Shower Thoughts: Muppet Edition

Peggy
January 20, 2018

This morning I found myself watching the episode of Muppets Tonight guest starring The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. In the shower, I ended up singing the theme from the original Muppet Show, which got branded into my kid brain in a way the Muppets Tonight theme never did.

Well, because I am old and haven’t really thought of that theme in ages, I sang fragments. Mostly Statler and Waldorf’s lines:

Why do we always come here?
I guess we’ll never know.
It’s like a kind of torture
to have to watch this show!

So that question was on my mind. And I came up with the objectively worst answer: Statler and Waldorf were a gay couple who contributed a lot to their city’s theatre scene; they worked behind the scenes for years, helping with every aspect from stagehand to finance wrangler. They made their world a brighter place. But they died in solidly Christian territory, without acccepting Jesus as their savior. And thus, their purgatory. Endless confinement in their box seats at the Muppet Theatre.

It’s not too bad. They never feel thirsty, or hungry, or tired. But holy crap it’s sure not good.

(This is of course the objectively worst answer because “they’re actually dead and in hell/purgatory/heaven” is always the worst possible recontextualization is a story.)

m.s. found in an open text editor window

Peggy
January 18, 2018

Writin’, she says. It fives yself something to do when y’r all alone by yourselfs and getting way-ass stoned.

So stoned yez got the death fear coursing through your brain in crackling Tronwave obstacle courses.

So sez Tipsy Zerphichore, the Space Cyber Pilot.

Thrill to her electric purple techno adventures, every Friday this fall on SpaceTube!

That’s the pitch and it’s terrible and garish and loud and Extreme and that is probably the road i’d rather go on with oarallax omfghow m

how much time DO i wanna giv to parallax anyway rn

parallax gets me nick cuddles and parallax gets me cum snuggles but parallax is Not Drowning City Damnit

oh hello Eyes strobing at the edge of my vision, dark voids of personal symbolism from Rita thou art the High Priestess between paired negative portals, blinking black and white strobing bells of resonance, sing O sing of another take on the Tarot omfg no that’s TOO damn far from my personal visions even if it WOULD have the broader net of Tarot Enthusiasts – no the Dawn was more than enough, she’s my slow burning bit of fan art to draw in people to My Vision (though i could use that ych as the Lust in a deck somewhere down the line? that could be a fun slow-burning back-doodle project? The Slutty Porn Tarot of Pushy Garnet, ha ha ha nnnooooo)

megapolisomancy 1: the freeway

Peggy
January 18, 2018

come to within a block or two of the freeway

and sleep

with your spine aligned to the flow

open up your senses (no, the other ones)

and just dip in

like a pelican skimming the surface of the water

like a spaceship skimming a sun’s photosphere with its fuel scoop open

don’t take too much, you see, you’ll drown

perhaps make a few passes, skim down going both ways, bring in a bank of the opposite polarity to better balance within

but be careful, you’re not the only one to know that all that hurry, hurry, hurry going in one direction for years on end carves open its own kind of ley line

and be careful to not get sliced to ribbons on the complex harmonic fields generated by the intersection of whole cloverleaf (i found Rez to be a useful metaphor to pass through intact, YMMV)

now i know why I miss LA, it’s a giant hole in the world torn by its neverending gyre of freeways, and it must be real good for sucking in popular stories or something, because it is our nation’s source of Dreams.

Where To Find This Fantastic Bitch At The Furry Con

Peggy
January 8, 2018

me this morning: I should deal with nailing down the last leg of my post-FC travels today, also maybe go get my hair dyed, also maybe like draw some comics

Also me this morning: Hey what’s FC’s theme this year I need a badge oh geeze “fantastic beasts and where to find them” okay lemme steal the typography from that recent drawing and faux-airbrush the hell out of the dragonsona in Witch Mode I guess.

It’s only three so I guess I can still maybe get some of that to-do list done…

The type was stolen from the drawing I posted the other day, and slightly modified. It’s worth noting that it’s actually just a bunch of white shapes; I have a style applied to the type layer that gives it a gradient fill and several overlapping outlines. It’s a lot easier to tweak it around this way; I don’t have to worry about rebuilding complicated compound paths or making multiple shapes have their gradients line up or anything like that. I just move stuff around and it magically blends in.

(The two strokes that are turned off are for a thicker outline to the type that I ultimately decided to not go with. My art files tend to be filled with a lot of their history like this.)

There’s also some interesting trickery going on in the pattern fills. I’ve managed to apply a gradient across a pattern fill, which is normally impossible. But if you pile a pattern fill on top of a gradient, set the pattern’s opacity to 0%, and turn on ‘Knockout Group’, then the pattern will be punched out of the fill. You can see that I made two versions of the same oval-brick pattern, one with red outlines, one with the same outlines expanded and punched out of a red square. I used the second one to do the highlights on the gown, which are perfectly aligned with the rest of the pattern. It’s a pretty cool trick to have in your arsenal.

(You can also do this by having different shapes on top of each other, grouping them, and abusing Knockout Group on the group.)

Pretty much everything in this drawing has a gradient on it, to give it a little life and make it feel more like something knocked out by an airbrush artist in the early 80s. Or maybe like someone working for Lisa Frank. The hair’s two variable-width strokes stacked on the path, with contrasting gradients on it. The glowing sigil is pulled from another con badge, given some of the same gradients, and set to ‘screen’ mode. About the only shapes in this piece that have a solid fill are the irises of the eyes, and some of the deep blue blurred shapes involved in the shading.

Oh yeah, and all those little gleams? Art brush. Two long translucent ovals and a blurred circle; select it and make quick little swipes with the pencil tool wherever I want.

looks great, plays terrible

Peggy
January 2, 2018

Somewhere back in August, I made a file titled “Peggy At The Con Of The Crimson King”, and meticulously reverse-engineered Roger Dean’s logotype for the 80s/90s computer game company Psygnosis. There’s a font out there that claims to be based on it, but half of the characters are swiped from his logo for Shadow of the Beast and they only sort of work together, so I just ended up making a bunch of art brushes based on his shapes and using those.

And then I let it languish in my working directory for the rest of the year because I didn’t like any of the sketches I’d done for the character. Today I loaded it up and did a decent rough, then did my best to pretend I was an airbrush jockey via a bunch of gradients and blurred shapes and masks.

Now I just need someone to do a furry con whose theme is “vaporwave” and I’ll have the perfect badge for it. But I probably won’t do badges in this style at the con because holy crap the typography took at least twice as long as the figure. I could re-use the brushes and styles I made but it’d still be like twice the work of “type name in a font, draw character” and I dunno if I really feel like seeing if there’s any market for $100 badges.

also here is a closeup showing the amount of detail I made Illustrator do in the eyes, because I wanted to capture a little bit of the INSANE STARING GLARE that Dean put into the stylized owl-head of Psygnosis’ secondary logo. There was also a bunch of angular bullshit around the eyes based on that but it got covered up by the chrome hair, oh well.

Someone on FA asked for this on a t-shirt, so I posted it on Redbubble. Go here if you want one too.

glowtide

Peggy
December 31, 2017

so, new years eve party. pretty good. things done:

kissed an otter after he stonedly declaimed his willingness to be my tool for refining raw chaos into power
talked to a fox (i think?) who had, like, actual moments in Rita she had *memories* about
publicly warned some folks that there is a magic spell at the end of the printed copies of Rita and told them its general intent (you wanna know? ask me at a party when I’m stoned enough to let the Magician speak)
sent a perfectly terrible wish to a genie
buried my face in a tiger’s tits
then the ex and i left at ten because we are old people who can only take so much social at any one time, especially when baked off our asses

and now food, and probably stoned snuggling in the bedroom some time after that

many thanks to the folks at the blazewing eyrie who hosted the party, it was wonderful as always ???????

dream fragment: maternal visitations

Peggy
December 31, 2017

Nick had brought back a cold or something from the flight home, and I’d caught it. So we were both sleeping pretty fitfully.

I dreamed that various dead women related to me were coming to my door. Most notably my mother and my father’s mother. All dressed in white, bright against the dark night. And you know that thing where you see someone coming through the window and try to get out of sight so you can pretend you’re not home? I did that.

Then I woke up and wanted to poke Nick to make sure he was still alive. But I could barely breathe. Couldn’t talk, my throat wouldn’t move.

And then I woke up for real and cleared my sinuses out. I’m glad I wasn’t stuck in a half-awake state barely able to breathe for a while, that would have been a hell of a nightmare.

Time For A Good Book

Peggy
December 29, 2017

A few days ago I was in the space of wanting to draw and having no desire to work on big projects, and no other ideas. So I asked on Mastodon.

“Kalinda.” “Kalinda.” “Naked in a coffee house.” “Kalinda TFing someone.”

I didn’t feel up to an actual TF scene so here’s a snake lady naked in a coffeehouse. With sensibly-sized boobs, and with absurdly oversized ones, because I felt like drawing big cartoon titties.

big cartoon titties version, absurdly huge cartoon titties version

If you are curious, the book is part six of the Penwiper Saga, “The Curious Adventure of the Gyrobicupola”.

181

Peggy
December 28, 2017

Stepped on a scale for the first time in a week or so last night. One eighty one, it said. Ugh, I said. So there I was this morning upgrading my ass from yoga at the Y to an exercise at the Y and holy fuck I sure did loll uselessly around the apartment for the next couple of hours after.

But that walk home. Ah, that special lazy, sinuous strut of a body that has just had every major muscle given a decent workout. I miss it.

New year’s comin’. Depending on how you count, maybe it’s already started – more and more part of me feels like it has, once the winter solstice passes. I don’t make formal resolutions, they’re fragile things, easy to overpromise and then never go back to the first time you slack off. But if I did, this year’s would be two things, I think: get back in the comics-drawing groove, and get back into shape.

I’m working on them both already.

the inevitable, really

Peggy
December 25, 2017

Lying in bed, reading a book. I come to the end of the first part and put a bookmark in it. I think of the books I took from my mother’s place, each with a bookmark lingering in them. Stories she never finished? Stories she finished, stuck the bookmark into a random place, and never got around to putting back on the shelves? Stories she never would have finished anyway, the bookmark merely a testament to how far she got before deciding she’d given that story all the time she was willing to give it to get good? I’ve got books lying about the apartment with bookmarks in them for all those reasons.

And thinking about that, a wave of sadness and loss sweeps across me.

Christmas was her birthday. I didn’t really think about it today. Mostly I just watched the birds eat the food I’ve been putting out for them lately, and puttered around the apartment aimlessly. Put off washing the kitchen floor still sticky from yesterday’s hastily-cleaned-up accident with the shattered bottle of sugary drink; ate sparingly. Wanted to go out but not in the cold and snow that covered Seattle last night and today. A typical celebration of the Winter Family Togetherness Holidays, much the same as I’ve done on Thanksgiving or Christmas most every year for most of my adult life, not much less fanfare than Mom and I gave to those holidays after Russell died. If she was alive, I would have called her to wish her a happy birthday; we would have talked about the trip I’d probably soon be taking to visit her, carefully timed to avoid the rush of people traveling for the holiday. But it’s been long enough since her death that the habit of calling her every week or two is faded. And that, too, feels sad and melancholy.

Mortality. Fuck it.

I thought of picking up one of those books taken from her place, after she died, to read tonight. But I didn’t. Because I didn’t feel like I wanted to dig into the feelings I knew those would stir up. But here I am lying in bed with tears running down my cheeks, wishing she was still alive.

Winter solstice is passed, here comes 2018. I guess.