Not Your Typical Cat Video

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.

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Quarantine Continues

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

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Perspective Videos on YouTube and Patreon: The First One’s Free!

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

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Round Black Glasses: The Morph

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The other day I blogged about the first Adobe After Effects project I posted to YouTube, a morph video of my son Ben’s Presidential portraits. Today, it’s another morph video, a survey of famous Round Black Glasses wearers both from history and popular culture, including Harold Lloyd, David Hockney, Sigmund Freud, Barton Fink, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Edna Mode, Poindexter, Simon Chipmunk, and MTV cartoon star Daria. The video can be seen here.

David Chelsea is watching: Ruby Sparks
starring Zoe Kazan

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Happy Presidents Day! Ben’s Presidents Morph In Adobe After Effects

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I haven’t blogged about this very much, but one of my main activities this the past year has been learning to do motion graphics in the software program Adobe After Effects. It’s been a steep learning curve, but my efforts are beginning to bear fruit. This week, I posted two short videos to YouTube, both of them morph sequences created in After Effects. The first is a collaboration with my son Ben.

David Chelsea is reading: A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel
by Amor Towles

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New from Rebecca: The Summer Dragons

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View the highly awaited new animation from Rebecca Celsi’s StudioAttic Productions on YouTube. A story of the secret world in one child’s garden- and how she discovered it. Music by the infinitely talented recent high school graduate Ben Celsi. Here are some screen captures to give you a taste:

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David Chelsea is watching: Fargo: Season 1
with Martin Freeman

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Another Frog From Rebecca

It’s a big week for blog posts, what with my latest 24 Hour Comic, and a couple of new books coming in, but first up, here is a new stop motion animation from Rebecca, Kelso’s Choices. Like Frog Chase from a few months ago, this also features a frog protagonist and was animated on the iPad. One big difference is that this one comes with a soundtrack (created in Garage Band). Big brother Ben Celsi contributed the music and Rebecca’s school friends Samuel Redding and Krystyna Klucznik did the voices.

David Chelsea is reading:
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans
by Lawrence N. Powell

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Stumptown Preview #1: Perspective Grids

The Stumptown Comics Festival approaches. This year’s event will be held at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland on April 16th and 17th. As usual I will be attending, signing books and selling artwork at my own table, but this year I will also be doing a presentation, a demonstration of drawing in perspective using the pre-existing grids from the DVD which comes with my new book Extreme Perspective!

David Chelsea is listening to: “Packing For Mars” by Mary Roach

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