The Crystal Weapon Tribe of Prehistoric Spain

From the Department of Interestingness:

Just found out about these 5000 year old crystal weapons archeologists found in a series of megalithic tombs in Spain.

They found the remains of 25 people inside the tombs, and it is believed that all of the people owned the weapons collectively, meaning that they did not belong to one individual specifically.

More info here: LINK

Okay, now I want to incorporate crystal weapons into a character design, or figure out how to fit it in one of my stories.

-Jake

Drone shots of Mont Saint Michel

From the Department of Creative Bank Accounting, in cooperation with the Department of Interestingness:

A fog covering the ground makes it look like it's floating in the clouds: LINK

Slow fly through of the various streets: LINK

Both of those are just to warm you up for THIS: LINK (prepare to be blown away)

-Jake

It's tough raising baby dinosaurs

Hope you're doing good. There's so much amazing stuff in the world. Yes, we've got problems that need to be solved. Lots of them. But don't lose sight of all the good and cool around you. I try to follow Mary Oliver's advice:

Instructions for living life:

• Pay attention.

• Be astonished.

• Tell about it.

My goal is to remember what I've seen and pass that along to you. My hope is it inspires you to go make and do good and cool things as well, so that there's even more of it to share. In that spirit, here's a recent illustration I made for fun.

Started out as an Inktober52 prompt drawing for "Tail" and then I liked how it turned out so much I decided to color it.

You can see process stuff like this, including videos and hang outs all the time on my Patreon: LINK

Thanks,

Jake

Vacation Drawings and...burnout?

I just got home from a 10 day, much needed family vacation. It’s been GO GO GO here for months, because my work didn’t slow down when Covid hit, it kind of ratcheted up a couple notches. Plus having all the kids home ALL DAY made things a bit harder. Deadlines don’t care.

Every summer we go stay with my wife’s grandma in a sleepy little town on Long Island. It’s not a flashy vacation, there’s no itinerary, no zip lines, no dolphin swimming, no nice restaurants, and no helicopter rides over volcanoes.

We watch sail boats go by as the tide rolls in and out. We try to outdo each other’s crazy dives off the dock. There’s lots of reading, and napping. Going to town to get ice cream is an event. We play memory, rummicube, and farkle. The most exciting thing on this trip was that a dogfish washed ashore and we debated whether it was a shark or not.

It’s juuust right.

For most of the vacation I didn’t even crack open my sketchbook. I did some reading, I did a bunch of staring out the window. At night I watched movies with my kids. One of my favorite things to do on vacation is write postcards from wherever I’m at and mail them to unsuspecting friends. I did a bunch of those.

I think I really needed this vacation, because I just felt burned out.

Drew this box bird thing up there on my flight home.

This was one of those “just let the pencil guide your way” kind of a drawing. There’s no backstory here, no reason for it other than I hadn’t drawn much for 10 days and I felt like I should probably get warmed up for re-entry.

I did two other drawings towards the end of our stay at Grandma’s:

Now that I’m home I’m feeling better, feeling creative, and anxious to get to work on stuff.

It made me realize I’ve been exhaling for way too long and needed to inhale big time before I passed out.

Here’s a family photo we took Sunday. I love this gang! Just wanted to show you the reason I work so hard; its to support these guys in everything they’re wanting to do.

-Jake

Question: I’m curious, what do you do for vacation and how do you avoid, combat burnout?

The Ruins of Fabbriche di Careggine

A 12th c. village in Tuscany submerged under the artificial Lago di Vagli since the construction of a dam in 1946. Occasionally seen when the lake is drained during maintenance work, it could resurface again in 2020.

This is definitely the location of some kind of necropolis or portal to another dimension.

Ghibli "What ifs"​

​It's not a huge trend, I can honestly only find a handful of them on the internet, but Ghibli "What ifs" might be my favorite genre of fanart​.

Basically, you just take a cool IP, any will do, and you reimagine it as if it were a film by Miyazaki. 

Here you go:

Ghibli Star Wars by Lap Pun Cheung​​​

Ghibli Dinotopia by DoonDraws

Ghibli Dragonball by ErisDraw3D

Ghibli Legend of Zelda by Matt Vince

And Ghibli Breath of the Wild by Miavern

-Jake

Chomp Bot

From the Archive Unit:

I have only been working on NDA stuff the past couple weeks which means I haven't had a lot of time to do anything in my sketchbooks or any personal work. I haven't posted on IG for 14 days. Which is a LONG time for me. Then I thought, why not just go through the archives and post older stuff. I don't think many of my newer fans have seen the older stuff, and the old fans might like seeing things from a years and years ago again. I had my son go through my folders and start putting together a bunch of art from the archives to start posting online from time to time.

One of my favorites he found was this Chompbot drawing from 2012:

I used to draw in pencil ALL the time. I loved it. Then I got into brush pens. But seeing this again I'm thinking I want to pick up the pencil again from time to time.

This was for box art from the CHOMPBOT resin kit I did with @industriamechanika. Everything turned out so great with that project was a lot of fun to see it all come together.⁣

-Jake

Video of a Great Black-Backed Gull swallowing a Rabbit whole​

This ​is insane. One the one hand it's like something you'd see in a cartoon, on the other hand it's one of the most metal things I've seen a bird do. And I used to raise chickens. 

My chickens LOVED mice. Seeing them fight over one was like watching a bunch of t-rexes tearing apart a goat. It wasn't pretty, but I couldn't avert my eyes from the carnage. 

I'm a huge fan of birds, both modern and prehistoric. And a bird's gotta do what a birds gotta do to fill it's belly. With that, here's the video of a Gull swallowing a rabbit whole. How he doesn't choke on it is a mystery to me.

LINK

I Stand Against Racism

The past couple of weeks has been a time of self-evaluation. Taking time to learn from the experiences of others and confront my own understandings and views. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with my family, my kids, my spouse, friends, and people I do business with about how we can be better and do better.

As the protests eventually subside and public attention moves to other matters, I will not forget my commitment to understanding and overcoming racism.

In the middle of all of this I keep coming back to this quote:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.“

Martin Luther King Jr wrote those words while in a jail cell in Birmingham Alabama.

I endorse King's message and in that spirit and without ambiguity:

I stand against racism.

Beyond what you see online from me, I am striving to promote equality and decency in every interaction I have. I am doing this in every corner of my life, not simply what you see posted online. I believe that what I do and say in person, when I step away from the computer, is much more important and has more influence than what I do and say here.

My hope is that if each of us does this our generation's legacy isn’t racism, prejudice, discrimination and hate but loving one another.

-Jake

DRAWINGS 5 Books are finished!

I’ve been chipping away at all the rewards for my Kickstarter project and am happy to announce that the books have been printed, paid for,m and are being shipped to my home! They should arrive in about 40 days.

Check out these advanced copies the printer sent out to me:

Front and back covers designs

Skull Chaser comic pages

Character design spread

Spaceships!

So happy with this book. You're going to love it!

Order now: LINK

-Jake

Great White Zeke

From the Friendship Unit:

My oldest friend, Tim Boyle, has launched a kickstarter for his quirky, fun, and beautiful book about a baby being raised by a great white shark. LINK

Tim is one of the most creative people I know and is also incredibly prolific. He's always creating things. One time he had a few weeks off work, and bought a bunch of lumber and made a life sized allosaurus sculpture in his mom's yard. He's always drawing something or building something and has been a huge inspiration to me my entire life. (We met in kindergarten). On top of it all, he's incredibly kind and generous.

Follow him on IG: LINK

And go back his Kickstarter: LINK

The Cannonball Run

From the Office of Wheels

I've been thinking a lot about the cannonball run lately. It's an unsanctioned race to see who can get from a garage in New York to a hotel in Los Angeles. LINK

It’s on my mind because the record has been beat 6 times since the US lockdown. The fastest being 26 hours and 38 minutes. LINK

I've always had a proclivity toward cars and odd races like Dakar and Peking to Paris. I love that the enterprising spirit behind them. The logistics, the car mods, the personalities that take these things on are all so fun, and makes me want to do a racing comic some day.

-Jake

The most important archeological discovery this year?

From the Department of Interestingness

Saw a tweet about what "could be this year's biggest discovery" an almost entirely intact Roman mosaic villa floor:

My wife and I were wondering how that gets covered with so much dirt over the years. I dug down into this. Apparently, the soil in any given place absent of human activity grows about an inch a century.

But where does soil come from? Organic matter that does erode away is some of it, but here's something I didn't know: Rain exist because of dust particles in the atmosphere. The particles give something for the atoms in water to latch onto. Every time it rains a small layer of dirt is deposited on the ground. (I wonder if that's why my car is so dirty after it rains?)

I assumed all this dust just comes from the earth itself; kicked up in dust storms and what not. But here's possibly the most interesting thing you'll learn today: As much as 40,000 tons of space dust arrives on Earth every year.

That means that even planets made entirely of water would still have rain fall...though not as much as you think. The earth weighs 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds and 40,000 tons is only something like 0.001% of the earth's mass. Our planet isn't really gaining mass at a significant rate, and a water planet probably isn't absorbing enough dust to make rain storms a common occurrence.

What is really cool about water planets is at their core is naturally occurring ice VII. Ice VII is, as I understand it, ice that has become crystalized so that it's indistinguishable from rocks. The only place scientist have found it naturally on earth is inside diamonds.

So...back to this Roman floor they found. How cool is that?

-Jake

Little Alien Dudes: L.A.D.s

Little Alien Dudes, or L.A.D.s as I like to call them. I drew these guys several years ago, but I never stopped thinking about them. Something about them keeps them in the back of my head. Maybe they’re a part of the Skull Chaser universe? I’ve got some ideas.

-Jake

It's a weird time to be drawing

I know there's a lot of painful and turbulent things going on in the world right now. Specifically in the U.S., it is a time for much needed reflection and change. Each one of us has a different part we can play, and there are many lanes in a revolution. Some protest publicly, others donate privately, while many more are having tough conversations with friends and families. All are helpful.

All of this to say, it's a weird time to be drawing and honestly, I haven't felt very creative lately. However, I'm reminding myself art shouldn't be abandoned, but embraced in times of trouble. So I'm going to continue drawing, because I think putting good, creative things into the world is important work. Outside of all things art, I am endeavoring to make the world in my personal circle of influence a better place and hope that you are doing the same.

On the Black Lives Matter movement:

My policy since joining social media, running this website, writing a weekly newsletter, and just being somewhat public with my artwork was to never share politics or get political online. I'm politically agnostic and see good on both sides and crazy on both sides of the spectrum. I also feel like I, a guy who draws mostly silly robots, should not be your go-to source for hot takes on current events and guidance on political/moral/religious matters. But this last week I struggled with the performative aspect of social media; like how do I share ideas and information because I think it's crucial, and not because I want to score points with people?

I see people being criticized for sharing the right message in the wrong way, sharing the wrong things in the right way, being silent, being too loud, being told now is the time for whites to speak up, but also now is the time for whites to listen.

Yet I feel like I need to share something. And I feel like this revolution transcends politics. So know that while I'm not perfect, I'm doing my best, I'm learning, and I'm changing.

Here's some things that have helped me, a white guy, put things into perspective:

First, this simple question asked in this tweet: LINK

Second, this overview of racial violence in the United States throughout our history: LINK

Third, this empathetic perspective on looting and rioting: LINK

Lastly, this Christian explaining Black Lives Matter to someone who keeps saying All Lives Matter: LINK

-Jake

The Jungle Prince of Dehli

From the Department of Amazing Stories:

Carve out 30 minutes of your weekend to read this. Trust me. I haven't read an article as fascinating as this one in a LONG time.

This story has it all, poison with crushed diamonds...a royal family forced to live in a train station...a crumbling old mansion in the middle of the jungle inhabited by a reclusive prince. It's a Hindu Grimm's fairy tale. And the writer unfolds everything expertly.

LINK

Fan Art Dump

From the Fan Art Acquisitions Office:

A couple Sundays ago it was my birthday and I asked my kids for fan art drawings of my characters. They delivered, but what was strange was an unusual amount of other fan arts that popped up this week as well. Thought I'd share them all with you here.

Parker Kids: Calvin drew Little bot and Sparrow. Penny drew Skull Chaser and his new girlfriend.

Tate drew CC and Benson in a cool ballooncar:

And Miles drew a Skull Chaser Star Wars mashup:

My friend Aaron Painter surprised me with a Missile Mouse drawing!

Ilya Prosvirov and Kiel Figgins worked together to make an amazing Skull Chaser model and rig: LINK

Milo Galileo made a model, rig, and animation from a character I posted on Instagram: LINK

And Kyle Beaudette hand sculpted a beautifully wonky Skull Chaser maquette: LINK

I absolutely love getting fanart of my characters. It’s probably the highlight of my career, knowing that something I’ve made has impacted someone enough to spend their free time on making something with it.

-Jake

The Real Lord of the Flies

From the Department of Amazing Stories:

This has always been a fantasy of mine; to live on a deserted island for a couple months to a year. Eating cocnuts and spear fishing. I think I watched too many episodes of Gilligan's Island growing up.

But it really happened to a group of boys in who were stranded on an island in the pacific for over a year. And no, they didn't kill each other and worship a pig head.

Read this short article about it here: LINK

My Flickr Faves

From the desk of Jake Parker:

In a simpler age, long before the social media giants had risen from the depths of the ocean to eat away the online landscape and rule it with their algorithmic iron fist, there was a peaceful archipelago of thriving websites. People could hop from island to island at a leisurely pace and consume content at their discretion. It wasn't gamified, and it didn't exploit the underlying motives of human nature.

One of these islands was Flickr. A simple platform to share photos and creations. I used to spend a lot of time there over a decade ago. I recently found myself there again this week and rediscovered all the images I favorited. It's a nice collection of everything rom 70's futuristic architecture to amazing LEGO creations. There's lots of old toys and pulp covers.

This is the stuff that influenced my work 10 years ago, and I feel bad I had forgotten about it, drifted away from it, and got lost in the sea of Pinterest and Instagram. The algorithms end up working in a way that shows you stuff it knows you'll like. Which means you rarely get surprised anymore, and aren't exposed to new things as much.

Surfing Flickr may be less efficient, but it has what I call the "library effect" on you. When you go to a library to check out a specific book you have to pass through all the sections of the library that might not be what you're currently interested in. However, by walking through you get exposed to books that catch your attention, and make you think about something tangental or adjacent, or even the opposite of what you're interested in. You end up leaving the library with a stack of books that you had never planned on cracking open when you walked in.

When I compare my Pinterest/instagram (P-I) feed to my Flickr feed the P-I feed is much more targeted and narrow. The flickr feed; much more broad and varied. The effect these two have on me is after surfing P-I everything feels derivative, and I feel as a creator that I don't have much more to offer. After surfing the randomness of Flickr I feel inspired because so many different things are bumping into each other making me connect dots that I never thought to put together before.

Anyway, that's my case for surfing blogs and flickr, and pining for the old internet. Here's a random page from my Flickr faves: LINK

-Jake

The Polyptych in Comics

In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics there’s a section in chapter 4 on Time Frames about the “polyptych” in comics. I’ll let him do the explaining:

He then draws a nice example of how a single image works to tell a story and move us through time and space regardless of gutters and panels:

I wish comics artists (myself included) did a little more of this. It's something you can't do in film or prose. We artists have a ton of cool story telling tools unique to the art form of comics that we're neglecting in favor of animation style storyboarding techniques.

With that, here’s several examples of the polyptych in comics. From this twitter thread.

By @NickDerington, @Dragonmnky and @BRIANMBENDIS

Crazy Quilt: Scraps and Panels on the Way to Gasoline Alley LINK

Gasoline Alley by Frank King LINK

By Gianni de Luca

By Gianni de Luca

By Gianni de Luca

Lewis Trondheim's Les trois chemins

La Jeunesse de Mickey by Tebo LINK

From Mr. Invincible: LINK

Moon Knight

By @shirahamakamome

From These Savage Shores

Saving these here so I don’t forget about them. Really want to try this out in my next comic.

-Jake