The Art of Skepticism: Scott Ewen

How do you visualize time?

2009-12-31T13:22:00.001-05:00

I was listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe recently and they started discussing how each of them visualize the days of the week, the months of the year, the decades, etc. Some of them had distinct mental visualizations, some had no visualization, but I've had this picture in my head of how time progresses since I was a kid. I don't know when I came up with it, but this is how I've always pictured time.

As you can see, each decade marches in a straight line and then (sometimes) moves off in a different direction with the next decade. I have no idea what decades prior to 1940 look like, because I've never had to really visualize it. Any time I think about dates prior to 1940 it's fuzzy and vague. But I do know that time goes forward (generally) up and to the left. Going back in time, you're travelling down and to the right. If I were to plot a timeline of the last 1000 years, 2010 would be in the top-left corner of the paper and 1010 would be in the lower right. In between would be a zig-zaggy line.

I actually don't quite visualize it just like this... it's more a 3-dimensional representation in my head, and I'm standing in whatever year it is at the time. I can look around and see the other years in front of or behind me. Right now I'm standing in 2009, so if I look ahead of me I can see the next decade, 2010-2019. Looking to my left shows 2008, and 2007 behind it, etc.

My Christmas Present for Cristina

2009-12-24T21:47:00.001-05:00

My fiancée Cristina and I this year decided to give each other lists of reasons why we love each other. I decided to go one better and make a book with visual aids. Let's take a look!

Some pictures of her reading the list:

And check it out, here's her list to me!

The Sundays page 1 inks

2009-12-15T01:45:00.000-05:00

The Sundays

2009-12-11T23:15:00.002-05:00

Kevin L. Sheath and I are launching a webcomic we've been working on for a while, called The Sundays. This is something independent of Zuda, we're doing our own website and putting up one page a week.

This is something we previously pitched to Image and a few other indie publishers a couple years ago, but they all passed on it. The art could stand to be improved (and Kevin wanted to rewrite it), so we're redoing it from scratch. Here's page one in progress.

I'm looking at January 3, 2010 as a launch date.

Lightshade page 7 step by step!

2009-12-03T12:36:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a class right now in Fundamentals of Speech, and I have a demonstration speech due today. In other words, I have to demonstrate to a group of people how to do something. I'm going to be demonstrating how to make a comic book page from start to finish, so I started on page 7 about a week ago and scanned in my progress along the way.

Below is the text of the speech and visual aids. It's written for people who aren't familiar with comics to understand, so forgive me if it's too elementary for you.

How many people here have ever read a comic book, or a comic strip in a newspaper or on the Internet? Even if you haven’t ever laid eyes on a comic, I’m sure everyone here has seen a movie based on a comic, such as X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Superman, The Dark Knight, Watchmen, or other non-superhero movies based on comics such as Ghost World, The Road to Perdition, V For Vendetta, A History of Violence, Constantine, or From Hell. Many people think that drawing comics is an easy job, or even that it’s done by computers. I can assure that any time you see a comic page, not only was nearly every line on the paper meticulously drawn by a human, or several humans, it took many hours to finish. Today I’m going to demonstrate how to make a comic page from start to finish.

The comics industry is based on an assembly line method of production. Since most comics are produced on a monthly basis, it’s nearly impossible for one person to complete 24 pages of story himself in four weeks. Terry Moore wrote and drew Strangers in Paradise for many years on a regular schedule, but he released 16 pages every six weeks, and I’m sure even that was tough to finish on time. Instead, a team of people work on most comic books, each one tackling a specific aspect of the art. One person writes the script, another person draws the comic in pencil, another person goes over the art in ink, another person puts in the dialogue balloons, and yet another person applies the color. I’m in the position of currently working on a project where I’m handling everything but the script myself, which is the process I’m going to be showing you today. I only had a week to do this, so unfortunately I didn’t have time to letter or color the page I’m going to show you, but I have a few examples here of what comic art looks like when it’s lettered and colored, which you’re free to look at.

First let me show you my desk, which is angled about 20 degrees so that it’s parallel to my face when I’m drawing. On the right you can see my T-square, which I use to rule panel borders. It butts up against the side of the desk and ensures that all the panel borders are exactly 90 degrees. Here are the tools I use typically: a wooden pencil for roughs, a blue lead holder for finished pencils, a click eraser, an electric eraser, a large eraser, and two different sized ink brushes. I have all these tools with me today if you’d like to see them.

The first step here is the script, which I got from the writer. I printed it out and started drawing small compositional thumbnails so I could see how I wanted to lay out the panels. You can see there were a couple panels I had to try from different angles because it didn’t work the way it said in the script. Panel three said it needed to show the demons from behind, with the house in the background, but I thought it would be better to have the shot from inside the window, since this is the first time in the story we see the demons in their adult form. I also changed the panel in which the male character lights his cigarette from panel two to the first panel, because it worked better that way.

Next we have the rough, which is drawn on a separate sheet of paper and incorporates the best shots from my thumbnails. This is what I’m going to be working from on the final page. Now I move to the board the comic is going to be drawn on, which is called Bristol board. It’s thick like card stock and smooth, which takes ink well without bleeding or spreading. This first step is basically putting in the forms and making sure the composition works before I start doing the finished pencils. Now we can look through the progress of the page in the next three steps before the finish pencils. From start to finish, the pencils take about four hours or so.

Next I start inking the page, which means I take an ink brush and start going over the pencils with black india ink. For lines that need to be straight, I use a thin marker with black ink called a Micron, and a ruler. Again, we can go through the next few steps in the process, which takes about four hours as well. Because of the dimensions that Zuda Comics requires, which is half the size of a normal comic page, I can fit two pages on a standard board. If I were doing a normal comic page you can double the amount of time it takes to do these steps. As I said, I didn’t have time to finish the letters and colors for this page, but letters take about an hour or two and colors can take about three to four hours. All told, a single page for Zuda can take anywhere from 12 to 14 hours to finish. A full comic page takes double that amount of time.

So that’s how you take a comic page from script to finished and ready for print artwork. It’s a long and meticulous process, one that takes many years of training and practice to prepare for. I don’t expect anyone to leave here an expert on comic books, but the next time you see a comic strip or an issue of Spider-Man, I hope you can step back and appreciate the amount of hard work that went into it.

To Santa or Not To Santa

2009-12-02T00:07:00.000-05:00

There is a discussion between my lovely fiancee Cristina and I about whether or not we'll be telling our kids about Santa Claus. Cristina is of the opinion that it's part of childhood and that there'll be plenty of years for having their dreams crushed once they grow up. I, on the other hand, am wary of telling my kids something that isn't true, when they're still in the impressionable window of time where they believe anything I tell them.

At some point I told Cristina, if our kids ask about Santa I'll tell them "go ask your mother," but that's not a sustainable position. At some point I'm going to have to answer their questions. Obviously I have a few years before this becomes a problem, but it's something I'm going to have to decide at some point. Obviously I'm not going to tell my kids there's a god, but what of Santa? Nobody over the age of 8 believes in Santa anyway, right? So what's the harm of giving my kids a little childhood innocense and fantasy while they're still young enough to enjoy it?

When I was little, my parents told me about Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and God. I got to a certain age (maybe 6 or 7, who knows), and I remember asking them if Santa really existed. Even to my Santa-loving kiddie brain, the idea of a jolly old man who can fly around the world handing out billions of gifts over the course of a few hours rang false. My parents sat me down and told me I was right: there was no Santa, only Mom and Dad. This taught me a lesson, and it's a valuable lesson I've never forgotten: critical thinking and skepticism is something to be rewarded. Questioning authority is a GOOD thing.

At this point I used that same logic and started applying it to the other fanciful things children my age believed in. There is no Santa, hence there is no Tooth Fairy, hence there is no Easter Bunny, hence there is no God. As I got older that list lengthened. There are no ghosts. There are no monsters. There are no aliens (at least, none that are in contact with humans). There is no chi, there are no auras, there are no psychics, there is no alternative medicine.

But as the list lengthened of things that aren't, so did the list of things that are. Black holes are real, and cool! So are quantum mechanics, which make absolutely no sense to my mammal brain but are cool nonetheless. Evolution is real, and fascinating. There are planets around other stars. Some are Earth-sized. Some could have life. There are robots on Mars. There are cameras in orbit around Saturn. There are human footprints on the Moon.

I want that for my kids! I want them to love science as much as I do, and to be as fascinated by the real and the amazing as I am, and reject the fake. Why waste time with astrology when astronomy is so much cooler, and real? Why bother with intelligent design when evolution is infinitely more interesting to learn about, because it's actually true?

But... maybe they need to arrive at that on their own. Maybe they need to flex those critical thinking muscles like I did, and figure this stuff out on their own. And maybe I'm just overthinking all of this. Santa... no Santa..... sigh.

Go ask your mother.

Skepticism 2.0

2009-12-01T23:26:00.001-05:00

Today I was reading Skeptical Inquirer, which is a magazine I've never picked up before. I usually read Skeptic Magazine, but the articles in this one were great. This issue's feature was on Skepticism 2.0, which involves the newer generation of skeptics (i.e., people my age) using new technology such as blogging and podcasting to spread skepticism. Hey, that's what I'm trying to do! This is relevant to my interests, as the kids and lolcats are known to proclaim.

A few decades ago, the skepticism movement was confined to larger organizations such as CSICOP (the Center for Skeptical somesuch or whatever, don't make me look up what it stands for) and generally people got their skeptical news and info from mailing lists and newsletters, and magazines such as Skeptic. These days there's a huge and growing grassroots movement to spread skepticism, and younger people like myself are getting involved more and more as it becomes cheaper and easier to get info out there to the masses.

It's nice to be part of a movement.

Conspiracy!!

2009-11-21T14:58:00.003-05:00

I got a comment on my last blog, and one of the topics that came up was that of conspiracy theories. The commenter expressed that he was a believer in alternative medicine, and used a conspiracy theory as reasoning. The idea was that "Big Pharma" (meaning pharmaceutical companies) somehow suppress studies that show alternative medicine works. This is incredibly weak logic, but somehow this argument pops up a lot when talking to alternative medicine believers. However, the conspiracy theory argument is worthless when debating anything. Why? Let's discuss, shall we?

First of all, the conspiracy theory is a Hail Mary pass. I'm not a football guy, but I've heard this analogy used before in regard to other things, and it works here. A Hail Mary pass is a move made in desperation; when it appears that you're going to lose the game and you have nothing left to lose, a Hail Mary pass has very little chance of succeeding, but you might as well try. When someone brings up a conspiracy theory in a debate, it's like saying "I have no evidence to back up my position, so I will now proceed to make some shit up and hope you buy it."

Which is not to say they're LYING, necessarily, I think most conspiracy theorists believe in what they're saying, it's just that they have no logical reason to believe it. Look, I get it. I understand people like to root for the underdog, and they like to feel like they have access to knowledge that other people don't, or are being kept from. I think it's a big reason why people believe in alternative medicine, they want to feel like they've figured out how to cheaply and naturally keep themselves healthy when everyone else is paying exorbitant prices to the evil pharmaceutical corporations that want to keep them sick and keep them buying medicine. The trouble is, it's all bullshit.

How do I know? Because if any conspiracy theory had any OUNCE of credibility to it, it would be MAJOR MAJOR news. Every single newspaper and media outlet across the globe would be talking about it. And whoever uncovered it would win the Pulitzer prize, the Nobel prize, book deals, etc. And I'm talking about not just the Big Pharma conspiracy, but about a number of bullshit theories. Take your pick: UFOs have been coming to Earth for decades, but the government keeps them under wraps; 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration; John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the government... a lot of these have to do with the government now that I think about it.

So the FDA, or "Big Pharma" (how I hate that term), or whoever, suppresses data proving that alternative medicine works? Let's examine this for a minute. Science is not something that exists only in America, funded solely by the American government or American corporations. It's EVERYWHERE. Scientists all over the world, in every country, perform tests every single day. Whether they're under the employ of giant corporations, or universities, or the government, or even if they're just students or amateur scientists, every single scientist has one goal in mind: revolutionizing their field. It's how you get awards, it's how you get published, it's how you become remembered after you die. We remember Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and Galileo Galilei because they revolutionized science, not because they maintained the status quo. There IS no status quo in science, and scientists all over the world are trying every day to overturn previously accepted scientific theories.

The fact is, if a SINGLE credible study was published, anywhere in the world, that supported alternative medicine, it would be MASSIVE worldwide news. It would appear in every scientific journal, every newspaper, it would be HUGE. And if alternative medicine worked, there would be these kinds of studies published EVERY DAY.

No government can suppress this stuff. No corporation can do it, no single organization or entity can suppress real science. It just can't be done, especially not in the modern world of the Internet and 24-hour news stations. The Catholic church tried for centuries to suppress science, but it still got out. That's how we know the Earth revolves around the sun. That's how we know Evolution is a fact. That's how we know the Earth is 4.5 billion years instead of 6,000. Real science cannot be suppressed for long.

So remember next time someone tells you a conspiracy theory: it's a Hail Mary pass. They got nothin'.

Opinion vs. Fact

2009-11-20T20:09:00.002-05:00

A few months ago, I was at my mom's house when somehow the topic of discussion got on Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccination nonsense. If you've been living on Mars for the last few years, the story in a nutshell is that some doctor found a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, until it was discovered that he faked his data and there never was any link between the two. Numerous testing done since his initial study report no link between vaccinations and autism, yet despite this certain members of the media went nuts and started spreading the idea that the two were somehow causally linked, resulting in frightened parents refusing to vaccinate their children, which in turn resulted in the rise of mumps and measles and other completely preventable diseases, and even deaths.

One of the biggest opponents of vaccines in America these days is Playboy centerfold Jenny McCarthy, who maintains that her son developed autism as a result of vaccinations, but that she cured his autism by giving him a wheat and dairy-free diet.

As unbelievable as her story is, the more unbelievable thing is that a lot of people are buying it.

But that's not what I'm going to talk about here. I was at my mom's house and Jenny came up in conversation. I mentioned she was anti-vaccination, and my mom didn't know what I was talking about. I gave her the quick run-down, and she said something that blew my mind. She said "well, honey, everyone's entitled to their opinion."

I love my mom with all my heart, but I couldn't believe something like that could be said by an otherwise intelligent adult. I said something like "yeah, but not when they're wrong," and dropped the subject, but it's taken me a little pondering to figure out exactly why she's wrong. Surely everyone IS entitled to their opinion, right? And I'm pro-freedom; I'm totally in favor of everyone's right to believe every bit of insanity they want to believe in. So why CAN'T Jenny McCarthy believe what she wants?

Here's why. Because there's a difference between fact and opinion. Jenny McCarthy saying that her child came down with autism after getting a vaccination is not an opinion. It's a statement of fact; only it's not a true fact, it's provably wrong.

Opinions are one thing, facts are totally another. If I say I believe "Abbey Road" is the best Beatles album, that's my opinion and I'm entitled to it. Someone else can make a very good case for why they believe "Sgt. Pepper" is a more cohesive album, but it's not going to change my opinion about "Abbey Road" if that's the album I personally prefer.

But if I said that the world is 6,000 years old? That's a statement of fact, and it's demonstrably false. I'm entitled to believe the world is 6,000 years old, but everyone else is completely entitled to tell me that I'm wrong, and should do so.

Jenny McCarthy's son did not get autism from a vaccine. Alternative medicine does not work. Intelligent design is not a viable alternative to the theory of evolution. These are not opinions, they are statements of fact. Let's stop allowing people to spout bullshit and treat them like it's their opinion that they're entitled to.

Proselytizing for science

2009-11-20T19:30:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to get into blogging a bit more, which is why I've been writing so many blogs recently. The reason why is that I've been considering starting a podcast, but without any experience doing it (other than being on Sidetracked a handful of times), it's a little intimidating to just start doing it. So I've decided to start blogging for a bit, try to organize my thoughts, and see if there's anyone out there that might be interested in listening to what I have to say.

Most of these blog entries will be about random thoughts that occur to me, and I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about science and skeptical topics. I'll probably do some blogging about comics and video games as well, and probably The Beatles, since these are things that I spend a lot of time thinking about as well, but I'm actively trying to get the word out about skepticism a bit more. I've decided to be a proselytizer for science.

That's a bit of a misnomer, really. Proselytizing involves trying to convert someone to a religion, and science is the furthest thing from a religion you can have. Religion is based on faith in what cannot be proven (but which can be disproven, oddly enough), but science is based on evidence, facts, and truth. Not believing in science is literally the same as not believing in reality. Which describes a lot of religions, actually. Spreading science and truth is NOT proselytizing, it's educating. It's like calling a math teacher a "proselytizer for algebra."

So what do I mean when I say I'm going to be proselytizing for science? Isn't proselytizing bad? Oddly enough, it's not. Despite the fact that I disagree with Christians on a fundamental level, I can't argue with the fact that they are trying to get the word out about their faith. If I believed in Jesus and truly believed that people who didn't believe in him were going to Hell, I'd be out there trying to convert nonbelievers too. But I don't believe in Jesus, or Allah, or Zeus, or any other supernatural being. I believe in science, and I believe that rejecting science is not only bad on a personal level, it's bad for humanity.

There are small but extremely vocal segments of the population that are actively anti-science, both on the left and the right side of the political spectrum. These people are fucking it up big time for everyone else, and need to be stopped. Fundamentalist Christians who want to include their religious dogma in science classes mascarading as "intelligent design" need to be stopped. Jenny McCarthy, spreading misinformation about vaccines and directly causing the rate of measles and mumps to rise (and causing children to die) because of her bullshit, needs to be stopped. Muslim men that force their wives and daughters by threat of violence to cover their faces and bodies in public need to be stopped. "Psychics" that take advantage of grieving survivors need to be stopped. Alternative medicine practitioners and chiropractics that peddle bullshit and snake oil on an unsuspecting public need to be stopped.

In the past I've rolled my eyes at these people and kept my mouth shut out of respect, but these kinds of people don't deserve respect. I have no respect for someone who tries to take advantage of people by telling them herbs will cure their cancer, or telling them they can talk to their dead loved ones, or telling them there's a god in the sky who will send them to Hell unless they give 10% of their paycheck to the church. These people are loud, they are forceful, and to the unskeptical observer, they are BELIEVABLE. Skeptics have to be just as loud and just as prominent. We HAVE to get the word out there, or the bullshit is just going to spread. The world will get more spiritual, more religious, and science (and humanity as a result) will suffer.

So I'm starting small. I'm going to start blogging and I'm not holding anything back. From now on I'm a warrior on the side of truth. Maybe if this works out I'll start a podcast. Maybe I'll move on from there to books and magazine articles. Maybe someday I'll be giving speeches at TAM or other skeptical conferences. Or... maybe none of that will happen and I'll get tired of this in a month. We'll see.

My iPod playlist as a metaphor for evolution

2009-11-20T19:28:00.001-05:00

I've talked about my awesome iPod playlist in great detail before, so I won't bore you with the details again, but in a nutshell I have a playlist on my iPod that I listen to while driving and while working. It is a smart playlist, which means it updates itself, and when I listen to a number of songs from it and then sync my iPod again, iTunes removes those songs I've listened to and replaces them with new songs at the end of the list. All the songs are rated, so 5-star songs show up more often and 3-star songs show up infrequently. I posted about this on a board that both I and Kevin Sheath (writer of Lightshade and The Sundays) post on, and he pointed out that the playlist is based on "performance, feedback, revision" and is a metaphor for natural selection.

I had never thought of it that way before, but it works. Essentially, natural selection is the guiding force (or one of the major guiding forces) behind the theory of evolution. Every generation, random mutations in DNA cause tiny changes in offspring; it might be a slightly longer neck in a giraffe or slightly sharper eyes in an eagle. But if the mutation causes the organism to survive better in its environment (to get more food than others of its species or to live longer), it has a higher statistical probability of passing on its genes to the next generation; in other words, havin' sex and makin' babies. Over the course of many many generations (ie., millions of years for a mammal or perhaps several decades for bacteria and other single-celled organisms), individual species can undergo so many changes that they no longer closely resemble their distant ancestors, and become classified as a completely different species. This is evolution, which means "change over time."

When I started using my playlist about a year ago, most of the songs that showed up in it were completely random, because I didn't have a lot of songs rated. Over the course of months, songs that I loved (ie., 5-star songs) started having a higher chance of showing up in the playlist than those I didn't like very much (ie., 3-star songs). And songs I hated altogether, such as 1-star tracks, had zero chance of showing up in the playlist. The playlist got better and more enjoyable for me to listen to, because the ratio of songs I liked to songs I didn't like became higher and higher.

This is natural selection, or more accurately, artificial selection (selection of genes by human rather than nature, such as selective breeding in dogs or food crops). Genes (songs) that are better adapted to their environment (more likely to be pleasing to my ear), are more likely to procreate (show up again in my playlist on a frequent basis), and the structure of the species (my playlist) changes over time. The playlist is very different than it was a year ago, when songs I didn't like very much showed up often. Over time I rated these songs poorly or deleted them from my iTunes library outright, and the chance that they'd come back dropped dramatically. Songs I like started showing up more and more, and songs I love started showing up very frequently.

Science is all around us.

EDIT: Kevin informs me this idea is touched on briefly by rapper Baba Brinkman on his song "Unity of Common Descent," from his album "The Rap Guide to Evolution." You can listen to it streaming here.

What I'm Reading: God Is Not Great, John Lennon, etc.

2009-11-20T19:25:00.002-05:00

When I was young I read constantly, but in recent years the amount of books I read has dropped off dramatically. However, recently I've started getting back into reading and I'm rediscovering why I enjoyed it so much back then. Nowadays, though, I'm starting to get into reading more non-fiction, as I would read mostly science fiction when I was younger. Here's what I've been reading recently.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.
I bought this book on a whim because I had $10 in Borders points, and Cristina was interested in reading it. I'm about a third of the way through now, and it really is a fascinating book about the kind of damage that religion does to humanity, both on an intellectual level (keeping people from learning the truth about the way the world works) and on a physical level (torturing and killing nonbelievers, genital mutilation [and I'm counting circumcision in this], the Vatican opposing safe sex, etc.). However, the title of the book kind of turns me off and is a big reason why I haven't read it up to this point. Despite being an out-of-the-closet atheist for close to twenty years, I don't consider myself anti-religion and don't consider religion to be inherently bad. It's the nutjobs that give it a bad name for everybody else; the anti-intellectuals that try to keep evolution out of school classes, the bigots that try to exclude gays from participating in marriage, the fundamentalists that fly planes into buildings... the list goes on and on. But this is not most believers, and I would never advocate taking away anyone's right to believe whatever they want to believe, no matter how much I disagree with them or how wrong they are. I just feel that religion should not get a free pass. When a priest molests a boy, he should go to jail. When a rabbi removes an infant's foreskin with his teeth and gives him genital herpes in the process, he needs to go to jail. When a Christian Scientist denies medicine to her child because she believes that prayer is the only thing you need to get better, she needs to go to jail. Religious freedom does not apply when you're actively harming children in the process.

John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman
I haven't gotten too far in this book yet... I was reading it before I got "God is Not Great" but I started reading GiNG one day because I didn't have the John Lennon book with me and I became so fascinated with GiNG that the John Lennon book got pushed aside. But John Lennon: The Life is a massive 800-page biography of the rock legend that covers his entire life, from birth to death. So far I've gotten up to his pre-adolescence, but I'm sure I'll enjoy the book immensely once I get into the Beatles era. I also heard that a Paul McCartney biography was just published, so I might pick that one up next. Just don't ask me to read a Ringo Starr biography.

Death From the Skies!: The Science Behind the End of the World by Philip Plait, PhD
Phil Plait (aka The Bad Astronomer) is one of my favorite science bloggers, who writes mainly about astronomy but in such a way that laypeople like myself can understand, and really comes across as being excited and inspired by the cosmos. I share a bit of that excitement about outer space, so I love reading his stuff. Last year he came out with a book called Death From the Skies, which is a book about all the nasty stuff out there in space that can kill us on Earth. Stuff like asteroids and meteors, black holes, solar flares, gamma ray bursts, and even the death of the sun and the end of the universe show up in the book, and Plait explains them clearly and effectively for laypeople to understand (although I'm still trying to wrap my head around black holes and quantum mechanics). He also talks about what it would be like for people on Earth to experience, say, an asteroid collision or a supernova, or what it would be like to fall into a black hole. Forget disaster porn like "2012," this book actually has real science in it.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
This is the best book on the subject of evolution I've ever read (although admittedly I haven't read many). It's mind-boggling that a century and a half after Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, there are still people that don't believe it's true, or believe that it's "just a theory," despite 150 years of solid evidence that has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution happened, is happening, and will continue to happen until the end of life on Earth. The Greatest Show on Earth displays all the evidence for how we know evolution is a fact, and Dawkins writes for laypeople in this book. For instance, I never understood how carbon dating worked, but now I do thanks to this book. He goes into the fossil record, DNA analysis, continental drift, selective breeding, and all the other undeniable ways we have of knowing that evolution is a fact. Despite Dawkins' reputation as a militant atheist, this book is not about religion, and he only touches on the subject a handful of times. Richard Dawkins is first and foremost an evolutionary biologist, and this book is about evolution. If you don't understand the theory, or don't understand how we know it's real, or even don't believe in evolution at all, READ THIS BOOK.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane - SPOILER FREE
I was interested in reading this book ever since watching the trailer for the upcoming Martin Scorsese adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The story involves two FBI agents (DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) who come to an island housing a mental institution to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, an inmate who apparently "evaporated right through the walls." We soon learn DiCaprio's character Teddy Daniels had ulterior motives for being there, as he's looking for the arsonist who set his apartment building on fire years earlier, killing Teddy's wife in the process. He has reason to believe the arsonist is being kept on the island, although the officials deny it. The first three-quarters of the book are fantastic, as I devoured the book over the course of a couple days. The mystery is set up in a way that I had to keep turning the pages to find out what was going on, but it unfortunately ends in an extremely cliched and predictable way. It's so predictable, in fact, that when I saw the trailer with my fiancee Cristina, she guessed the ending before the trailer was even over. I hoped while reading the book that this was not actually the ending, but alas.

Gettin' married

2009-10-05T13:16:00.000-04:00

I have an announcement.

I was going to do a guest spot on Sidetracked to announce this, but because of unforeseen circumstances that came up this week, I won't have any time to record. My Anchorbird page might be a day or two late as well.

Anyhoo, my announcement is this. Friday was my two-year anniversary with my girlfriend Cristina. For my anniversary present, she gave me a really nice new set of headphones.

For her present, I gave her a diamond ring and asked her to marry me. She said yes!

Lightshade page 3 for Zuda

2009-09-26T21:41:00.001-04:00

Doin' a Zuda submission. Here's page 3:

Anchorbird page 54

2009-09-19T14:37:00.000-04:00

This is my latest page for Anchorbird, the collaborative webcomic I serve as editor for and also contribute to. It's my sixth page, but the 54th page overall. My next page will be #64, which is the final page of the first issue. Exciting!

Here it is without letters and with. Click on the version without letters to enlarge:

More pictures of Cristina and me; Hello Kitty

2009-09-11T19:25:00.002-04:00

Here we are at her uncle's wedding earlier this summer.

And also, a page out of a Hello Kitty coloring book I colored for a draw-off at Penciljack:

Anchorbird page 43

2009-09-05T21:57:00.002-04:00

My 5th page of Anchorbird and the 43rd page overall. Read 'em all at http://anchorbird.blogspot.com

Doing a site redesign

2009-08-25T23:25:00.001-04:00

This is a temporary look, but I'm redesigning the site so it'll be like this for the moment.

Page 3 of Lightshade

2009-08-24T15:43:00.003-04:00

Here's the third page of Lightshade, for Zuda. You can follow the progress of this page in my sketch blog on Penciljack.

Strip Jam: Rufus

2009-08-24T10:42:00.002-04:00

The 193rd panel of the Never-Ending Strip Jam:

Harry Potter vs Voldemort

2009-08-21T13:41:00.001-04:00

For PUMMEL on Penciljack:

Lightshade page 3 for Zuda

2009-08-20T14:08:00.000-04:00

Third page of pencils for the Zuda submission by me and Kevin L. Sheath.

New strip jam panel

2009-08-11T18:11:00.004-04:00

This is my 25th (I think) panel for the Never-ending Strip Jam, and the 187th panel overall.

Lightshade page 2 for Zuda

2009-08-09T22:02:00.003-04:00

Here's the second page of the Zuda submission Kevin L. Sheath and I are hard at work on:

Wolverine sketch

2009-08-05T21:37:00.001-04:00

Selling original art (published)

2009-08-05T15:31:00.005-04:00

I'm selling the original artwork for Robot: 2047, which was published in last year's Fat Chunk anthology by Slave Labor Graphics. Each page is 8" x 12.5" on 2-ply Bristol board, and I'm asking $10 for individual pages or $18 for both.

Robot:2047 page one inks by ~ScottEwen on deviant ART

Robot:2047 page two inks by ~ScottEwen on deviant ART

I'm also selling the pin-up I did for Dave Chisholm's Let's Go to Utah, published in the trade paperback edition. This is 11"x17", and I'm asking $15 for it.

Let's Go to Utah pinup by ~ScottEwen on deviant ART

If you'd like to buy any of these pieces, email me at ewen.scott@gmail.com

More Lightshade

2009-08-04T18:19:00.001-04:00

Inks for page two:

More on Lightshade

2009-08-03T20:30:00.003-04:00

I never put up the pencils and inks for the first page of Lightshade, so here they are:

And here are the pencils for page two:

Lightshade page 1 for Zuda

2009-08-01T17:08:00.001-04:00

This is the first of eight pages for a Zuda submission. It's a redo of a short story we did a couple years ago, but it never got finished.

The page can be seen in progress in my art blog here: http://www.penciljack.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1057183

And here's the original version of the page we did two years ago: http://scottewen.deviantart.com/art/Lightshade-pg-1-of-5-69673699

New panel in the strip jam

2009-07-28T20:34:00.002-04:00

This is my... I dunno, 24th panel, I think. It's the 179th panel overall in the Never-ending Strip Jam.

New Anchorbird page

2009-07-14T09:33:00.002-04:00

I've done a new page for the collaborative webcomic Anchorbird. This is going to be my last page for a while, but I plan on making a return to the story after I've finished some other projects I'm working on. I will be staying on the project as an editor, though.

Me and Cristina

2009-07-03T19:33:00.003-04:00

Me and my girlfriend went out for breakfast. Photographs courtesy of her brother Joe.

Two new Strip Jam panels

2009-06-22T22:09:00.003-04:00

Two new panels for the Never-Ending Strip Jam.

New Anchorbird page

2009-06-20T11:47:00.002-04:00

New Anchorbird page

2009-06-09T11:43:00.002-04:00

This is page six of my new webcomic, Anchorbird, which is a collaboration with a ton of other Kubert School students and Penciljack members. Read it here: http://anchorbird.blogspot.com.

iPod: Smart Playlists

2009-06-08T16:15:00.004-04:00

I have around 50 gigabytes of music, podcasts, comedy albums, audiobooks, and videos in my iTunes library, and my iPod is an 8 GB nano. This means I can't fit nearly my entire collection on my iPod. For a couple years I simply went through my albums and manually dragged the ones I liked over to my iPod, but with that system I got sick of hearing the same stuff over and over. I figured there had to be a way to make it seem as if I could take my entire library with me, without actually doing it. And there is, provided you listen to your iPod on "shuffle" a lot. This system works with any size iPod, and depending on how many podcasts you listen to you can probably use a 2 GB iPod and never have any need of a larger one. I have my iPod synced to several Smart Playlists, and when I plug it into my computer it deletes music I've listened to and puts new stuff on, automatically. Here's what I do:

First, this system is dependent upon rating your songs. If you don't rate your songs, this is not going to work. Until I figured this stuff out I didn't rate my songs, but now I do for every single one of them. A lot of them I did in bulk: I would select all Belle and Sebastian songs and rate them "4 stars," for instance, then I could go back through as I listen to them and give them 5 stars or 3 stars as needed.

The way my ratings work is this: 1 star is for songs I absolutely hate... this is for tracks I want to delete out of my iTunes library ASAP. 2 stars is for filler tracks: skits and noise that are part of an album (so I don't want to delete them), but I'd rather they not come up in a shuffle. Tool and Pink Floyd tend to have a lot of these in their albums. 3 stars is for songs I don't really like but I don't hate them. 4 stars is for songs I like, and 5 stars is for songs I love: songs I get excited for when they come on.

I have a manual playlist dedicated just for podcasts, audiobooks, video, and comedy albums. This is 1 gigabyte, and is generally enough space that I have a lot left over.

I have another manual playlist called "New Stuff." This is 1 GB and is for new albums I've added to my iTunes library in the last few months. When I get a new album I add it to the end of this playlist and remove an album in the list to make room. I try to listen to all albums at least 5 times and rate all the songs before I remove them from the list.

Now for the smart playlists. The following are not synced to my iPod, but are important for the playlist that is synced to it.

5 Stars: 309 MB. This playlist is for 5 star tracks only, and only for songs I have not played in the last 2 months.

4 Stars: 338 MB. This playlist is for 4 star tracks only, and only for songs I have not played in the last 4 months.

0/3 Stars: 61 MB This playlist is for songs that either have not been rated, or songs that are rated 3 stars. The songs also have not been played in the last 8 months, so it's a good sample of songs I'm not that crazy about but haven't heard in a while.

New Stuff Shuffle: 108 MB This is a small sample of songs from my "New Stuff" playlist that haven't been played in the last two weeks, but nothing that has 1 or 2 stars.

Recent: 213 MB This is for songs added to my library in the last 6 months, that hasn't been played in the last 1 month. Nothing below 4 stars shows up in this playlist.

I also have a manual playlist called "Classic" which is just in case there's an album I haven't listened to in a long time that I get the hankering to listen to again. It stays empty most of the time.

Now, all the above playlists (except "Classic") get combined in a random order into a 1 GB playlist called "Play This!", which is the one that gets synced to my iPod. Playing it is like hitting "shuffle songs," but it shuffles through my entire iTunes library.

What all this means is that when I'm driving around in my car I hit the "Play This!" playlist. When I'm done, I plug my iPod into my computer and the stuff I've listened to gets taken off and new stuff is put on. It is, in essence, like shuffling through my entire iTunes library, but only for songs I like and haven't heard in a while, so it actually works a lot better than the "shuffle" feature.

All of this takes up a couple gigabytes on my 8 GB iPod, and it could work for a smaller iPod as well. Just reduce the amount of megabytes each of the smart playlists take up, although it's smart to have a higher ratio of 5 star tracks and lower ratio of 0/3 star tracks. This ensures that most of what comes up is going to be songs you like, love, or have just added to your library. If you don't listen to many podcasts, you can reduce the size of that playlist as well. You can also reduce the size of the "New Stuff" playlist or make a smart playlist to replace it that adds random songs that have been added to your library in the last few months. If you don't listen to podcasts at all, you can make this work with an iPod as small as 1 GB.

Annoucing Anchorbird

2009-06-03T13:38:00.004-04:00

Anchorbird is the new webcomic by myself and several other people. The idea is we all take turns adding a page to the story, and nothing is planned out beforehand. Check it out at http://anchorbird.blogspot.com.

Fables for draw-off

2009-05-30T22:10:00.002-04:00

This is for a Fables draw-off at Penciljack. It went up a couple days ago but I'm just now uploading it. It was essentially a sketch because it was all I had time for and I got my ass kicked in the draw-off. Serves me right.

This is Snow White and Bigby Wolf from DC/Vertigo's "Fables." They have five "cubs" in the story, but I only drew three because I finished the third one about 50 minutes before the deadline, which I'd already asked for a two-day extension on.

By the way, while we're on the subject, if you're not reading Fables, I highly recommend it. It's an epic story about a war between fairy tale characters in the present day, and is (in my humble opinion) one of the very best comics to come around in the last decade. Incredibly entertaining, with gorgeous artwork from Mark Buckingham that evokes early Bachalo. Read it!!

Webcomic Jam: It Begins

2009-05-22T10:27:00.003-04:00

The webcomic jam is a new project on Penciljack being organized by myself, Oscar Padilla (Spidey), and Karl Savage (Wild&Uncouth). There's a rotating group of artists, along with a few guest artists here and there, and we'll all take turns doing installments of the comic. Here's the first installment, which you can click to make bigger.

We're going to have a website set up for the comic eventually, but we don't know what the comic is going to be called yet. Here's the thread on Penciljack where we organize the thing, though.

Even More Album Covers

2009-05-17T20:27:00.003-04:00

More album covers made by combining a random article on Wikipedia, a random quote, and a random photo on Flikr. Photos are attributed to the original photographer where I remembered to do so, and here are more of these if you want to see them.

Photo by Felix M. Cobos

Photo by chrisfriel

Photo by sigma-zeta

Photo by Jan Durina

Photo by beldyga.com

Mary Marvel meets Thorn

2009-05-12T09:28:00.004-04:00

This is for the P.U.M.M.E.L. tournament at Penciljack. Round one (against Bathill8) was to team up a character from Justice League International (or "Formerly Known as the Justice League" or "I Can't Believe it's Not the Justice League") with a character from Bone. Bathill went with Phoney Bone and Booster Gold, I went with Mary Marvel and Thorn.

Strip Jam: Ghost Yoda

2009-05-05T12:54:00.002-04:00

My nineteenth panel and... I dunno, a hundred and something panel overall for the Never-Ending Strip Jam on Penciljack.

Penciljack's down at the moment so I can't post this yet there, but I'll post it as soon as PJ comes back.

The Beatles album that never was...

2009-05-04T19:01:00.000-04:00

Please excuse me while I become a complete Beatles nerd for a minute.

I've been a big fan of The Beatles for a few years, but until recently I wasn't familiar with any of the individual members' post-breakup music. I decided a few months ago to start listening to their solo albums and to my delight there's a lot of great music there for people who love The Beatles' music. I've listened to almost all their 1970s stuff now and I can tell you that if you're a fan of The Beatles and never heard their solo stuff, here's the stuff you should get.

JOHN LENNON - The best album is 1971's "Imagine," without a doubt. Lennon's a bit too political for me generally, but if you like his stuff you might also seek out 1970's "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" and 1972's "Some Time in New York City." That last one is a double album and is credited to John Lennon AND Yoko Ono, so there's some weird stuff in it, but I feel like Yoko gets more shit than she deserves sometimes. "Sisters, O Sisters" and "We're All Water" are pretty good even though Yoko's singing.

PAUL McCARTNEY - After The Beatles broke up, McCartney released one pretty good solo album, called "McCartney," then released an amazing album co-credited to his wife Linda called "Ram," then the two of them formed a band called Wings with whom he released several albums in the 1970s. 1971's "Ram" is definitely worth getting, as is 1970's "McCartney," but as far as Wings albums go, I'd recommend 1973's "Band on the Run" and 1975's "Venus and Mars." The others are good too, but those are the best.

GEORGE HARRISON - A huge surprise, George Harrison's music wound up being my favorite of the Beatles' solo releases. If you are at all a fan of The Beatles, run out and get 1970's "All Things Must Pass." An AMAZING album. 1973's "Living in the Material World" is also fantastic, but I can't stress enough how great "All Things Must Pass" is.

RINGO - Don't bother. Most of his stuff is blah, and his best stuff is written by Lennon or Harrison. Get 1973's "Ringo!" if you must, don't bother with anything else.

Okay, now the real purpose of this journal is to talk about my new project, which I got the idea for a few weeks ago. My idea was to create an album of post-breakup Beatles songs, as a way of seeing what the next album after "Let it Be" might have been like if they stayed together. I had a few rules for selecting my songs, for instance the songs had to be released in either 1970 or 1971, since that's when the next album probably would have come out. Two Harrison songs, one per side, since that had been the pattern for several albums. I wanted one Ringo song, but nothing that came out in 1970-1971 fit the tone of a Beatles album. In 1970 he released two albums, one was an album of old standards, and the other was a country album. The closest song was "It Don't Come Easy," released as a single in 1971, but it doesn't sound exactly like a Beatles song, despite being co-written by Ringo and George Harrison. Similarly, I didn't put "My Sweet Lord" on there because despite being Harrison's biggest hit from "All Things Must Pass," it's not very Beatles-like.

I tried to choose songs that were released as singles, and songs that sounded like Beatles songs to me. I chose a time limit of 50 minutes. Then I put them together in an order that sounded good to me. Linda McCartney's backing vocals are featured on a couple tracks, but that's okay. Yoko's voice is on the White Album.

I'm calling it "Another Day," after the first song on the album. I've included the track listing below and the albums you can find these songs if you want to try this out for yourself. Listen to it and tell me this doesn't sound like a "Let it Be"/"Abbey Road"-era Beatles album.

ANOTHER DAY - 47:24
Side A
1. "Another Day" (1970 Paul McCartney single, bonus track on the "Ram" CD)
2. "Hold On" (John Lennon, "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band")
3. "Teddy Boy" (Paul McCartney, "McCartney")
4. "Oh My Love" (John Lennon, "Imagine")
5. "Wah-Wah" (George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass")
6. "Oh Yoko!" (John Lennon, "Imagine")

Side B
1. "Maybe I'm Amazed" (Paul McCarney, "McCartney")
2. "Imagine" (John Lennon, "Imagine")
3. "Too Many People" (Paul and Linda McCartney, "Ram")
4. "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" (Paul and Linda McCartney, "Ram")
5. "What is Life" (George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass")
6. "Heart of the Country" (Paul and Linda McCartney, "Ram")
7. "Crippled Inside" (John Lennon, "Imagine")

Hulk faces

2009-04-26T19:13:00.000-04:00

After doing this Hulk pin-up, I got quite a few comments saying it didn't quite look like the Hulk. I'm not that familiar with the character, so I guess I gave him too human of a face. I'm going to redo the face on my initial pin-up at some point, but here's some practice sketches I did today of the Hulk to try to get his facial structure down:

Hulk!!

2009-04-23T20:40:00.001-04:00

I did this for a two-man Hulk draw-off on Penciljack. Click to make big.

Strip Jam: Me and the Major

2009-04-21T16:14:00.001-04:00

My eighteenth panel (and 119th panel overall) for the Neverending Strip Jam at Penciljack.

25 Million Years after our story begins, Master Yoda and R2D2 have found the Ministry's suitcase, and opened it to find the souls of Sam, Sammy, Joker-Snake, The Major, and Yoshi. Just then the rotting, soulless body of the Major showed up, grabbed his own soul, and popped it in his mouth.

And before anyone asks, "Me and the Major" is a Belle & Sebastian song.

2009-04-21T11:49:00.001-04:00

Texting this from my phone. Just want to make sure it works.

Character Sketches - April 21

2009-04-21T11:19:00.002-04:00

Karl Savage asked where the Sayid drawing I did was, so here it is, along with a Wolverine sketch. Both of these are from months ago, but I never scanned them in for whatever reason.

And here's today's sketch. Over the past few weeks I've been making my way through Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series on Hulu, which is a science program from the early 80s made to introduce and explain complicated science ideas to laypeople in a way they can understand. I'm a big fan of Sagan, going back to the first time I saw the movie "Contact" in high school, and then went back and read his novel it was based on. I loved the movie but the book is a hundred times better. I then started reading his other books like "Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and "Billions and Billions," the former of which started me on my journey into skepticism. I consider Carl Sagan a personal hero of mine, and it's a shame he's no longer with us.

More of these album covers

2009-04-08T19:22:00.002-04:00

More of these and these. Done by taking a random article on Wikipedia for the band name, a random quote for the album title, and a random Flikr image for the album artwork. The original photographer is credited where I remembered to save the link.

I tried to do some aging on this one. If you look at the original photo, it's in color and looks new, but I looked up some tutorials on aging photos.
Photo by margolove

If I ever start a rock band, I'm going to call them The Virtuality Continuum.
Photo by Fort Photo

Photo by Tuffer (belgian edition)

Tried my best at doing a logo. Turtle Soup is Florida ska.

I tried doing a hip-hop album. Cheated because it was "Nebuchadnezzar II" but I dropped the "II" and the "r."
Photo by maurizio carucci

Photo by Diddis

Another pass at doing a hip-hop album.
Photo by PHOTOcLiiCK

More album covers

2009-03-31T12:51:00.003-04:00

More fake album covers, done by combining a random Wikipedia article for the band name, the last four words of a random quote for the title, and a random Flikr image for the art. Here are the last ones I did, and here are some more.

Photo by Cinnamon

Sri Yerramilli Narayanamurthy is an American-born Indian man who does folk-country.

Photo by jurvetson

Reston Manitoba is an alternative band from Knoxville.

Photo by froodmat

Pseudofeces is a late '90s hard rock band.

Al Watan is actually Al-Watan, a newspaper in Saudi Arabia. But I dropped the hyphen and made it some dude's name. I think he does smooth jazz.

Photo by Olivier Maurin

Carlos Salazar is an 80s new wave band.

Photo by Atilla1000

Photo by Jaki Good

Churchill is 90s Britpop.

Wasting time

2009-03-30T15:10:00.007-04:00

There's a fun game on Penciljack where you come up with a CD cover, band name, and album title. You just go to a random page on Wikipedia to get your band name, the last four words of the last quote on a page of random quotations, and the third picture on a page of random Flickr images. But recently someone had the bright idea to actually go into Photoshop and design the CD covers. Here are my attempts.

Tuzki is a European instrumental folk group.

John Marshall High School is a late 90's alt-pop band. I also used another quote on the same page for a song title.

I cheated a bit here because the Wikipedia page was for Ohs, a cereal, but I made them The Oh!s, who I've decided are a 2000s garage rock band.

Phalcoboenus is a folky alt-rock band.

Smarty is a Scottish girl who does pop music.

Leaf Blower is a Damon Albarn side project.

Kvíslavatn is an Icelandic pop group that sings in English and clearly loves Wes Anderson movies.

Cheated a bit, but "Plays - Cynical But Hopeful" didn't sound as good. Jonathan Webster Cornett is a one-hit wonder from the 80s.

COCONUT98 is a 90s pop-punk band.

I could go the obvious route and say Plaxton is an emo band, but I'm going to say they're a house electronica band.
And here's the last one, because I really don't think I could do one funnier than this:

EDIT: I've done some more.

Strip Jam: MF Doom

2009-03-24T14:14:00.001-04:00

This is my fifteenth panel (and 102nd panel overall) for the Never-ending Penciljack Strip Jam.

Character Sketches - March 19

2009-03-19T14:24:00.003-04:00

So these Daily Character Sketches aren't exactly daily anymore. I underestimated the amount of time it would take to do a sketch like this every day. So I'm going to try for two or three sketches a week now, and do Loomis sketches the rest of the week.

In honor of this week's final episode of what is, in my opinion, the best science fiction show of all time, I've drawn Kara "Starbuck" Thrace of Battlestar Galactica.

Titus Colored

2009-03-17T20:41:00.001-04:00

Color version of the Bruce Timm-style Titus sketch I did.

Bruce Timm-style Titus

2009-03-17T17:54:00.001-04:00

This is Titus, the main character of the comic I'm doing right now. I decided to do this in a Bruce Timm/animated DCU style. After finishing it I realized it's not really that different from my normal style.

Loomis Sketches - March 13

2009-03-13T15:04:00.001-04:00

Let's Go to Utah

2009-03-05T19:28:00.002-05:00

This is a pin-up for the trade paperback of Dave Chisholm's "Let's Go To Utah" comic. If you've never read it, I suggest going to his DA page and reading through the story, it's pretty great. I've seen someone describe it as a Coen Brothers movie in comic format and that's pretty apt.

Loomis Sketches - March 5

2009-03-05T13:26:00.001-05:00

Loomis Sketches - Feb. 27

2009-02-27T15:19:00.001-05:00

Penciljack Strip Jam Recap

2009-02-20T17:22:00.002-05:00

This is a recap of the Neverending Penciljack Strip Jam. Read it from the beginning here.

Daily Character Sketches - Feb. 19

2009-02-19T20:14:00.000-05:00

A bit of Wolverine for you. I decided to go with the Jim Lee costume since that's the Wolverine I grew up with, but with the John Cassiday boots, because let's be honest, the giant wings on those boots in the 90s were ridiculous.

I respond to the Blasphemy Challenge

2009-02-17T20:29:00.001-05:00

http://www.blasphemychallenge.com

Daily Character Sketches - Feb. 17

2009-02-17T11:11:00.003-05:00

Now that I've finished the Bridgman book, I'm going to be doing a sketch of one of my favorite characters every day. Today's sketch is Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, although this sketch is based more upon Ralph Fiennes' portrayal from the last couple movies.

If you have any suggestions for characters (either of the people that read this blog), leave 'em in the comments section.

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 16

2009-02-16T13:37:00.004-05:00

Well, this is it. This page is the last of my Bridgman sketches. I started on June 18, 2007 and finished today, February 16, ~~2008~~ 2009. That's almost exactly 20 months. It took up 238 pages in an 8.5"x11" sketchbook, and 13 pages in an 11"x14" sketchbook, for 251 pages total (although some of those pages were drawn out of other books, I don't know how many pages were solely Bridgman sketches).

So now, like I said a while ago, I'm going to draw a few of my favorite characters for a while and then start in on a Loomis book. Maybe in a couple years I'll try drawing through this book again and seeing if I can't improve upon my first attempt.

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 15

2009-02-15T14:24:00.002-05:00

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 11

2009-02-11T15:41:00.000-05:00

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 9

2009-02-09T14:00:00.000-05:00

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 8

2009-02-08T13:16:00.000-05:00

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 5

2009-02-05T12:01:00.001-05:00

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 3

2009-02-03T10:07:00.000-05:00

Bridgman Sketches - Feb. 1

2009-02-01T16:27:00.002-05:00

Also, here's my latest panel in the Never-ending Penciljack Strip Jam:

Bridgman Sketches - Jan. 30

2009-01-30T11:06:00.002-05:00

Bridgman Sketches - Jan. 28

2009-01-28T09:24:00.002-05:00

Daily Character Sketches - Jan. 27

2009-01-27T20:00:00.001-05:00

Daily Character Sketches - Jan. 26

2009-01-26T21:41:00.002-05:00

Once I finish my Bridgman book (a few more days) I'll be taking a break from drawing out of anatomy books for a while. I'm inspired by Jesse and Rian's sketch blog and have decided to steal the idea: doing a favorite character every day for... well, a month or two, anyway. I thought the idea was so good I wrote down about 40 characters I want to draw and got started on #1: Harry Potter. I messed up the shadows on the face and made him look pudgy, I think, but oh well.

Bridgman sketches - Jan 26

2009-01-26T14:57:00.001-05:00

I got myself a new sketchbook recently, this one's 11x14 instead of 8.5x11 like my old one. Since it's twice the size, I'm only doing half a page a day instead of a full page, and so I'll be updating this blog every other day instead of every day. Here are the scans for the last four days. Click to make bigger.

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 22

2009-01-22T14:05:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 21

2009-01-21T13:11:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Inauguration Day Edition

2009-01-20T13:27:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 19

2009-01-19T09:35:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 18

2009-01-18T20:25:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 16

2009-01-16T11:20:00.001-05:00

Carna the Cannibal Amazon from Venus

2009-01-15T16:02:00.002-05:00

I drew Repo Man's character for Penciljack's "Draw My Character" game:

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 15

2009-01-15T15:17:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 14

2009-01-14T10:11:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 13

2009-01-13T10:36:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 12

2009-01-12T14:10:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 9

2009-01-09T10:31:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 8

2009-01-08T10:27:00.000-05:00

The Bar pg. 1 pencils

2009-01-07T22:13:00.002-05:00

Here are the finished pencils for the first page of the new webcomic I'm working on with writer Jimi Odell. Click to embiggen.

Strip Jam: Dead Ministry

2009-01-07T17:39:00.001-05:00

The Ministry of Fuzzy Love is dead. Let us all rejoice.

Click the picture to see the strip from the beginning.

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 7

2009-01-07T13:29:00.001-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 6

2009-01-06T13:33:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 5

2009-01-05T13:19:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 4

2009-01-04T09:46:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 3

2009-01-03T19:20:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Jan. 2

2009-01-02T17:02:00.001-05:00

My house was out of power this week, so I spent a few days at my girlfriend's place. I didn't bring my scanner with me, so today I'm playing catch-up with all my daily warm-ups.

Bridgman sketches - Dec. 27

2008-12-27T23:56:00.000-05:00

Bridgman sketches - Dec. 23

2008-12-23T15:37:00.002-05:00

More sketching from this tutorial on drawing hands: http://www.tomrichmond.com/blog/?p=3644

Bridgman sketches - Dec. 22

2008-12-22T12:32:00.001-05:00

More sketching from this tutorial on drawing hands: http://www.tomrichmond.com/blog/?p=3644