I got to play Cartoodle this week!!!!
Hi party people! I think I am slowly turning into a cursed Californian, by which I mean I got cold today at 66°F. In Missouri I would wear shorts down to 40° no problem… what is happening to me…
That’s right! This is a poll! A nifty feature substack (this platform) has that I haven’t used yet! Sure, you can only have five options, and each has a pretty small character limit, but they stick around forever and everyone can see them! So please participate! I think they will be fun and hopefully funny! Okay! That’s enough exclamation marks!
I’m not 100% sure exactly how these work, since at the moment the only substack I’ve read is my own (while I’m writing it). How long, exactly, is “forever?” Can you vote more than once? Twice? Thrice? Frice?
Okay, I’m not gonna lie, I am getting really excited writing these.
March Mania!
Okay so fun fact the US Marine Corps band does an event every year during March called March Mania where marches written by the composer John Phillips Sousa are put into a single-elimination bracket. Here’s the bracket from this year.
On top of already being extremely hilarious, they would send sheets with stickers of the circular logos to participating schools, which I still have on one of my water bottles. They also sent out Burger-King-looking paper crowns with the logos for jewels. Looking it up just now, I had completely forgotten that we were also encouraged to make brackets and predict the winners, just like in March Madness.
Anyway, I’m telling this story because one year during March Mania, our band director would play the marches of each week so we could make informed decisions about voting. One of these marches was the Right-Left March. Click the link to listen for yourself.
We universally agreed that Right-Left was probably the worst song in existence.
That week some of the kids discovered that March Mania was not limiting the number of votes per person in any given matchup.
Maybe you can guess what happened next.
Question: how many people would you expect to vote on average in any given contest between two marches written in the style of John Phillips Sousa? Most of the marches from this year have 2,000 to 16,000 votes, but I remember any march getting maybe 200 to 400 votes for either side. But thanks to the power of refreshing your browser all day and not paying attention in school the Right-Left March regularly trounced its opponents to the tune of over 10,000 weekly votes. Thank you, voter fraud.
Red Pen Era
Before I started drawing, I had heard that Van Gogh thought every color had a specific character and emotional quality. “What rubbish,” I thought!
Flash forward to today, and my favorite pen color by a landslide is the warm blue you’ll see toward the end of this section. It’s very calming to me, and I love the pleasing combination of blue and white you find in ceramics.
Red, on the other hand, to me screams, “DANGER! CORRECTIONS! ANGER! ALERT!” So finding myself in the possession of a red pen, I’m trying to use it up in the hopes of refilling it with blue ink later getting to know red as a color and how I might use it.
Maybe sometime in the future I’ll label what I was thinking about in each of the pockets of text on a picture.
Recently I’ve seen a lot of professional animators’ self-published sketchbooks. These usually consist of character sketches, doodles, whatever. But the interesting thread is that usually the individual elements are given room to breathe, to enjoy space of their own.
You might have noticed that I… don’t do that.
In my perpetual quest to push the bounds of reality, I’ve been asking myself, “What if all of these disparate elements (as above: sheep characters, grocery list, creature types, Avery sleeping with one eye open) know about and interact with each other?”
In other words: what does the radical integration of text and image look like?
The red pen in this image above was from a fun country group at our local farmer’s market. I had a lot of fun with this one!
I’ve also started going to a going to a local board game meetup a couple of miles from out apartment! It’s been super fun so far, and we played Cartoodle this week! If this is your first time reading Enter the Liquefold, Cartoodle is a board/roleplaying game I’ve been working on for the past year or so. The very short version is: it’s a revision of all of the things I didn’t like about playing Dungeons & Dragons (or at least, the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons). As I continue to work on and revise the final look of Cartoodle, it’s starting to actually become real in my mind as a thing that will be out in the world. Very cool! It’s cool to believe in yourself.
I do feel a little bad not going into as much depth as I could with each image, because all of these pages really have their own story. I hope you’ve been enjoying seeing my drawings as I figure out how to balance writing this blog with also working on my other projects (and learning how to be an adult). Tune in next time for more entertaining and exciting stuff! Thanks for reading!
BONUS MANGA
