JPG Clog

Back In DC For The Summer

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:54:00 +0000

I'm sorry about the lack of updating on both this blog and Feldman. I was an idiot and messed my computer up and now I'm sending it in to my insurance company for repairs.

Anyway, I'm in DC now, the area I'm originally from. I'll be working in-house at the SEIU in Dupont and I'm pretty excited about that. They do amazing stuff. They're huge, they're unusually leftist even for a labor union, and even though the labor movement is dying, the SEIU isn't going anywhere because the professions it represents are very difficult to outsource. If they gave me a permanent offer to be a lawyer there, that would be amazing.

Anyway, I'll update Feldman soon. I haven't really started promoting it yet, but my main source of views for it so far has been Reddit. Thanks, Reddit!

You should like Feldman on Facebook.

Feldman the Cat

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Tue, 07 May 2013 05:47:00 +0000

Hi, guys! I'm taking a law school exam right now, but I thought I'd take a break to link you to my webcomic, Feldman the Cat. http://feldmanthecat.com/ is the main address, but http://FTheCat.com also works.

There are only about five cartoons up, but you should probably bookmark and Facebook-like the site. I mean, the cartoon on the front page right now is a pretty clever commentary about butts. I hope the metaphors aren't too hard for you to parse!

Here, have an image of me digesting on the floor today. I do this a lot at my friend Kelley's apartment. I was seriously so full.

Kaiser Wilhen

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 17:30:00 +0000

Here, have a chicken character I drew. It actually began as a fake clip art drawing I made for my part of an Animal Law group presentation about the conditions of egg-laying hens and what different labels for eggs mean.

My portion of the project was to compare the U.S.'s minimum standards for the treatment of hens and requirements for labels to the E.U.'s. The gist is that the E.U. is ahead of us in every conceivable way in this area.

If you're eating eggs in the E.U., the hens are treated pretty well. If you're eating eggs in the United States, there's around a 90% chance that they're treated horribly, even if it has some promising label on it like "American Human Society certified". It's depressing. There are only a couple of labels in the United States that actually indicate that the hens are being treated well.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty rough. My sleeping has been bad and exams are coming up. I've also been working on side projects and doing things for friends of mine.

Last Saturday I woke up around 7AM to get to the courthouse down in the Loop so I could be my classmate's defendant in a mock trial for his Intro to Trial Advocacy class. After that ended around 1 and we got lunch, then I walked with him to SAIC's MFA art show, which was humongous. Then I went to a fundraiser theater production being held by Northwestern's med school, then went to a bar nearby with some friends after that, then went to another bar on Kinsey where several classmates were having a big birthday party, then went to the end of a pop country concert at a bar up at North and Clybourn, then ran into some LLM students I know and hung out with them until about six. I think I slept pretty late on Sunday, but I don't remember right now.

10,000

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:50:00 +0000

Boston has been very brave lately. I mean, sure the net danger of being around Boston during the lockdown was still much lower than that of being somewhere in Chicago or the Bronx, but it looked scary! And it totally increased my net faith in humanity that a horrible thing was committed by people and some people who were running on the day of the bombing kept running somewhere and not stealing wallets and shoes from people.

Now we need to do 10,000 Boston bombings in the Muslim world to make sure this never happens in the U.S. again!

Hey so I know this might seem like an absurd opinion to have if you live in the developed world, but life isn't wonderful, it's horrible, and the Boston bombings lowered my faith in humanity because they reminded me of how we do these same horrible things to people every day in the Muslim world and people here really don't seem to think or care that we do.

Why Are People So Surprised That Some People In Boston Were Helpful

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:02:00 +0000

I hate Facebook after a tragedy. People "lose faith" and "regain faith" in humanity way too easily. Genocide isn't enough for you? You have to lose your faith every time you read an article about people being bad on Buzzfeed and then regain it every time you read an article about people being nice? And why are people so amazed that there are actually people trying to be helpful after an attack? Did you expect 100% of the people there to just go "Wow, something bad happened and people are hurt while I'm fine, I'd better not be helpful!"

The attack on Boston sucked and it sucked a particular amount and we shouldn't try to pretend that we saw how wonderful humanity was yesterday or something. Just shut up and move on and keep trying to improve the human condition and minimizing the harm to people that we're responsible for.

Stupid Mallard Fillmore And Ethnic Profiling/I Turned 25 Today

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 06:31:00 +0000

If I responded to every political cartoon I disagreed with, that would be too much. But occasionally I want to.

Here's today stupid Mallard Fillmore. A lot of people find it really offensive when conservatives advocate for [ethnic] profiling, as Bruce Tinsley subtly does in this cartoon:

I'm not really very offended by Republicans who defend mild racial/demographic profiling. Because if you don't actually think about it, hearing about agents pulling Grandma or a small child to the side to search them sounds ridiculous. And if you're a dumb-ish white person, it might make sense to you in your comfortable never-suspected-of-anything bubble that airport security should as a practical matter be more inclined to investigate the people who are demographically most likely to be airplane terrorists, and they shouldn't waste time on old ladies and children. And they're right that the TSA only has limited resources for doing the more intense searches that we're talking about here, and every old lady searched means roughly one fewer swarthy bearded guy searched.

But not only is this opinion and practice discriminatory and against what our society's values should be, it's also stupid and not actually practical. And when we suffer the first high-profile attack on a plane committed by terrorists who deliberately used a pale child or old woman to smuggle a device onto a plane, these conservative racial profiling defenders will finally shut the fuck up about it and pretend they never had that opinion. It's unfortunate that it might have to come to that.

Also I turned 25 today. I feel about 25 so I guess it's good that those things match up.

Updates Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 05:05:00 +0000

I'm a bum. Updates about all the bum stuff I'm doing during and around my spring break to come soon. Sorry for that.

I did file my first provisional patent for Moodstring about 10 days ago though! I'm taking Patent Prosecution (which means filing patents and getting the patent office to accept them and making sure the patents will protect you as much as possible in the future) at school and even though I may be the only student in the class who isn't actually eligible be a patent prosecution lawyer because I didn't major in a hard science, I took it because I wanted to be able to file my own patents, and it's already come in handy. I'm the only person whom I can legally file patents for, but that's enough.

Offensiveness

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 19:20:00 +0000

A guy is saying to stop being offended and people are reading this and liking it. But he's not saying it right. He's doing it from the privileged conservative white Christian male perspective.

I love how he says "textbooks are being rewritten". White-people-are-awesome textbooks shouldn't get to be the default just because it's annoying when people are offended by things. I understand what this article is saying, and I partially agree with it, but it also feeds into the conservative invention of "political correctness" that they use to buttress bigoted policies and views.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

And he talks about comedians being afraid to say their material, presumably referring mainly to Seth MacFarlane and his stupid sexist jokes at the Oscars. But there are different kinds of offensive from comedians. Lenny Bruce's kind of offensive was wonderful because it made valid criticisms about society, and it made people uncomfortable in a way that forced them to think about how they see things. George Carlin was like this too. Seth MacFarlane's jokes were offensive because they were destructive and harmful, and they weren't funny enough to make up for it. I think I like Seth MacFarlane overall, but he stunk at the Oscars.

I Make Pun, Reddit Likes Pun

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:24:00 +0000

I'm not a big Reddit user at all. But for a little while I really liked a subreddit called Fifth World Problems because it gave me an opportunity to think of and post puns. It's not primarily meant for wordplay; it's supposed to be a forum for complaining about problems that don't make sense in a world with our known rules of physics.

Anyway, I made this pun and people liked it (screenshot was edited to fit on this blog):

Re-percussions, see? Heh heh.

That was by far my most popular pun on there, and it's rare for a post to get that many upvotes on such a small subreddit. I still have yet to get on the actual front page of Reddit though.

My two week spring break starts at the end of this week and I'm not going anywhere, so if you want to meet me for some reason, hit me up and we can get booze or something when I'm not at Horseshoe Casino down in Indiana trying to make money at the poker tables.

Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:17:00 +0000

With a classmate and her friend at Northwestern Law's Barrister's Ball ("Law Prom") last Saturday. Managed to achieve my goal of fitting into my old made-to-measure Thick As Thieves suit.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Law school gets busy even for me sometimes. Among other things, I'm working on a roughly 35 page economics paper about adapting current microlending models into a self-sustaining for-profit model for fostering collectivism in the developing world.

Moodstring: Though I did manage to get a working alpha version of the it up, I took the site down because I decided that I just don't have the time or knowledge to program it by myself in a reasonable time frame. I'm looking for a web developer to partner up with, or for funding I can use to hire a developer. I've been working on meeting the right people in Chicago, and making people sign non-disclosure agreements I've written before I pitch Moodstring to them. I'll try to keep working on my knowledge of Ruby on Rails in the meantime.

Webcomic: That should be up fairly soon. I've been figuring out WordPress still, and by "figuring out" I mean hacking the HTML and CSS and PHP to death until the stupid website lets me script things how I want. I'm surprised that it was actually easier for me to strip and rescript a tumblr (Santorum-2012.com) than this WordPress site. But this was the better move to make for a webcomic. I'm using ComicPress.

You're Being An Idiot If You Think Joe Salazar Is Going To Be Our Todd Akin

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 02:32:00 +0000

Conservatives have a superficial understanding of bigotry and women's issues. This whole situation with Joe Salazar reminds me of a time when in third grade, I said somebody was a sexist, and a girl in my class told me she didn't like me anymore because I said "sex".

Republicans are latching onto something said by a Democratic state representative who was arguing for banning concealed carry on a college campus. They're making it out to be insensitive about rape, and anti-woman or something. They're trying to elevate it to the level of Todd Akin's scandal, which I became a minor part of. Here's what Salazar said:

"It's why we have call boxes. It's why we have safe zones. That's why we have the whistles, because you just don't know who you're going to be shooting at. And you don't know if you feel like you're going to be raped, or if you feel like someone's been following you around or if you feel like you're in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop... pop a round at somebody."

Whether the feared crime is rape or murder, he wants fewer innocent black men like Trayvon Martin, and innocent people in general, getting shot by scared people with guns. You have to distort his comments a lot before you get something like pundits are claiming he said.

It's disheartening how little control he has over how people are interpreting and distorting his statement, even with the truth on his side. So now he's had to go into damage control mode in order to try to keep the non-scandal from being elevated even more, and to avoid being dumped by the Democratic Party.

Here's something conservative media and politicians don't seem to understand: Acknowledging that we live in a society where rape is a real, everyday fear for women and that walking around at night and passing by a man when nobody else is around is scary, is not bigotry.

Conservatives can't even begin to grasp these issues, so any time a non-minority says something that acknowledges how bigoted our society is, they immediately try to call him racist for it. They think the "race card" is a real thing that explains every call of racism from progressives, and that conservatives are just evening things out by playing the race card back against the Democrats.

When Joe Biden says something awkward that is essentially about how our racist country is only willing to accept a black candidate who fits their narrow criteria, Republicans immediately start saying "See?! He's racist too!! He called Obama clean and articulate!" They don't care what he actually meant. They have a superficial understanding of the idea that those words are inappropriate to use to describe black people, and they have no interest in going beyond that in the discussion of racism.

And finally, Salazar's just a state senator. In the past week I've read maybe eight stories about various conservative state senators who've said absurd things about abortion and other issues. Todd Akin was a U.S. congressman who was a major party's nominee for Senate. If we really gave a shit what state legislators said, all these stories about absurd bills being proposed by crazy Republican state legislators wouldn't just be small blips on politicalwire.com. Just today there was a story about a Republican introducing a bill that would make it a felony for a legislator to introduce any kind of gun control bill.

I'm Launching A Webcomic Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:34:00 +0000

Not yet though. But it'll be good, hopefully. Some cartoons will be more like editorial cartoons, and some will be more like normal, good webcomics (e,g. PBF or ALILBTDII as opposed to Penny Arcade or PVP Online), in format and content.

It should be up soon.

Predictive Cartoon Edit After State Of The Union Address

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 04:08:00 +0000

After Obama repeatedly used the line "They deserve a vote," referring to victims and families of victims of shootings in the United States, I think some editorial cartoons like the one above will come out. I edited some stupid cartoon about abortion to make it. I love how they always draw dead fetuses as fully formed babies or even toddlers, rather than either fetuses or adults.

To be clear, the "vote" in question for these fetuses would be a vote on abortion legality, meaning that ruling in Roe v. Wade should be struck down so that abortion bans can be legislated.

Norman Amaker Retreat

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:19:00 +0000

I just got back from Loyola Chicago Law School's Norman Amaker Public Interest Law and Social Justice Retreat upstate in Woodstock, IL. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the speakers and made many friends. I wish I could make all of my classmates go because it's almost impossible to listen to these speakers talking about poor people, ethnic minorities, LGTBQ people, tenants, etc. being completely screwed in the United States without wanting to do something about it, or at least be angry.

And to my liberal friends who think they're above current events and domestic day-to-day politics because they only want to have fun philosophizing about "big picture" issues, I wish I could make them listen to Joel Rogers talk about how important state and local laws and government are for changing the country, and how conservatives, with their organization ALEC, have made excellent use of it to destroy the progressive movement in the United States. Here's one thing he wrote that overlaps with his presentation to us, about his new answer to ALEC called ALICE.

I would talk about how amazing Norman Amaker was, but that would take up several more paragraphs. To be brief, he was the only non-white person in his classes at Amherst University and Columbia Law, he worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. and smuggled out the famous letter he wrote from jail in Alabama, and he worked as an NAACP lawyer doing amazing things there, among other accomplishments. He died when he was 65 in 2000 and I wish I could have met him and talked to him. He also really should have a Wikipedia entry, geez.

Anyway, I'll have more interesting things up here soon, including the launch of my webcomic on a separate site.

The Oceans Are Rising And The World's Poor Are Fucked. Happy Groundhog Day

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 08:16:00 +0000

But also, how about that Superbowl? I'm from Maryland, but I'm a Redskins fan, not a Ravens fan. But I've always really liked how similar the two coach brothers look.

More cartoons to come.

Update: Damn, on the day of the actual game, I really got into the Ravens. All the Maryland stuff still affected me. Plus I won some money. O'Malley 2016!

I Did It, Fewer People Are Applying To Law School

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:58:00 +0000

People have finally started listening to me, and law school applications are down 38% from the attending-in-fall-2010 cycle. Fall 2010 was the hardest cycle there has ever been, and it was actually my cycle--my scholarship was deferred a year. I feel validated! This post is braggy, but it's my blog, it's not like it's Facebook. If I can't talk about difficult things that I've done on my own private blog, then I guess the only acceptable places to do it are on book jacket covers and news site bio pages.

This post is so smug that I actually drew this cartoon for it.

I was absurdly lucky to get a full scholarship at a T14 (Top 14, one of the many, many designations for various tiers of law schools that we legal people use because we're terrible and empty prestige whores) that year. I also graduated from college during one of the worst years to do that, in 2010. The Year of the Dragon got screwed.

I'm also very lucky to have grown up as a white male with an economically comfortable living situation. If I had been born under the circumstances of 80% of the world, or about half of America, I wouldn't be in such a fortunate position today. But there was also the Tourette's, which poisons every moment of my life. I lost a significant chunk of time while taking the LSAT, where the time limit is brutal, just to deal with my Tourette's. Anyway, the point is that I really don't have sympathy for other white males who were raised in middle class households who falsely complain about things being stacked against them. If you're finding it harder to get into a certain school than you would have in your father's generation because now people who aren't white men are being given a modest portion of the pie now, then stop complaining and just do a better job.

The smug Mallard Fillmore I drew up there is actually for the parody I'm working on though, mentioned in the post before this one.

Mallard Fillmore

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 09:43:00 +0000

My line work and inking technique is getting better, steadier. This cell phone picture version is bigger than the actual drawing, but I wanted to zoom in.

I'm getting my ducks in order for a single strip parody I want to make of Mallard Fillmore by Bruce Tinsley called "Swan F. Kennedy by Goose Tinsley". I chose that name over several other options, like Andrew Quackson, Swan Quincy Adams, Quackery Taylor... There's more to my idea for this strip than just the name though, obviously.

The duck is saying "I'M GAY" because that's one of my most cathartic tics, from the Tourette's.

Preston Blair And His Amazing Animation Book

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:44:00 +0000

I recently got Preston Blair's seminal book on animation. John K, creator of Ren and Stimpy, swears by this book. Here's a post on his blog about how important this book was to him as a kid. So I bought it for myself and it's been pretty freaking useful.

However, while I do want to learn to animate, I mainly plan only to draw static cartoons. Blair's instructions about character construction are still extremely useful for this, but now I have to teach myself how to reconcile these techniques with my current drawing style, combining them to make characters that are specifically suited for what I want to accomplish with my cartoons.

Blair's techniques are meant for groups of animators to be able to reproduce characters from various angles with very little room for error. This means that the characters are fairly simple, and follow certain formulas that make them relatively easy to reproduce over and over again, at a fast pace.

That's why cartooning for animation and cartooning for comics are two different disciplines. They certainly overlap a lot, and people can switch between the two, but when you're drawing a static character, you don't need such simplicity.

Some of the features I like drawing most in my cartoons wouldn't work for animation, but I want to hold onto them. So now I have to absorb all the knowledge of this book, reading it multiple times and doing the practice drawings it prescribes until I have it all down. This is a big deal for me because I practice drawing pretty infrequently, and even on the days when I do practice, I don't do it for long. After I've done this, I'll make sure the book influences and improves my drawing technique without completely supplanting it.

More Editorial Cartoon Edits

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:16:00 +0000

That first cartoon actually isn't an edit. It's an original cartoon by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Ramirez. He's one of the worst cartoonists out there. His drawings of backgrounds and vehicles are solid, but his drawings of people are horrible. He doesn't know how to draw them. But he's also just one of the most infuriating cartoonists out there. He lies constantly, in ways that can easily be disproved. He paraphrases people's quotes in ways that completely change their statements, for example. He even spells people's names wrong, or assigns incorrect first names to them.

He's also absolutely obsessed with "DEBT". In cartoon after cartoon he draws some large object and labels it DEBT to the point where it's just a running gag now. He clearly thinks about it all the time. It's like he has Tourette syndrome (like I do) and writing that word on inappropriate things gives him some relief. The smoke from Pearl Harbor is DEBT? Does that mean that it will eventually dissolve into the sky and isn't worth worrying about? He never thinks these metaphors through.

He's too stupid to even write something that makes more sense for that cartoon like "A DEBT THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY."

Here's another amazing cartoon by him. Fuck you, Ramirez. He was even more egregious with his cartoons on the Benghazi consulate attack. He's a horrible person.

Anyway, here's my edit of his 9/11 cartoon, making fun of his DEBT fixation and the awful puns he tries to make:

And here's a parody I actually made, attempting to imitate his style, including the sometimes excessive crosshatching and his loopy handwriting. It ended up looking more like a Tom Toles cartoon. It also scanned very badly. I might try to scan and color it again. It looked better in person, I swear. The squiggliness of the line work is not an accident though, to be clear.

Here's the most recent cartoon by Tom Toles to compare, even though this wasn't supposed to be a Toles parody originally:

He tends to label things with big squiggly white letters like I did in that cartoon as well. His cartoons are very squiggly.

Finally, cartoonist Milt Priggee posted one of my edits on his blog. Though he didn't give me credit for it, which is kind of weird. I don't feel like bothering him about it though.

I don't want to post the original on this blog because of its content. Edit: Okay, here's the original. Not safe for work because of a giant offensive word.

Schaudenfreude Cake For Inauguration Day

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:35:00 +0000

Happy Re-Inauguration Day! Here is a schadenfreude cake from my food blog Santorum-2012.com. I got the sticker from, I believe, CPAC 2011. It might have been from the 2010 Values Voter Summit though.

Best if accompanied by a bottle of Republican tears.

Political Cartooning Lessons: How To Draw A Democrat

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 03:10:00 +0000

Miss Iowa Doesn't Let Things That Are In Her Way Get In Her Way

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 06:05:00 +0000

This year's Miss Iowa, Mariah Cary, has Tourette syndrome like I do. Milder than mine, but still, I'm sure it has made her life much harder. I don't have anything against her; good on her for doing something notable. And the worthless things she's saying are just what's expected of you when you're a beauty pageant contestant, so that's fine too.

But an email I got from the Tourette Syndrome Association about her annoyed me.

One line particularly: "Diagnosed at eight, Mariah has never let TS get in her way."

I don't get it when I read a stupid inspiring story about a successful person with Tourette syndrome "not letting it get in his/her way." Tourette syndrome is basically designed to get in the way, that's pretty much all it does. If it isn't getting in somebody's way, then I don't understand what it's doing to them.

The email also quotes her saying:

"I am living proof that there is nothing that can stop you from achieving your goals but yourself. Tourette Syndrome does not make you 'different.' Everyone is different and unique and that is what makes life interesting. I tell myself every day, I cannot change how God made me and I would never want to. Take what you are given and make the very best of it."

The first sentence isn't Tourette syndrome–specific. and is just standard garbage that people need to stop saying to our kids so much. Do you understand how many narcissistic self-important monsters I have to deal with who are around my age because we are all told this as kids? Please, please stop.

The other sentences are similar to other things I've heard. No, you're wrong. Tourette's makes you different. Nothing isolates me more from the rest of humanity than Tourette syndrome does. I had to completely rewire my brain, getting rid of all knee-jerk reactions and instincts, just to be able to function at an inferior-but-passable level in society. I rarely encounter other people with Tourette's, and when I do, it's usually less severe or manifests itself very differently.

Unlike Miss Iowa, if I could get rid of Tourette's, I would with no hesitation. There's no pretending something is a blessing when it causes you pain and interrupts whatever you're doing every three seconds or so.

The last sentence in that quote is the only one I agree with. This is what we should be telling children with Tourette syndrome:

Tourette's sucks, so you need to work around it. It will get in your way, constantly, from the time it fully manifests in fifth grade to your final living moment, barring a remission after adolescence or the discovery of a completely effective treatment. You can still be successful, but it will be harder than if you didn't have Tourette's. It's not something to be ashamed of, but it is a bad thing and your focus should be on learning how to suppress and control it so that you can live a life that looks normal to others and is for the most part enjoyable.

1/13/13 Update: She ended up the fourth runner-up in last night's Miss America pageant. That's pretty good! While I criticized some of her rhetoric in this article, I'm still proud of her, and I do of course think it's good for children with Tourette's when notable people have the condition and are open about it.

Also I love her stance on marijuana. She doesn't think it should be used for anything other than recreational or medical use! Good for her for slipping that in there. Judging by the blog coverage of the contest, it was one of last night's more notable moments. It's so subversive and subtle!

Americans Can't Use Intrade Anymore And This Really Bums Me Out

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:04:00 +0000

I'm angry and sad. I really liked Intrade. I made a couple thousand in profit from Obama's victory. In retrospect, I should have taken out student loans and bet more like $10,000 on his winning. Because of my full scholarship and some money I've saved up and some money from dead and living relatives, I haven't taken out a dollar in loans yet, so I could have spared it.

Unfortunately, I won't get another chance like that, unless I get a non-American friend to manage an account for me. But even then, I don't know how many options related to American elections the site will still have now that all American accounts are closed. The next Senate election in Massachusetts might have been fun to bet on.

Inking And Coloring Cartoons

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 01:48:00 +0000

If you've been following this clog, you know that I started teaching myself how to draw about three years ago, and then almost one year ago I started teaching myself how to draw cartoons. Before January 2012, I had never really attempted to draw cartoons, but I think I took to it pretty quickly. I started drawing countless cats and quadrupi and other animals, weirding out my classmates at Northwestern Law in the process.

Unfortunately, because of law school, Moodstring, hip hop production, and countless other half-assed projects, I've generally only been able to dedicate a limited, sporadic amount of time to getting better at cartooning. Maybe about once a month I would spend an hour or two drawing in my apartment when I felt the urge to do it. I also drew on the whiteboards and blackboards at my school whenever I got the chance.

But after I finished my exams for this semester, I decided to put a good chunk of time into developing my line work, inking method, and coloring. Basically I wanted my cartoons to look as legitimate as the political cartoons and popular comics I see online and in the papers. So first I draw the sketches in pencil, then I ink them in with a brush pen (which is essentially a paint brush with ink constantly flowing into it), and draw over my smaller lines and shading with a normal pen, then I scan the drawing and color it in.

Choo Choo Whale

This whale with the smokey blowhole, named Choo Choo Whale, was the result of my first try. There's a lot of brush scraping evident in the ink; lines where the brush went a little dry or made the wrong shape or something because I moved it too fast or had it at the wrong angle. After this post I'll experiment with vectorizing my images if I'm not happy with the line work.

Here's a guy I drew. Not a particular guy, just a guy in my head. He kind of looks like my friend Andrew. For some reason even though I spent a couple years on-and-off teaching myself figure drawing, and then a year on-and-off teaching myself cartooning, I never bothered to learn to draw human faces. Oh well!

Anyway, the linework of the hair in this drawing, specifically the sides of the hair on the far right and far left rather than the hairline, is what I'm really going for. I want that smooth, professional style with natural-looking variations, as I see in hand-drawn comics. If I can do with all my drawings what I did with the hair in this drawing, then I'll have succeeded at more-or-less perfecting my inking.

That's another drawing. In my next cartooning post, I might experiment with vectorizing some of these in Adobe Illustrator and seeing if that makes them look smoother, cleaner, more appealing, and more professional, or if I prefer to have all the hand-drawn touches kept in the pictures.

Men And Cats

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Peter Green) — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:20:00 +0000

I'm Jewish and not really doing anything right now, but Merry Christmas. I don't think I've ever posted about this: Here's an entry about me on Men and Cats from two and a half years ago. My friend Hannah submitted me.

Man, I was so much smaller back then, a measly 190 pounds at six feet. Now I'm 215 and I like being this dense and heavy. I just wish my old suits would fit.

Me hunched over petting a projects cat on Staten Island.

New post about inking and coloring cartoons to come soon.