Category: Miscellany

Break a Leg

Last Monday l took the kids for an outing with another family to Oaks Park, the local roller rink I used to skate at back when I was a teenager. l hadn’t been skating in years,and I figured  it was about time for the  kids to learn- Rebecca is already pretty good on ice skates. My accident happened when I decided  to take a break from circling  the  rink and get a drink. Decelerating as I went from the wood rink to the carpeted outer area, I heard a pop and stumbled- I thought somehow the shoe had broken until an Oaks employee pointed out my broken shin and asked if I wanted someone to call 911(Please disregard any rumors you may have heard that my broken leg resulted from a rinkside run-in with Tonya Harding).. Eve has done research and tells me this injury happens to a lot of guys like  me- that  is,  middle-aged hotdogs with an old man’s brittle bones- though  it  usually results from something more macho like a football tackle or a motorcycle crash. At least my downfall didn’t happen to  cheesy organ music- the rink has switched to nonstop oldies.

l was taken by ambulance to Legacy Emanuel, where I received excellent care, had surgery the next day and got home the day before Thanksgiving. I had hoped to get some comics drawn during my  hospital stay but I was on heavy medication and mostly took naps.This was all I could manage:

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Palming It

Stipple illustration with my faithful Palm Zire 71
An illustration from my faithful Palm Zire 71

I just uploaded eight of my Palm Pilot comics to my page at Comics Lifestyle. This is a series of little autobiographical and dream strips I drew between 2004 and 2006 using the Notepad application on a Palm Zire 71. I still have the device, and in fact I am scribbling this paragraph on it in the Memo Pad application, but eventually I quit drawing the strips because the software’s limitations were wearing on me- the 1×3 window limits the number of frames to no more than three. and  the combination of the application’s low resolution with the device’s clumsy stylus makes it difficult to get either fine detail or legible lettering.

What the software is best at is stipple, and I did do some decent drawings in it given the limitations. John Weeks was displaying the strips on his site for a while, and a techie friend managed to get them to display on his cell phone, and told me they looked really good there, making me feel very 21st Century. Still, I have never really warmed up to drawing using a computer or any electronic device.

The bulk of my artwork is created on paper using fossil technology like ink and brushes- which I then scan into Photoshop and beam worldwide.