Roman Legionnaire and the leader of the sixty-six hundred soldiers that made up Theban Legion. According to legend (which, like much in religious history, probably has some historical root but which has been distorted over the years to where it no longer jives directly with what we know of the time period and the politics at play), the Legion converted en masse to Christianity and was decimated (every tenth soldier killed) for refusing to obey orders (specifically, that they offer sacrifices to pagan gods on their route to Gaul). Maurice was a very popular saint until the mid-1500s, when the African slave trade started up and Europeans started to feel like real jerks for asking the intercession of one African while denying the humanity of others, so they stopped using him as a central feature in art and architecture.Though there is no historical evidence for Maurice from his lifetime, he is a good avenue through which to look at black Roman soldiers in the 3rd century, which one rarely sees in films. Some of the most important Roman military finds were in York, England (where I was lucky to live for a while as a young man), where large burial grounds of soldiers have been unearthed over the past half-century. The soldiers buried at York were part of the group stationed near Hadrian’s Wall, which separated “civilized” Rome from the wild barbarians of the north. Seen Game of Thrones? These guys were the Night’s Watch.
Forensic anthropology from multiple sites there has shown that the soldiers buried were roughly 60% white, 13% North African, and 25% sub-Saharan African, so black soldiers were more not an unusual novelty in the 3rd century Roman army, they were about a quarter of it (Rome of course “recruited” from the populations of any areas that the Empire conquered).

Josephine Baker was a world-famous entertainer and the first black woman to star in a major motion picture. She was also a spy for the French Resistance when France was occupied by the Nazis during WWII.A renowned dancer on Broadway, she was known for her hilarious comic timing and technical proficiency. On moving to France, she became a popular (and controversial, due to the erotic-tinged nature of her dances) performer.During WWII, she used her clout to find visas for resitance fighters and refugees, and used her show travels as an excuse for espionage. She would perform mostly in heavily-occupied or strategically important places, gathering information for the resistance and transporting it pinned inside her underwear, banking on her fame and reputation to keep her from being strip-searched at checkpoints. She refused to perform in front of segregated audiences, wouldn’t take racist bunk from anybody. She was actively involved in the Civil Rights movement in the US, and after Martin Luther King’s assassination, she was asked by Coretta Scott King and others in the movement to take his place as its leader. She labored over the decision for more than a week, and declined. She had adopted twelve children and did not want to risk their lives or leave them without a mother, something that the murders (some of them house bombings) of other civil rights leaders at the time portended. For her service to Free France, Baker was awarded the Croix de guerre and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.I drew her with her pet cheetah, Chiquita, who would sometimes get bored with Baker’s act and jump into the orchestra pit, sending the musicians scurrying.

Black Caesar was a pirate who scourged the Caribbean shipping lanes off the Florida Keys for ten years.A chief in West Africa, he was captured when a ship with which his village was trading cast off with him aboard, the crew intending to sell him into slavery. When the ship hit a hurricane, he and a crewman with whom he’d become friends took the ship’s provision and survived by taking a longboat to shore as the ship was destroyed. He and the other man used the longboat to begin a pirating enterprise that continued for years, grew larger, and amassed each considerable treasure, until the two fought a duel over a woman which Caesar one. He amassed a crew and created a kind of Batcave-like hideout in Biscayne Bay that included a system of elaborate pulleys that would serve as elevators, trap doors, and ship-hiders (tipping the ships over on their side to hide their masts from the view of Naval patrols).
He eventually teamed up with Blackbeard, and was one of the last men in the crew of the Queen Anne’s Revenge still fighting after Blackbeard died (reportedly from more than twenty sword wounds and five gunshots). When it was seen that he would not escape the battle alive, Caesar attempted to blow up the ship’s gunpowder but was eventually subdued by the combined might of the Navy’s sailors. He was convicted of piracy and executed.

Yasuke was the first non-Japanese person to become a Samurai. He arrived in Japan in 1579, a tall young man from Mozambique working as a servant for Jesuit Missionaries. His appearance caused a sensation to the isolated Japanese, and by 1581 word of his presence reached ears of Oda Nobunaga, one of the most powerful warlords in the country. Nobunaga met Yasuke (insisting that his chest be scrubbed to make sure that his dark skin wasn’t a trick), and was impressed by his size, strength, and grasp of the language, and brought him into his service. Over the next year, Yasake received martial training and was made a samurai.
Nobunaga was killed by the army of a rival the following year, and Yasuke went to protect Nobunaga’s heir. He and the heir fought for some time when ambushed between castles, but were beaten. The heir was forced to commit seppuku, and Yasuke was sent to Kyoto, where he disappears from the records.

Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint George was the colonel commanding the first black regiment in Europe, the Legion de Saint-Georges, fighting for the French Republic before Napoleon staged his coup.
As a teenager, he became widely known as one of the best swordsmen in Europe, his celebrity rising when he besting a champion fencing master at 17 in a very public duel. He was also considered to be one of the best-looking men in Paris, a fine wit, and an exceptional dancer. In his mid-twenties he became a renowned violinist and began performing his own compositions (which you can easily find), before turning his attention to opera. Here’s a link to a long grouping of some of his violin concertos:

Juan Garrido was a Spanish Conquistador, part of the small group of combatants responsible for the European victory over the Aztecs and the conquering of Mexico. There were quite a few African freemen on the expedition, but Garrido was the highest African-born soldier in rank. Among his non-military accomplishments were the building of a chapel in honor of the Spanish dead, the cultivation of wheat in the Americas, and “discovering” (mapping) nearby islands.

Zapatista Soldadera
The Mexican Revolution, which sprang up in response to the corrupt dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, had any number of Revolutionary factions, and while some leaders (like Pancho Villa) disdained the use of women soldiers (though Villa himself had a few whose skills made it worth discounting his gender principles for their service), Emiliano Zapata had a substantial number of female combatants in his army. A number of these women were Afro-Mexicans, probably descendants of the estimated four thousand former slaves who escaped to anti-slavery Mexico between 1829 and 1865 or the black migrants in the 1890s. Most of the names of the roughly two hundred fighting soldaderas are lost to time, and with the exception of two (a Dutch-Mexican woman and an Afro-Mexican transgender man) I could not find any reputable citations linking the specific women of note with the many anonymous photos of the soldaderas (Euro, Indigenous, and Afro), so I’m not sure who was black and who wasn’t, hence the composite character.

Giovanni Moro was a knight, the commander of the castle in Lucera, Italy, where he was the governor, which had a large Moorish immigrant population. Giovanni was the treasurer of the kingdom of Sicily and a considerable landholder. When the Pope attempted to have Manfred (the future king of Sicily, a famous knight who had often championed the rights of the immigrant Moors) assassinated, he came to Giovanni for aid. Giovanni and his soldiers joined Manfred in 1253 to fight against the army of Rome, winning a number of victories. Giovanni ended up being killed amidst everyone’s nonstop political intrigues, including his own (like Manfred, he was making secret secret negotiations with the Pope; unlike Manfred, he was killed by some of his own soldiers).

Eugene Bullard was an American who went to Europe at a young age, became a prizefighter, joined the French Foreign Legion, was seriously wounded in the Battle of Verdun, volunteered to join the newly created French Air Service, joined the Lafayette Flying Corps (American pilots who fought with France, since America hadn’t entered the war), and was promoted to Corporal. When America entered the war, the United States Army Air Service invited him to join based on his record, but when they discovered that he was black they rescinded the invitation, because America, at the time, sucked. He continued to fight with France.
He later married the daughter of a Countess, owned a fashionable nightclub, became friends with Louis Armstrong and Ernest Hemingway, was a spy against the Nazis in the lead-up to WWII, and fought defending Orleans from the invading German army. He was injured, and when Orleans fell, he escaped to Spain, and then to New York. Among the fifteen medals he received, he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest military honor. Oh, and he always took to the skies with his faithful companion Jimmy the Rhesus Monkey.
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Gamiel, Nov 13, 2016

#5815

Lady_Misty, mavjade , TrakNar and 3 others like this.
Sith-I-5 Force Ghost

Registered:

Aug 14, 2002

Holy ****, I thought those would be fictional people, but Matthew Henson checks out!

Thank you to you and the artist for bringing that to the fore.

Sith-I-5, Nov 13, 2016

#5816

Ewok Poet likes this.
Gamiel Chosen One

Registered:

Dec 16, 2012

Sith-I-5 said: ↑

Holy ****, I thought those would be fictional people, but Matthew Henson checks out!

Thank you to you and the artist for bringing that to the fore.
Click to expand...

He has also done something similar with historical warrior women.

Somebody he don't mention but would fit right in is Général Thomas Alexandre Dumas (father of the author Alexandre Dumas)
oil on canvas (sorry for the bad quality)

Gamiel, Nov 13, 2016

#5817

Lady_Misty, TrakNar, Ewok Poet and 1 other person like this.
Ewok Poet Force Ghost

Registered:

Jul 31, 2014

These are all amazing pieces of art!

Ewok Poet, Nov 13, 2016

#5818
TrakNar Jedi Grand Master

Registered:

Apr 4, 2011

After the stress of the election and spending the weekend with my germ-ridden niece and nephews, I woke up sick.

TrakNar, Nov 13, 2016

#5819

ShadowofLures and Chyntuck like this.
mavjade Former Manager VIP - Former Mod/RSA

Registered:

Sep 10, 2005

Chyntuck said: ↑

.
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So so so CUTE! I didn't know I needed this, but I totally did!

So I learned recently that they are making Groundhog Day the musical! Ahhh.... so excited!
The music and lyrics are going to be written by Tim Minchin, which just adds to the excitement!

mavjade , Nov 13, 2016

#5820

Chyntuck likes this.
TrakNar Jedi Grand Master

Registered:

Apr 4, 2011

I was laying on the couch earlier today and Erma got up to join me. She sat on my face.

Wow, thanks.

TrakNar, Nov 14, 2016

#5821

Chyntuck, Briannakin and Ewok Poet like this.
Briannakin Former Manager VIP - Former Mod/RSA

Registered:

Feb 25, 2010

Track, I hope you feel better. That's pretty much the relationship Aggie and I have.

It's past 2:30 am here and I'm wide awake for some reason. I'm debating skipping class tomorrow because I have reached that point in the semester where I actually don't care about anything anymore and 3 hours of Nationalism might actually break me

Briannakin , Nov 14, 2016

#5822
Gamiel Chosen One

Registered:

Dec 16, 2012

SOME OLD WEST LADIES
from http://schweizercomics.tumblr.com/

I made a New Year’s Resolution this year.

I don’t usually do that. If I find there to be a deficiency in my character (such discoveries occur with far more frequency than I would prefer), I try to put into motion whatever steps are needed to correct my misalignment then and there rather than wait for the calendar to roll-over. Waiting seems contrary to growth, and besides, I find faults too often to give one favor over the others by enshrining it in ceremony.

This year is a little different, mostly because the discovery of fault (part of a larger issue that I’m trying to work through concerning how I handle characters in my comics) coincided with the end of December. And the fault is this: I am daunted by and suck at designing costumes for women rooted in any given specific historical and regional setting.
Just how do I suck at it? There are a few ways, and they’re best examined by noting the discrepancies between how I handle drawing female characters and how I handle drawing male ones.

* I should mention that this particular issue relates to off-the-cuff drawings for the sake of doing drawings, not characters in any particular stories, although I have no doubt that my inadequacies in one arena carry over to the other.

First, occupation. Unless the people that I’m drawing are part of a story, in which a breadth of social variety is necessitated by the narrative, I tend to draw men in an adventury role. A sword, a pistol, a pith helmet – something denotes their inclination to action. When I draw women, however, I have, until this month, not put adventure at the forefront of my depictions, and as such precious few of my drawings of female characters give such an impression.

In the execution of story itself, I’ve been lucky – kind of – with the book on which I’m currently working. Two of the best characters are very adventure-leaning women, but this was not by design, it was a lucky stumble. But with the male characters, it’s nearly always the case, at least when sketching willy-nilly.

Second, the degree to which dress is customized. Now, I like to think that, for all my artistic faults, laziness of design is not a charge against which I can likely stand accused (though my confidence in that field likely means that I’m probably due for a kick in the pants any time now). I always try to customize costume if I can do so, and so any dress or costume that I see will have some degree of alteration under my pen. The color will change, or the cut, or I’ll take elements from two or three similar outfits and interwork them. But with men, I’ll go nuts. Tucking a vest into pants under suspenders, a military uniform jacket with a sarong, an unusual hat blocking, blankets tied to boots, shirts unbuttoned, shirts buttoned absurdly high, etc. I try and treat each outfit as if it’s a catholic school uniform and see what I can do to deviate as much as possible from its intended mode of wear to a statement on the wearer.

But I don’t, or haven’t, done this for female characters.

Part of this is that the fashion history books that I have generally show fancy clothes in full regalia. Not having a clear awareness of how the clothes are worn, layered, etc (easier to consider with men’s clothes, generally as the layering of garments has shown little change in the past half-millennium, the garments themselves being variations on that which we still wear), I have always gone to the default, formal wearing.

Now this gets into something else – the dichotomy between easy access to depictions of the rich in portraiture and preserved clothing and the inaccessibility of depictions of peasant and lower class dress – but that’s something I’ve wrestled with before without too much difficulty. And this is not the issue, though it may seem so on the surface. Men’s dress, too, has a certain haughtiness in its depiction, but that hasn’t stopped me from scuffin’ it up. The “nicer” womens’ dresses of a historical period are no less modular than their masculine counterparts, you just see it less frequently (or at least I have).

So what you get is a shocking conservatism of design on my end when it comes to female costume, an adherence to which I always, consciously and unconsciously, placed at the doorstep of historical plausibility. But, if anything, these regimented depictions are more implausible than their modular alternative, and are a result not of accuracy but of laziness in the research phase, and, more troubling, of research carried out with preconceptions at its onset, preconceptions disinterested with finding adventure-geared manifestations of traditional dress, or untraditional dress on record.

Which leads me to my resolution. I had to train myself to consider the customization of wear with men’s fashion, and now it’s a part of my artistic DNA, I suppose, though I still put conscious thought to it. I should say that it is always a question that I ask myself in the design stage. So let’ say “takeoff checklist” rather than DNA, as it’s not so ingrained as to forgive dismissal (though, to be fair, no segment of the artistic process should really be permitted to rely entirely on autopilot without at least glancing at the instruments, if I might extend the metaphor). I want to train myself to do the same with women’s costume. And the only way to train is through practice.

So my resolution is this: That I draw at least as many females when sketching and doing up figures as I do males.

That may not sound like much of an undertaking, but seriously, 95% of the people that I draw out of my head for the fun of it are male. So I’m woefully ill-prepared to handle the casual design aspects of female characters simply by virtue of not having put in the hours.

So I spent yesterday and part of the day before drawing up a bunch of female characters specific to one historical/regional period. For the sake of convenience, I picked the Wild West, as I already feel I have enough familiarity with the trappings as to allow me a head start so far as holsters and boots are concerned.

I actively decided to stay away from the most overused trope in female costuming in the west, the saloon girl. I did, however, include one, because I found some photos so far removed from the popular conception of the saloon girl costume and so delightfully awkward that I couldn’t resist taking a shot at it through that lens (fig. 26). I also tried to stay away from the Man With No Name costume and its many variants. As much as I love those characters in the Leone movies (and, unless you’re looking at it through a strictly thematic non-literal lense, they are different charaters), putting a character in that costume or a variation on it (as you see in lots of comics, video games, and low-budget western films) is pure, unadulterated laziness. Its casualness makes it no less iconic than Darth Vader’s armor, and putting on a character (including a female character) is no different than making a lady Darth Vader and trying to cram it into a non-Star Wars space opera.

While you don’t see a lot of women wearing gun belts historically, I included quite a few on here for the sake of that adventury vibe. To be fair, you don’t see a lot of MEN wearing gun belts historically. I include them on many male characters for the same reason.

The pants/skirts combo thing is something that was popularized by the Dress Reform movement of the 1850s. Often the pants would be made from the material cut from the bottom of the dress. The photos are pretty darn cool, and the ferocity of the caricatures pertaining to them are kind of infuriating, mostly because the punchline is inevitably the dress reform woman in old age, alone and unloved, reverting to an overtly feminine dress in a too-late attempt to catch a man. Anyway, I’ll do some scans of some of some Dress Reform photos sometime, because they’re really quite fascinating. One of my favorite discoveries was not a dress reform issue at all, but a photo of a woman in the Klondike wearing suspenders over a sweater vest over an Inverness cape, which I used as the basis for fig. 17, only I added a deerstalker and made the cape Holmesian plaid.

The Western period is luckily recent enough, and well documented enough during its existence, as to yield up any number of female participants in a variety of occupations. Some of these specific instances (including the buffalo skinner [fig. 8] and the buckskinned scout [fig 19]) informed or inspired some of these drawings.

Anyway, my practice is underway. Hopefully, after a year’s time, I’ll be equally inclined to depicting either gender, and as I no longer feel myself any more beholden to drawing women in boring roles than I do drawing a male medieval accountant or candlemaker (though that sort of thing will probably be next year’s resolution), I’ll be equally enthusiastic. Given the fixed start date and that, ratios being measurable, progress is quantifiable, it’ll be easy enough to chart my adherence to this particular resolution.
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If people are interested so did Schweizer a light follow up on this explaining what lady #17 is wearing - http://schweizercomics.tumblr.com/post/75042069674/id-dearly-love-to-see-the-photo-of-the-woman-in

Gamiel, Nov 14, 2016

#5823

Ewok Poet and Chyntuck like this.
Chyntuck Force Ghost

Registered:

Jul 11, 2014

I have a cold too. A nasty one. *beuh* And of course I'm sharing it with my nephews and nieces, so it looks like this is the time of the year when the Chyns are all happily swapping bacteria.

Last night Mr Chyntuckopoulos and I took the old ladies to the cinema to see the absolutely brilliant I, Daniel Blake (because apparently we needed to see a cheerful film #not). I'm rather happy cinema-wise right now because a lot of current and upcoming films have me very excited. We're planning to go see Fantastic Beasts on Thursday and we are soooo psyched for Rogue One. From the trailers I'm even more excited for this than for TFA.

Oh, and Obama is visiting Athens tomorrow and Wednesday, so they whole city will be on lockdown. Plus, Thursday is the anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising, so lockdown again. If I'm lucky I'll have received my copy of Catalyst to keep me company

In case someone needs a laugh today, here's something to cheer you up:

Chyntuck, Nov 14, 2016

#5824
ShadowofLures Jedi Master

Registered:

Jul 13, 2005

TrakNar said: ↑

After the stress of the election and spending the weekend with my germ-ridden niece and nephews, I woke up sick.
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I feel the same way. I've started to make plans for a move to Canada. I know, drastic and nearly impossible, but it's something I feel I have to do.

ShadowofLures, Nov 14, 2016

#5825

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