Chapter five of A Mad Tea-Party is finished and all online! I recommend reading the whole thing in one sitting: http://www.jonathondalton.com/?p=1495

But if all you need to catch up on is the latest scene, I’ve put that right here as a gallery. Drawing the Vourasq War is always a bit of a stretch for me stylistically, but it sure is fun too.

I should have news about how you can get a print copy of chapter five soon.

rubywhiterabbit:

My little brother got into outer space and stuff so my step-mom bought him a place mat with all the planets on it. When I first saw it, I was upset, because it was newer and so Pluto wasn’t labeled. I was about to say something when I noticed something…

Pluto is there.

The artist remembered Pluto.

Guys…

The artist drew Pluto crying.

THE PLANET PLUTO

1930 - 2006

NEVER FORGET

(via darrylayo)

glassshard:

“Yeah, if someone is proud they don’t use “reference” to do artwork, they must not have much else to be proud about…”

This. The greatest artists and illustrators used photo reference. Not a little, but A LOT. Norman Rockwell was notoriously slow because he insisted on shooting…

This is all true of course. 100%. But I do feel a swell of pride, as well, when I’ve drawn a thing (a folding chair, for example, or a tea cup) often enough WITH reference that it is now permanently stored in my brain and I don’t NEED reference anymore. There are too many things in existence for me to ever be able to fly without that net entirely. But it’s a good direction to be pointed in, at least.

One of the many things I had to build in order to finish book 5 of A Mad Tea-Party was this image of Connie and Matilda’s parents, Zeus and Althea. Like several other characters in the story, I never expected that I would care so much about these two. They might seem settled and domestic at the start of the story, but never forget that they fought an army of giant alien robots from beyond the edge of known space - too often bare-handed - and lived to tell about it. I like to think of them as characters from a world much like Evangelion or Gundam, but with two decades of comfortable retirement in the suburbs starting to take its toll.

I have a series of illustrations of Mad Tea-Party characters in this format built up now. So far the only use I’ve found for them is on the back cover of the minicomics. Hopefully some day I’ll find another purpose to give them as well.

There is a new page of A Mad Tea-Party up on my site!

I don’t have Manga Studio, nor do I have any fancy plug-ins for making printing dots. But it was important to me to be able to make these flashback sequences look like they’re ripped straight out of a pre-digital Japanese manga. Even though I end up using all these weird labour-intensive workarounds to get the effects I want in Photoshop, I’m pretty proud of the results. Unfortunately, they’re largely invisible until you see them zoomed in or printed on paper.

It’s looking pretty unlikely at this point that I’ll have chapter five printed and ready for VanCAF this weekend. I’m so frustratingly close! But there just isn’t enough time left. Nevertheless, I persist in pushing forwards. Here is the front cover, ready and waiting for Photoshop to do its thing.

liberalreader:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor there see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

- John Steinbeck

Also because it was stamped out at every opportunity by a paranoid government.

Also also because the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement stole a lot of socialism’s best ideas and implemented them without the people having to resort to a revolution to get them. There was a carrot AND a stick. Do you remember carrots? Carrots were pretty great.

(via darrylayo)

darrylayo:

progressivefriends:

Glad I’m not the only one asking that…

Haha, I never quite thought of it this way. It’s just the way we are organized as creatures. We establish heirarchical communities in which power is exerted over a physical space for resources. Cooperative living including the exchange of different services to make humanity into sort of collectives of large superorganisms.

We created money as our minds became more abstract and sophisticated in order to broaden the reach of our superorganism and also to attempt to create an equal exchange.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, we are still working on creating that equal exchange! It’s a work in progress!

Anyway, funny picture :)

Ayo

Ooh philosophy time! I want to play too!

Whether it is conducted by government, by a regulated free market, or by cultural tradition, the exchange of goods and services and the redistribution of wealth are necessary parts of sharing space as human beings. Currency is one very effective way of regulating that exchange.

We’ve always paid to live on this planet, because we’ve always had to share it with other people, even when that sharing isn’t entirely voluntary.

Here there’s a new page!

I’m back on schedule and plan to stay that way.

Ha. I’ve been so busy I nearly forgot I had a new page to post. Here you go.
The rest of the story is here.

I’m really happy with this page. I’ve been waiting to draw it for a long time. I think it’s going to be one of the stand-out pages of the entire book. I’m also happy with the direction my inking is going in. This last scene has really pushed me to experiment with some new techniques.

And yeah, you can’t go wrong with home-made screentones. They are gritty and awesome.