Facon.

Why do people get so incensed when I mention veggie bacon? Not you…no, no, I know you understand me. But I mentioned having veggie bacon with my dinner (which, I didn’t for the record) the other night and right away got a response…a horrified response, from an old friend. Here’s the thing. I don’t mind bacon. But I don’t care about bacon either. It’s not my thing really. But, man do people get defensive about that. It’s not like I’m saying, I don’t really like…puppies or something. And it’s not that I don’t like bacon. I just don’t care about it. If there were no bacon, I wouldn’t be sad. And it is exactly because of this that I first tried veggie bacon years ago.

Now mind you, years ago, veggie bacon isn’t what it is today. I can’t remember the brand, but I do remember that it had such a strong smoke scent, that everytime I opened the freezer, I could smell it. Frozen and I could smell it. Yikes. It wasn’t good. Neither, for that matter, was the soy milk I tried all those years ago. But now I can’t imagine life without soymilk, it makes everything so much easier for me. But the point is, I tried something new, I didn’t like it. I tried it again, much later, but again nonetheless and I did like it.

When I first started in this job I have. I was often teased for my lunches. They were often (and still are often) vegetarian, and they often incorporate strange (to some) ingredients that my co-workers (Hi Candypants) would often mock. Nowadays, I hear these guys (yeah, you heard me, I said CANDYPANTS!) eat veggie friendly food on a regular basis.

I’m not a foodie, or a food snob. I’m not a vegetarian. I just like to try things. And usually I try them more than once. And sometimes, like with the veggie bacon and soy milk, it’s better the second time. Look, I don’t recommend veggie bacon if you like real bacon. I don’t recommend veggie bacon if you like turkey bacon. It’s not bacon. It’s something else. But it works for me.

Wait…what was my point here? I don’t remember. I just know if I mention veggie bacon people will appear from nowhere to tell me what a terrible thing it is.

Meanwhile, I’ve been watching movies. So far:

Shoot ‘em Up-Liked it. Crazy, over the top violent and v.v. entertaining.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day-Liked it. Surprisingly dark. But filled with pretty boys. Oh, yeah...and good acting.
Strictly Sinatra-Not bad. Scottish gangster type flick.
Othello-Modern version w/Christopher Eccleston, Eamon Walker, Richard Coyle and Keeley Hawes. Liked it a lot. A very nice adaptation with brilliant acting. Highly recommended.
Meet the Robinsons-Kind of all over the place but in an entertaining way. I dunno, I wanted to dislike it because it was all over the place, but in the end, that’s part of the reason that I did like it. Nice art, some good jokes and I loved, loved, loved Goob.

Ok, look, if you don’t work in this office, the one where YOU had to RING in to get through the door, why would YOU, the person who does not work here, just let someone in? Jerk.

Sorry, had to get that one out of the system. I guess I’m feeling kind of ranty today…so here are some bits of my new pinup girls (not THOSE bits)...



As you were.

Rock.

There’s one final pinup for you coming after all this type-ity stuff. I’d be hard pressed to say which pinup was my favorite to draw but this one is my favorite joke (if you don’t know why it’s funny, don’t worry, it won’t matter anyway) but this is also the pinup that went through the most revisions. She started out just as kind of rock chick and eventually became a kind of rockin’ Uhura. Mostly I just wanted to have something that said “Rock out with your Spock out.” And now I do. So here she is before and as you can see, no hands, one sock, no shoes. She’s a bit of an urchin here. But I still like her with the pink hair and all and I suspect she’ll make a return appearance…somewhere…sometime.



As for now, it’s all Christmas cards all the time as I gear up for a holiday craft fair. Oh, there are some Hanukkah cards too. And Chanukkah…and Hannukah. Whatever. All of them. I like to cover all my Jewish spelling bases. Oh, and hopefully, before that, there will be a few Halloween cards in the store. So, you know keep an eye out for that.

Meanwhile…you will never guess who I met last weekend…give up? I MET THE AMBITOUS HAMSTER. How cool is that? Well, very cool for me since I also work for her and this is the first time we have met face to face. We have emailed, IMed, texted, called and tweeted one another but this marks our first actual meeting. And it was grand. Hopefully she wasn’t too scared and will come back again sometime.

Sadly, there were no cupcakes for the hamster meeting, although she remarked that it would have been nice, and it would have but I was at work. Even sadder? There were many cupcakes the very next day. So many that we weren’t even able to eat them all and there were cupcakes enough for the whole weekend. And you know what…yum. I hate to say I make great food because really, that’s all just a matter of taste, right? I mean, what I like and what my husband likes are markedly different, so I can’t really assume that…anyway…I made two kinds of cupcakes and I gotta say, I done good on both. I started with “Crimson Velveteen” vegan cupcakes. Now, I am not a fan of the red velvet variety of cupcake. It tends towards oilyness and it’s not really chocolatety and holy cow it uses a whole bottle of red food dye. Yeeesh. Even this “Crimson Velveteen” recipe calls for 2 TBS of red dye but I could only bring myself to use one and then promise that I would find a more natural solution next time (I’m thinking dried beets will do the trick). But this recipe, even with the shocking amount of dye…fabulous. It bakes up so light and fluffy and not at all oily and because it calls for some chocolate extract, it actually tastes of chocolate. It’s different from a chocolate cupcake in a good way, not in an oh god what did I just eat way.

But then I started to worry that some of the people I would be with wouldn’t cotton to a red velvet cupcake, but I knew that at least one of them likes coconut, so coconut it was. And they were damn fine too. And they got better the second day when the flavor had developed even more. So sorry Hamster, I’ll make sure you get some next time.

And the final pin-up in the geeky girls set:

Daemon.

What I’ve written about lately that I haven’t posted:
My favorite comics
Why Frederic Wetham could be more important to you than you know
My first (and last) scrapbooking experience
Tempeh Chickenless Wingz
How quiet my life is when my husband goes away (the phone rang 3 times in one week…that is all. Three times.)
What I’ve been reading, watching and doing lately.

But…um…yeah. Not really done with any of those yet. There were some lemon cupcakes a few weeks ago because I found some lemons in the office kitchen. Don’t know where they came from though. I’ve read some books. I…um…watched some new tv shows…

LOOK, a pinup!


And the pinup cards are now available HERE.

So are the cupcake cards.

And some new robot cards by Ambitious Hamster.


So…there you go.

Seduction.

It's the return of the sad lunch.

It wasn’t really a sad lunch, more like a weird lunch because it was all stuff I more or less wanted to eat, but not all together. But I was feeling particularly lazy and I didn’t want to walk to the store. I guess I should have. But because I didn’t it was peach soy yoghurt with a fresh peach mixed in and some hummus and pretzel thins. It doesn’t seem very balanced does it? But it’s got a fair amount of protein and fiber I think. It was a lot of creamy stuff though, but without any cream. Kind of like a baby food lunch.

Here’s the problem. The husband left town. Usually that means a week of vegetarian goodness over here. In fact, this time it was going to mean a week of premade, delivered fresh vegan goodness. I was gonna order my meals from a fresh food delivery service, just to see what it was like. But the menu for this week was…eh (OH! next week it looks really good! Tofu Chilaquiles and Korean Chapchae! Quinoa salad! With cranberries! Darn.) And I got sidetracked and that’s how I found myself in a crowded Whole Foods last night, running into comic-con friends and searching for an appealing soup for dinner (veggie) but I neglected to look for lunch. Ah well. Maybe I will make my own Tofu Chilaquiles for dinner.

Sorry, anyway…pin-up, because I really have nothing of interest to say.


This is the second in the set and she is called Seduction of Innocent. Now, there is kind of a joke here, which, if you are not a huge nerd, may just sweep on by you. That’s ok. It was aimed at the nerds.

In 1954, this guy Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist wrote a book titled Seduction of the Innocent, which postulated that comics were a cause of juvenile delinquency. To be fair, that’s a simplification of the whole thing, but all you need to know for this picture is that comics caused kids to do naughty things. There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff connected with both the book and with Wertham, who aside from some strange ideas on comics, was a pretty interesting guy. But the pin-up, not really meant to be any real social commentary, just a nekkid girl with comics.

What did cause a little buzz around this picture (and I mean little buzz, like three people’s worth) was the bruise on her leg. See, when I was drawing her, I was trying to go a little bit against the pin-up type. See the glasses? The sneakers? The comics? And most pin-up girls have flawless skin, right? Well, this one has a bruise…on her calf. Which some people saw as her knee. And then took to some unintended extremes. So…whatever. She’s a nerdy girl who loves the Batdude and Hellguy, what more do you need?

Zombie.

I’ve been meaning to show you one of my pin-ups for a while now. They were quite a treat and a revelation for me. I have always avoided drawing people because…well…they just never end up looking like people. Not to my satisfaction anyway. I sometimes will draw distorted cartoony children because hey, if their heads are too big, well who is gonna complain about that? But pin-ups are a whole other thing. And oddly, I kind of dreaded drawing them, even as I knew it was something I had wanted to do for some time now. So, here is “Dead Sexy” the first of the four pin-ups. I actually sold more prints of her than any of the others and one girl even bought one and came back the next day for another. She told me she had ended up giving hers away and wanted another. She also told me that she had shown it to a friend who was a pin-up artist who had commented that it was “demure” and not too gory or disturbing, which made me happy since that was exactly what I was going for.



In the end, I was very pleased with all the pin-ups and I discovered that I really, really enjoyed doing them. I am planning on another set of four girls and I think I am even going to try a few pin-up guys. Any requests?

Nerves.

Well, it’s almost here. That one thing that makes me both shudder in horror and squee with glee. Well, fine, a lot of things do that to me, but this one…you know…Comic-Con is right around the corner. I leave on Wednesday and I am more or less ready. More or less. Some new stuff to show off, some old favorites. It should be good. It should also be exhausting and nerve-wracking. It’s just one of those things.

At the moment I am experiencing the weariness that goes with Comic-Con. Stayed up a little too late last night to get one last thing done, woke up a little too early this morning due to the endless construction on the building across the way. I’ll be better tomorrow I am sure. But it’s not tomorrow that I am worried about.

Right now, aside from regular life worries, I am experie….

Here’s a strange aside. I just answered the phone and Sponge Bob Square Pants was on the other end. Well, voice actor that plays him was on the other end. Weird. He was very nice though.

Anyway, aside from regular life worries, I am a little nervous about presenting new art. You know that it’s hard enough for me to refer to what I do as art, but then showing it to people….ewwwwww. Makes me twitchy. And that’s kind of the point for me doing things like Comic-Con. Or having a blog. It’s a challenge to myself to step outside of my comfort zone. And…well…right now I’m not totally comfortable. But, for me, that’s kind of a part of the whole process. The nerves part.

So, in an attempt to kind of get it started, here is a little sampler of some of my newest art….my first attempt at pin-up girls…nerdy pin-up girls…for nerds. I hope you like them! Um, I am just now realizing that the nerdy part doesn’t always show through with just these little bits. They are all full figures, heads, feet and everything in between. And the titles kind of reveal what makes them nerdy, so clockwise, from top left…


Dead Sexy
Rock Out with your Spock Out
Seduction of the Innocent
Mailer Daemon

That should give you some clues. And maybe, when I get back from con, if they have been well received, I will show you a bit more.


Hmmm….you know…there is a serious shortage of pin-up boys in this world…maybe…nah…not yet.