While laundry goes unwashed, I have been keeping myself busy with other projects. Let's check in and see how productive I've been on my extracurricular activities.
1. The Creepy Canada Comic Book
This side project had its origins one dark and jittery night at the local café, as I sat drinking too much coffee and multi-tasking. The multiple tasks amounted to reading a blog post on Eerie Comics, and thinking about the latest ePub conversion I had done at my job. That was a book about the gory and groin-injury-heavy Chilcotin War, and suddenly inspiration struck. At university, the common complaint from all of my American friends was that Canadian history is boring.
Now, that is patently untrue. Canadian history is not boring. After all, we elected a man who conducted seances with his dead mother to lead the nation... twice (well, three times, depending on how you want to count 1926.) We produced the Black Donnellys. We have embraced a sport often leaves blood on the ice. And that sport, my friends, is figure skating.
There is a great store of exciting, blood-curdling tales to be told about this land, and what better way to tell them than in a format mimicking the horror comics of the late forties? I can't draw at all (screw you, depth of field! What have you done for me lately?), which is perfect, because once you get past EC Comics and into Charleston territory, the hired talent barely could either. And I'm taking a screenprinting class, where the point that it's almost impossible to get multiple colours to register perfectly is a repeated often. That's also something crappy horror comics of the day didn't worry about too much either.
I'm screenprinting the covers in color, turning the image into halftones first and then using a roughly four colour process system. The interior will just be photocopied from my black and white drawings. The cover rough is finished (see following) and the stories (The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the Chilcotin War and the Hamilton Torso Murder) have mostly been scripted. My version of the Crypt Keeper is an embittered history teacher, driven to homicidal lengths by the indifference of his teenaged students. I'll probably do about 50 of these for friends and family, so if you want a copy let me know. I can mail things.
2. Die Birdhaus
After many weeks, much frustration (I had to use a HANDSAW to cut the roof) and even more wood filler, my birdhouse is finished.
Apologies to Facebook friends who might have already seen this. I invested too much time on this project already to take another, slightly different photo.
And I didn't even manage to paint the thing correctly. I originally envisioned a green birdhouse with a red and white-striped roof, and dutifully painted on two coats of white paint. Then I went to put on the stripes with the same 1$ synthetic fibre brush I had used on the rest of the birdhouse, by this point a rather stiff and splayed affair. Furthermore, I decided to freehand the stripes instead of sketching them on with a pencil. Naturally, I ended up with bits of pink paint everywhere and no two stripes of similar width and straightness.
So I made the whole thing pink, adding white polka dots with a Q Tip. And still not one of the dots was of the same diameter. Well, that's life. The birds of Guelph should appreciate the effort. As for my next woodworking project? Well, apparently I'm going to be the workshop's shelf monkey!
