a pathetic snake loses face in public

initially i put some stereotype cactus in the background but it was less funny to me if the location seemed to switch. It could transform in the same place, have different lettering and texas doors but not BE another place. The horse-like figures are a hold-over from the cactus phase but not as out of place as the cactus was and I felt no great impetus to remove them. i could have given one a shopping cart but then i think maybe it should look like a little covered wagon and that might be too distracting and that was rather late in the process anyway by which point I was already tired of changing things that did not matter, which typically means two more hours of changing things.

most of the comments on this were positive, and I am glad to get comments at all, especially since the snake ones tend to be complaining about people who comprise the little audience I have, but one did say “the snake should probably know better than to put other people at risk with such a weird and long-term illness!”
which seems to imply that I the real person who isn’t a naked neon cartoon serpent is most definitely out and about breathing diseases every which way. And this sentiment may be harbored by more people than spoke up. Which is normal, these snake comics tend to be misconstrued and this is a fairly mild case. I should move on and not worry about it but that isn’t what I do and usually there isn’t a rough implication that I possibly kill people.

I respont “fortunately the snake is fictional! it errs for my amusement. I don’t personally mess around with public masklessness, worried that someone else might think I have a problem, but I do feel silly unless I have a big hat with it.”
I understand that wearing a mask is more for the courtesy of others than actual personal protection, since you can have and be contagious with the virus before any symptoms manifest and you may in fact never get symptoms at all, and there could be CONSIDERABLY more carriers who are asymptomatic, and nobody who has been permitted to appear credible seems to know just how long you would remain contagious for or if you can get the virus a second time. I will wear the dumb mask if it aids in preserving what passes for order and doesn’t mess with my ability to function, even if people who think this whole mess is exaggerated or totally staged comprise a larger share of who I know than otherwise. I think kids who have been perfectly fine for a month should be allowed to play with other kids who also have been, attempting to forbid people from being outside at all unless they are employed or shopping is bizarre, and selectively forbidding the sale of certain items inside a store but not others, such as occurred in Michigan, is ludicrous and counterproductive since it inspires anger in people who want to be angry. If adults think their government is treating them like children they will disobey it and make a bigger problem, often like children. Without a plan to calm them down, and with a head of state who actively encourages them to not be calm, ostensibly well-meaning policies that don’t have a whole lot of potential at best can end up having none at all.

but i will wear a dumb mask!

I won’t buy one at an inflated price from a trendo brand-conscious profiteering scumbag who advocates more complacent childish behavior

and apparently I couldn’t even if I wanted to but there is no shortage of ways to pay extra to advertise what an imbecile I am.

there is another bit of talking to sketch out before I can get it out of this room. and then I will have to clean up and color in this whole mess, oh! I am HOPING it will be more clear and the actions less indistinct at full speed once that occurs –at the moment some are only clear when I replay and watch the right spot or advance it one frame at a time– but like with most matters I truly have no idea if the finish I am betting everything on will occur. even if a lot of it does not work I can at least see clearly that words are getting said by a creature that thinks it is more important than it is and a meeplier creature suffers misfortune, which is what is truly important.

in the last bit there may be a sound anomaly, with a split second of static around “somebody must go.” i corrected it for the music-less version i was using to “match” the mouths to the words but I didn’t replace the main version yet and it is not prudent for me to have sound coming out of machine at this time of day.

The crony needs to talk again in the next part and I don’t know whether to reuse the front view or add in another right-facing angle, since I only had that once but have had left three to four times.

a quick test of the new tablet pressure sensitivity in ASEPRITE, a feature i had looked forward to for quite a while! i drew a nemitz first because anything i made after that could only be an improvement.
“quick” as in i probably meant to draw one frame in ten minutes that transformed into two hours
Unfortunately the way pressure sensitivity is implemented in the program is, so far, more of a detriment to me than help except on larger objects, like the tail here, so I have had it turned off for most of the process on what I did next! The way that works in clip studio I like much better. but if i ever get back to my so ill it transcends pandemic-fated doom-engine-based-construction i may be able to create animated sprite graphics faster for that; I draw them large and have them scaled down in the game so to minimize pixelation
aseprite is the same program I used to make [most of] the other pixel animations that would be found under the “animation” tab had I updated at all recently and not only haven’t I, the stuff that used to be on it no longer shows up because I linked to them from my deviantart account because they were already THERE and I could. That evidently is no longer the case. Ewps. I will hopefully tend to that before 2021.

page 48 of the bimshwellian comicoid.

the gnomes are regrettable but elpse was pretty regrettable for a long time and now I find it very amusing. The colors on this page at least are nice. i think they are nice!
i worried that the “kaiser monarchs,” the motorcycle gang-like assemblage the gnomes belong to was among my least inspired groups of characters, and maybe i was right because i just learned [thursday] that the ill-fated pixar film onward also features a “pixie biker gang” similar in appearance and presumably to some degree in behavior to the gnome collective. I look forward to people talking to me like I ripped that off in a few years.

ehhh my approach is still probably awkward and contrarian enough to not retroactively be construed as a rip-off of that by people who need to see everything i make in terms of recent media they consumed. Due to various factors including a worldwide pandemic that you may have heard about coinciding with its theatrical release, “onward” may also be one of the least-seen pixar films so i have even less to worry about. Even though the more people think i am inspired by recent media the more they accept what I do so perhaps I should encourage them to think that but I don’t like being liked like that!

my gnomes are more awkward than onward but at least I like them. I don’t like these at all.
According to this blurry picture and I didn’t want to go searching for more, “pixie dusters” is their name. Whereas i thought a gang name that directly alluded to my characters being gnomes was too on-the-comically oversized nose. However they like butterflies and “monarch” is a powerful-sounding type of butterfly, and then kaiser because i thought kaiser helmets were really funny for a bunch of years, hence the name.

I got to thinking about onward because i inadvertently read that pixar had paid whoever owns dungeons and dragons now to use a Beholder in the movie in some capacity, which made it necessary for me to skim its synopsis to be certain it wasn’t just doubling down on the wreck it ralph formula, but I think instead it is just quadrupling down on the pixar formula, which is essentially the same thing but the characters have smaller eyes and ugly little footless stump legs and prefer annoying existing songs to ones that they sing themselves. Prior to then i had seen pictures of the main characters and thought they looked sort of like greegorp and lactorp, the pointy-ears imbeciles from my beet cartoons but had no reason to presume the behaviors were similar.

LATER ON in the one other picture I saw, it became apparent to me that one of the characters is holding a drink bottle many times larger than itself, which would indicate the creatures are rodent-sized, which would make them QUITE different from my gnome gang. I would question why something that could fly would need a motorcycle or how at that size it would get one. you can’t just say “oh magic” to explain that because nothing else about it is magicy. I would accept and grant credibility to the gang if they mugged Runaway Ralph and Stewart Little during the film because disney can buy and use just about any character they want in any way they want but that would still only get vehicles for two of them.

an attempt to convert some creatures of that sketchbook page into a remotely coherent composition. It did not work! But I felt artistically fulfilled for a few hours.

the website that links to is evidently not being used to its greatest potential by me but it seems to function in the capacity of displaying my only just slightly edited for the purpose of clarity scanned sketch book pages without me feeling self-conscious about the minimal level of value they seem to be perceived as having, which I have been unable to accomplish on other trendo sites.

the green thing did not initially make any statement about its appearance nor even wear glasses but I could tell it thought it looked like spike lee. Initially the words just floated beside the creature as if it was dialog but I do not think that is aesthetically functional in this sort of image, but fortunately it seemed plausible that this creature would have a sign made with this pronouncement written on it that the creature would pose in this presence of.

In the upper left is an incredibly corny looking, tiny dopey teapot that was a recurring element in the painting classes I had when pursuing a largely superfluous bachelor degree. I could tell the teapot was profoundly proud of itself and that it thought it was the honorable Horace T. Teapot. it probably also has a sign announcing that just out of the frame. It might as well be wearing a bowtie. You could probably make ONE cup of tea in that dumb teapot. I have NO idea what it is so proud of. I thought for certain I had explained all this years ago but apparently I did not which is why the world is in such a dire situation.

this about sums it up

oh fleeps I never made a website entry out of this

Obviously we are collecting boots today. I don’t see how you could have POSSIBLY messed that up. Hey, fool! We are not catching fish here. And yet you caught one. You couldn’t even catch cholera by ingesting the Vibrio cholerae bacterium, and still you caught a fish. Good job. “Good” as in “opposite of good.”
Atrocious. Typical nemitz move.

tennish years later

nemitz (orange imp) seems to be improving mitz skill at fishing. improved for nemitz, i mean. Presumably elpse (green imp) has something better to do. I hardly think there could be anything worse to do.

meanwhile I have I have not gotten much better at drawing!

page 3-47 of the bimshwellian comic strip. a huge hard to draw waste of space but possibly the last page that will take place in this parking lot! Now instead of a difficult to draw background I have an impossible to draw object that is simultaneously foreground AND background.

I fear this mask business may be getting a bit out of hand

the original “plan” for this included additional mask-types but at that stage it looked to me more like a bad local mural or the cover to an issue of Cracked magazine than something that was supposed to be taken less-than-seriously. i laughed while making it but sometimes that is an instinct-like reaction to things that i am really worried about not being funny, like some previous images related to halloween, bad geico advertisements (all of them are bad) and my experience at the louvre museum.
The worst thing about the version I decided on is that after I added the dope on the shelf on the left I didn’t want to crop it out even though the composition works much better with that mostly empty space removed and EVERY composition works much better with dopes removed. Theoretically the older version is superior on account of lacking dopes, apart from the cart advertisement seeking to raise awareness of them, but ultimately it is ugly and trying too hard. The final version tries a more appropriate amount.

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