I haven’t been doing much commissioned work recently, but I’ve been plugging away nonetheless, posting comics, videos, and sketchbook pages to my Patreon on a regular basis. On any given week I might post a book report comic drawn on a library call slip, like this one about Sarah Polley’s memoir:
My family and friends love to play the game “Eat Poop You Cat”, especially at large gatherings. This game is the drawing equivalent of the game “Telephone.” The way it’s played is that one person writes a simple description of a scene, preferably something comical like “a badger eating pizza”, then passes it to the next person. That person attempts to draw a picture to match, then folds the paper so that the only their drawing can be seen, and the NEXT person writes a description of that drawing, and so on until there is no more room on the paper. What may start out as the caption “Karen reads a lot of books”can end up as “A man presenting a girl with a snowman for her birthday” once it has traveled down the line.
My late foster brother Rafael had a Cuban proverb he used to quote to me: “El vago trabajo doble”, which translates to “the lazy one works twice”, which I take to mean that if you’re lazy and skip steps, you’re going to have to work twice as hard fixing all your mistakes later. For me, this proverb comes up a LOT, because I am by no means a systematic or methodical worker. The latest proof of that is today’s subject, a series of posts I’ve been putting up over the course of the last few years on my Patreon page.
David Chelsea is reading: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey
Continue reading Perspective Grid Comics And Drawings
Well, you missed your chance to sign up for the PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event by Palm Sunday to save $500 off the retail price, but no problem- you can still register by April 11th and save $300! Go here and find out how!
I will be presenting a live-on-video online perspective drawing demonstration as part of the event. This will be similar to the perspective speed demos I have been posting on Patreon for the past year, but in real time and with my spoken commentary guiding you through every step of the process. Full disclosure: my demonstration will not literally be plein air, as in drawn outdoors. It will be a simple one-point perspective of an imaginary room. The organizers told me that was fine with them. I will also be responding in real time to questions in streaming chat. Since I am not a touch typist, I will be using my iPad’s voice recognition software.
David Chelsea is reading: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Continue reading PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event: Watch Me Live & Save Up To $300!
Today, Palm Sunday, is the LAST DAY to save up to $500 on the retail price for PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event! A lot of attendees wait until the day of the deadline to purchase- could that be YOU?
In case you missed my previous blog post, here’s a recap: I will be presenting a live-on-video online perspective drawing demonstration as part of the event. This will be similar to the perspective speed demos I have been posting on Patreon for the past year, but in real time and with my spoken commentary guiding you through every step of the process. Full disclosure: my demonstration will not literally be plein air, as in drawn outdoors. It will be a simple one-point perspective of an imaginary room. The organizers told me that was fine with them. I will also be responding in real time to questions in streaming chat. Since I am not a touch typist, I will be using my iPad’s voice recognition software.
David Chelsea is watching:
Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season
Continue reading PleinAir Live Global Virtual Event: Watch Me Live & Save Up To $500!
Got any plans for April? Here’s where I’m going to be:
David Chelsea is reading: Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
by Christopher Bonanos
A month and change into the quarantine, and things have settled into a routine. Every morning I wake up around 6:30, have coffee and a frozen banana for breakfast (I’m trying to avoid putting on quarantine weight as well as using less toilet paper), feed Winston, post dreams to Facebook, and then work until noon, when I have… another cup of coffee (and feed Winston some dry food). Eve usually answers work emails for an hour or so in the morning, then goes outside to do stuff in the garden. After noon I usually put in a little time pulling weeds (the focus this week- bluebells!), work in the studio for a few more hours, maybe take a leisurely bike ride around the neighborhood in the afternoon. At seven, just before dinner, (and around the time Winston gets his third feeding- he’s a growing boy), Eve & I go outside and bang pots and pans or beat on a drum with our neighbors. Theoretically, this ritual honors essential workers, but mostly it just lets off steam. Then Eve & I watch TV: So far we’ve watched Season 3 of Ozark, Mrs. Fletcher, Avenue 5, Season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Some of Dave and What We Do In The Shadows, and two and a half seasons of Better Things. I usually get sleepy and head off to bed between 9 and 10.
Some weekly events punctuate the Groundhog’s Day sameness. Saturday morning we do our weekly Zoom conference with scattered family. Wednesday evening garbage goes out. Various podcasts arrive on schedule to tell me what day it is. Ken Jennings’s Trivia Quiz email tells me it’s Tuesday.
I’ve been making little tweaks here and there to my Patreon page. Recently, I decided to add links connecting all the Call Slip Comics I have posted over the past few years. Cheer your confinement by recalling the bygone days of when libraries were still open! Now you can read the strips in order, starting from the very first:
David Chelsea is reading: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Continue reading Quarantine Continues
With nearly everyone confined to quarters for the foreseeable, everyone has a quarantine story to tell. This is mine.
I was leading pretty much my normal life up to the week of March 9th. On Wednesday the 11th, I had lunch with my publisher- ordering actual food from a restaurant- and had a studio visit from a friend’s high school-age son in the afternoon. Thursday I had a date to go to the theater to see a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with my sister Teresa, but had one wary eye on the headlines- schools had already been closed, and the governor had banned gatherings of over 250 people. I checked the theater’s website that morning to see if the show was cancelled, and saw that a planned matinee was going ahead, but that the status beyond that was uncertain. A few hours later they cancelled the rest of the run.
I had my usual Friday visit on the 13th with my hangout buddy and sometime assistant Jacob Mercy, in which we were careful to avoid standing too close or god forbid, shaking hands, but that is the last social interaction I have had with anyone not in my immediate family. The store my wife Eve manages was slipping into closing by degrees- first, closing one day a week, then taking a planned two week holiday, then shutting until further notice.
Our daughter Rebecca flew home from LA on Tuesday the 17th- classes at UCLA had gone online, but she had intended to stay in the dorms through finals week, but we were worried that flights might be cancelled altogether. The three of us stayed in the house together, apart from a two-day trip to the coast, for the next ten days.
David Chelsea is reading: The Last Cruise
by Kate Christensen
Continue reading Notes From Quarantine
I haven’t written here for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. I’ve been posting content regularly on my Patreon page, which of course you would know about if you were one of my sponsors. My main effort has been going to instructional perspective videos created in Adobe After Effects. Since the last time I wrote about this project, I’ve posted three more:
Drawing Perspective with David Chelsea: Simple Two-Point Perspective
Drawing Perspective With David Chelsea: Simple Three-Point Perspective
Drawing Perspective with David Chelsea: Three-Point Perspective Axioms
David Chelsea is reading: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Continue reading Stuff I’ve Been Posting On Patreon
If you’ve been following these posts, you know that I’ve been acquiring chops little by little in Adobe After Effects. Well, I now feel adept enough to have launched a series of animated videos about something I was already good at- perspective. The first in my series of step-by-step perspective tutorials dropped on Patreon in May, and as of now, I have posted three of them:
Drawing Perspective With David Chelsea: Simple One-Point Perspective
Drawing Perspective With David Chelsea: Constructing One-Point Perspective Over A Reference Photo
Drawing Perspective with David Chelsea: A Hexagonal Floor In Perspective
David Chelsea is reading: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Continue reading Perspective Videos on YouTube and Patreon: The First One’s Free!