La Nina Comix

I'm on the Phone

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 23:21:00 +0000

At the moment, I am probably wrestling with pasta dough and wondering where the hell two dozen people are supposed to SIT in my wee home as I serve them a dish that was basically designed to promote laundry detergent, so the first blog post of the rest of my life will not be remotely birthday-related. Instead, I want to show you more results from my ongoing field work on pay phone non-obsolescence:

As I mentioned recently, I most of my trip to Vienna placing fake phone calls

Budapest, too.

I made some outraged faces

got a little blurry

(which is unfortunate because that was easily the fanciest phonebooth I have ever seen!)

got faded

which I know you saw already but it is significant because later that night I placed a fake phone call from something that isn't even a phone booth

I got pranked

sat in water

got frustrated

there are still a few phone boots here in the US though

so you haven't seen the last of me.

Thanks to Shannon who took all but one of these photos, and thank to Cakes for the last one!

Party at my place

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:13:00 +0000

It's my birthday tomorrow and if you are in the neighborhood please stop in for some piping hot, made-entirely-from-scratch-yes-even-the-pasta lasagna, with three red disasters:

one red disaster for each decade that has slipped away during my quest to create the perfect tomato sauce. Let's find out together whether thirty years of effort tastes breathtakingly good or strangely bitter and under-seasoned.

Call for the address; I'm still not doing emails. See you on the other side,

Nina

Strong bias

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:05:00 +0000

In my knitting, that is. Towards the diagonals.

A spring colored shawl

in eye-of-partridge stitch. From a free pattern available here. The stitch breaks up the colors of the yarn with strong diagonal lines, and in the right lights, you can see the dimensional, honeycomb-like quality of the stitch as well. I think fabrics with defined foregrounds and backgrounds are completely charming, and in fact, I might be slightly obsessed with these little waffle stitches in particular. I'm not nearly done with the shawl and I've already started another pattern made of little squishy cells:

I forgot how much I love knitting! Deadlines tend to suck all the fun out of my knitting, and it occurs to me that I should remember that the next time I catch myself thinking something like "The graphic novel WILL be finished by XX/XX/20XX." This one will be a sweater, which I hope to have finished by my birthday later this month, but...well, deadlines. Even if it isn't finished, I plan to give it to myself as a totally unsurprising birthday present. After all, it is National Knit a Sweater Month, and I am totally confident this will turn out more successfully than all those novels I started. Started with total confidence, of course. And deadlines.

Happy Halloween!

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:43:00 +0000

Dead Caesar:

Tasty Snacks:

Always on the Move

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 18:19:00 +0000

I know I SAID I would blog again but then...

I went to Vienna! And it was great. Besides peeing in the fanciest public toilets, I had a very enlightening conversation about cuckoo clocks

I saw some old friends

and made some new ones.

I saw more art than you can shake a stick at

And of course, I placed lots and lots of fake phone calls.

I did not (and still have not) respond to most of my emails. Apologies if you are high and dry waiting for a missive from me; those are the breaks. In other news, I am unemployed as of tomorrow (OMGWTFK2TOG) so maybe you will get that email soon, after all.

All News is Good News

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:58:00 +0000

1. I'm still not smoking.

2. I took a much-needed trip to the desert last weekend. I love the desert. Why oh why am I living in Portland then?

Oh right, I like drinking water, too.

3. La Nina Comix and Geminica will be tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium this weekend. It's free to attend and there will be a ton of great artists and independent publications there for your enjoyment. I'll have 2 new zines, preview issues of Life With the Underdog #3, and back issues of most of my comics. Come by and say hi!

Real posts coming soon :)

It's on.

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:09:00 +0000

I have lovely, tolerant friends. So I feel that I should take note that many of my friends, typically very tolerant of my crass and obnoxious tendencies, were a bit hurt by my recent anti-coffee comic.

I suspect that many of them felt a bit personally attacked because they, like most of the western world, habitually consume coffee with pleasure and gusto. It was not my intention to diminish their pleasure in coffee consumption at all--in fact, the comic was supposed to be more about customer behavior, and how said sad, petty behaviors appear from the other side of the counter. Just one of the many subtleties that one risks losing when one spends a total of 45 minutes on her comics homework.

Ok, maybe there was one part of the comic that came across as strongly anti-coffee, but I know only one person who habitually consumed 9 shots of espresso in one workday (or, for that matter, uttered the odious phrase, "three shots, one cup" to a barista) so that part of the comic was a potshot at that specific customer, and I had to leave it in because he really annoyed me. You know what was the most annoying thing about him? I worked afternoons at this cafe, and it was always really slow. I was the only staff member on and I would typically get 4 customers in a 4-hour shift, that's how slow the place was. So I would close up the shop to take my smoke breaks, and if a customer came while I was smoking, I would put out the cigarette and let them in and make their drink. AFTER thoroughly washing my hands. This one customer who I am talking about would come in every afternoon for his third triple espresso of the day, and if he came while I was smoking, he would invariably make some sneering remark like,

"Those things give you cancer, you know."

AS. IF.

And I mean, who does this guy think he is??? You're coming in here for an indulgent and, frankly, overpriced beverage with the sole purpose of getting wired and you're going to get all high and mighty with me about MY vice?

Yeah, it used to make me mad.

Well, the responses from my normally loving and tolerant friends (and I do believe that your responses still come from a place of love, friends) have brought me right back to that guy because the number one response has been "How can you criticize caffeine dependency when you YOURSELF are a SMOKER?"

There's a little bit wrong with that logic but you know what? FINE. I love smoking, but I REALLY love building myself up by ridiculing the weaknesses of others, and you can pry THAT out of my cold-dead hands.

It has been 39 days since my last cigarette and it is only getting easier. Watch out, coffee drinkers. Open Season has begun.

(Also, the tyrrany of flipper hands/weird claws/paddle hands/mittens over my drawings is over. Long live anatomically correct/not cold-dead hands!)

A Month of Comics, part I fell off the wagon so freaking hard

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:59:00 +0000

But not before I made a couple more comics:

I did this one in ink without any planning of pencilling which was really fun and yes I am now aware that I should have a dictionary on hand the next time I attempt something like this.

I would tell you what inspired it but I've made a promise to myself to only be nice about outside stuff in hopes that I will then get in the habit of being nice about inside stuff and my current funk will lift sooner.

See what I mean?

Yes it Counts, or, A Month of Comics, part 18

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:00:00 +0000

ring, ring.

Paul: Hello?

Nina: Hi Paul! Wow, we haven't talked in soooo long! I have so much to tell you!!

Nina: And then I was all, no YOUR comics lack technical facility! And then he was all--

Nina: Oh no BIRDS WTF!!!

fin.

A Month of Comics, Part 17

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Sun, 23 May 2010 19:34:00 +0000

How on earth am I ever going to top Bear Santa?

A Month of Comics, parts 14, 15, and 16

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Even though it's only two pages, it took me a ton of time and a lot of (very clumsy) Photoshopping to wrap this one up. So it COUNTS, damn it. Cakes and Paul and I went camping in Yosemite last weekend, did I mention it? So obviously this comic is inspired by the true facts that we saw there.

Bears are a lot less scary when you believe in Bear Santa! Just like old men and regular Santa.

A Month of Comics, Part 13

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

My Date with Davis, and, A Month of Comics, part 12

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:30:00 +0000

Dear Blog,

I knew I would need a vacation after Stumptown Comics fest, so I went down to Davis the next weekend to visit my old friend Paul. Paul appeared in my mini, L'Avventura Italia, under the quasi-pseudonym "Smalls." For those of you who haven't read the comic, he's this guy:

Paul lives right now in Davis, California, a city that could easily be mistaken for a giant college (it kind of is) and which by all appearances sprang out of the earth fully formed sometime in the last 50 years, rather than having grown and evolved in the way cities "ought" to.

It's creepy.

But it has it's benefits, too..."planned" cities tend to have really convenient parks and green spaces, and since Davis is the agricultural nexus of central California, there's a lot of awesome flora, and the subsequent fauna.

Like ducklings!

This may not seem exciting to you but having grown up with pigeons and rats as the native "wildlife" I get really excited when I see animals out and about that are not completely gross.

We went over to Napa county and hiked up Mount St. Helena (not to be confused with Mount St, HelenS, more famous volcanic mountain (to me)) which offered some spectacular views of the admittedly very attractive region.

The trail was easy but towards the end, we got tired of all the switchbacks and decided to take a "shortcut" that ended up getting us marooned in a forest of pebbles and scrubby little trees. Fun! And, Pretty!

We fought our way though the bramble until we admitted that there was no way we were ever going to make it back to the trail by going UP (we thought there was a switchback when in fact the trail simply went...straight) and slid down the sandy face on our butts. But first, left a signal for anyone else dumb, I mean genius enough to do what we did.

So if you saw our rock-and-flower cairn on Mt St. Helena in the last few weeks...Hi! Allow me and Paul to take credit for that.

I am a total Iron man when it comes to exercise so after that big long hike, I still had some energy, which I worked off on the elliptical machine

And then Paul told me a story which inspired my part 12 of the month of comics.

Hail Gurglebaum,

La Nina

My Sordid Past, or A Month of Comics! Parts 9, 10 and 11

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

I"m really liking the square format of the comics I've been doing this month, so when I settled in to catch up the two days I missed last weekend, it never occurred to me to draw anything other than a square layout. A whole page of comic takes a long time, though, and nine panels later, I decided to go to bed, having failed to catch up again.

But today, as I was scanning the page, I realized that rather than draw one nine-panel comic, I had drawn 3 three-panel comic strips! So I declare myself caught up. Presenting, parts one through three of my sordid past, or things that I feel deeply guilty for having done. Fertile ground, this. Expect some more installments before the month is over, and probably for the rest of my life.

A Month of Comics, Part 8

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:01:00 +0000

I dropped the ball on the project this weekend--monitoring my senior cat while he recovers from oral surgery, hanging out with Cakes' mom who was visiting, and making the barest attempts to see my friends and thus maintain our relationships took priority and I fell behind on my comics. So I plan to catch up in the next few days, before Cakes and I fly the coop and take an ill-advised trip south for an impossibly short time. More on that next week!

Allow me to present: Another comics that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I intend to provide some context for it eventually, but for now I'll just admit that the whole thing was motivated by the desire to draw horn-rimmed glasses.

I pencilled in all the glasses frames and the lettering, but all the scenes in the frames were drawn freehand in ink without any planning.

I am Pretty Sure I'm the Only Person who Went to Both of These

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Stumptown Comics Fest:

CABA (Columbia Alpaca Breeders Association) Classic Halter and Fleece Show:

Comics fans: Totally adorable!

Alpacas: Also adorable!

Fellow Artists: Patrick and Pam, superstar classmates of mine who also helped run the table and keep me from freaking out:

(ok maybe I did cry a little but it was a scary and overwhelming experience!)

Fellow Alpaca Enthusiast: Dan of Inti's Gift Alpacas who let me "hug" Andretti

and also very patiently explained the ins and outs of raising fiber-bearing alpaca herds. and encouraged me to do so. I think I need some pasture first--but that just became a higher priority.

Oh and his wife knit him that vest.

Selected Stumptown Haul:

I've been trying to get back into reading comics--I definitely over-consumed for a while and had to take a step back. I was approaching comics the way I am used to approaching books--from an academic perspective. Which means "YOU MUST READ EVERYTHING,"and that meant I ended up reading a lot of "classic" comics that totally annoyed and bored me. So I quit doing it. And now I think, what if I only read comics and zines I enjoy? Novel idea, that.

CABA Haul:

I've been trying not to buy any yarn or fiber items this year--I definitely over-consumed for a while but whereas it will take 12 hours or less to read a really good comic, it takes me 80 hours or more to knit up a sweater's worth of yarn and I have a HUGE backlog of fiber to work through. I've been doing really well at curbing my spending. But here's the thing: I just spent a whole weekend (at Stumptown) sitting behind a table of things I and my friends made, trying not to feel insulted when people flipped through our efforts and didn't buy. So I didn't want to put the alpacas in the same position! They made some really nice fiber, I appreciate nice fiber, and they seemed pretty stressed out. It was literally the least I could do.

I already read the comics (all of them great, incidentally) and I have a plan for the fiber.

A Month of Comics, part 7

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Well, I haven't written a blog spot about my cats in a while.

So...that happened. I do still plan on having a summer vacation. The little victim is resting comfortably andI suspect that his slightly-protruding tongue may be a permanent side-effect of the surgery. Cute!

Edited to show the picture I got of Murray in his opium haze:

A Month of Comics, part 6

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Sat, 08 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

I promise I'll actually write something one of these days--at this point though, I am tickled (and admittedly quite surprised) to still be on the daily comics wagon.

I have a lot of fun projects on the go now, and just booked my table for the Portland Zine Symposium, so I have a deadline too! I promise to write a proper blog post again soon!

A Month of Comics, part 5

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Actually, no, the writing of my next piece is not going well, but thanks for asking.

A Month of Comics, part 4

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:58:00 +0000

Even if I am running low on ideas, this is turning out to be a pretty fun week!

Paul gave em another idea for a comic but it will involve some intense (by my standards!) drawing, so last night I made this instead. It allowed me to use a tracing paper transfer, since I wanted the "Girlfriends" to be as identical as possible and I'm not great at reproducing drawings freehand. So This comic also produced this neat little relic:

A Month of Comics, part 3

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:00:00 +0000

So...last night Cakes and I went to dinner with some friends, and we were all hanging around in their garden and saying things like "My, doesn't the sun set late up here in Oregon," (8:19pm yesterday and getting later at the rate of about 2 minutes per day!!!) and "Yes I believe I will have another cocktail," and then we get home and it's all 10:45 in the PM and it's a work night, and I drive to a whole nother state every morning for work and need sleep! and this is basically how I whined and tried to convince myself not to do my daily comic.

Procrastination FAIL:

The title was inspired by Mike's comic from a couple of days ago: "Cakes made tacos. Also, Cakes is a person."

A Month of Comics, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:32:00 +0000

A REAL TRUE STORY that happened while I was in Davis last weekend.

A Month of Comics, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:24:00 +0000

My intrepid friend Geminica somehow persuaded a few artists to commit to making daily comics for the month of May. Obviously, this is a scheme on her part to expose my hypocrisy through hipster journal comics...but I don't like being left out so I signed on anyway. Here's my first contribution: A comic that made Paul say "I don't get it."

I will point out that Paul is still new to backgammon.

I "Like" You, part I

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:45:00 +0000

I'm not actually ready to talk about stumptown yet. I'm still feeling a good bit overstimulated and cranky.

So instead I'm going to start posting pages from my latest mini, I "Like" You.

You can probably see where "this" is going.

I made this "mini" for a class assignment that I wanted to try something new with, and I really enjoyed both coming up with the page "titles" and drawing all of them. It was an easy and fun project and I think I've gone on and on before about how easy + fun = bigtime art success.

Or maybe easy + fun = bigtime art failure. Unfortunately, one of my "friends" who stopped by my table this weekend made a dismissive comment about this comic which really hurt my "feelings."

"Editing," people. Not every idea we have is worth broadcasting.

But maybe both of my ideas are wrong, maybe easy + fun = nothing and there is no formula for bigtime art success because there will always be someone whose "opinion" is like so much amorphous smelly goo.

Or maybe easy + fun is a bad formula for precisely the reason that it feels like a good formula; that is, because it leaves no reaction time for the internal censoring mechanism and you accidentally blow "Draven's" cover and the next time you're walking through Washington Square Park with your friends he comes up behind you and threatens to bust a "cap" in your "ass."

You know when easy + fun is NOT a recipe for success either? It is when it is used as a recipe for BREAKFAST. I had puffy "cheese" snacks for breakfast today. To be fair while that was easy, it was not very fun. Maybe if I eat them out of my polka-dot breakfast bowl tomorrow they won't leave me in such a crummy mood.

Ok, I guess I can see how this entry breaks the continuity of the piece a little bit but since I feel all defensive, I'll try to "explain" why I included this page in the comic:
1. Lasers are COOL but I have next to no idea what they actually ARE. Therefore, I can't like them, I can only "like" them.
2. The comic is about things I want to draw and drawing "lasers" was fun, even if they turned out looking more like the pneumatic tubes from the movie "Brazil" than actual lasers.
3. It's the last page of the piece and there's plenty of "precedent" in the "art world" for the last piece in a series to be a little inconsistent and grandiose. Like ending a fashion show with the wedding gown.

Thus ends our little show. Please join us again tomorrow when I panic because I meant to spread these pages over 3 days worth of posts.

Life with the Underdog #3 Previews, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (La Nina) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:00:00 +0000

The answer to yesterday's fake-ass trivia question: Jello.

So, Stumptown Comics Fest is tomorrow and Sunday. I'll be tabling there with the rest of my IPRC cohort-I'll be at the table after 2 pm both days. Back issues of my comics will be for sale as well as our totally awesome anthology, From Stella with Love. Please come visit?

Some more previews from the new piece--I talked myself out yesterday so I'll make you wait a while before I explain how making a comic is like knitting a sweater (and THAT will probably take a long time for me to express, since I like making comics as well as knitting sweaters very much!)

Here's a strip from page 2. I'm actually really enjoying looking at these tiny little strips out of context--seeing how their meanings change or are obscured when they stand alone. I really like this one as a standalone strip. Makes me think I should do a reductive comic one day--write and draw the whole thing but then delete two-thirds of each page and see what kind of story the remnants tell.

Oh hello! If not for the precedent-less pronoun in that first panel, this could be mistaken for a standalone strip any time. Also? I think I'm a little obsessed with swimming. I mean, I know this story takes place on the beach but I really like swimming, you know? And I'm thinking it's been waaaay too long since I went.

This is another old panel--I loved working on it but I also had to be reminded that it would take way longer to draw and ink panels with 4 human figures in them than one. At least all that life-drawing practice has started to pay off! I love the big reveal in the center panel, too. Don is a huge character in this story and I'm not going to lie, probably deserves his own series. I feel that way about a lot of my secondary characters, like Farren from LWUD #2--she started out based on a real friend of mine but in my imagination has grown into this amazing larger-than-life figure who falls victim to crazy adventures constantly. Point being--more comics since these characters have way more life left in them. Which is easier said then done. I'll cover that during my comics-are-like-a-sweater discussion tomorrow too.

Here's a little decorative/subliminal storytelling element from page 3. It might be hard to tell out of context (well for all I know it might be hard to tell IN context too!) but they are supposed to be little TV screens. These 2 rows of tiny panels appear above and below one long central panel in which the character is flipping between channels on the TV. I love it when stories present ambient media in their own contexts, the more heavy-handed the better. Think "Your Money or Your Life," from Time Bandits, or "I'd buy that for a dollar" from Robocop. (Obviously there's a lot going on in both of those films that's a bit out of my league for now, too.) I wanted to set a tone for the media that this particular character (Smug) absorbs. I procrastinated on drawing them for a long time, having not planned the specifics of the images at all in my thumbnails, but once I got started I found them to be really REALLY fun, and definitely want to try more devices like this in the later pages of this story.

In Summary, Please visit at Stumptown? Or at least, assure me that you wish you could?