Search and Research #105

Yes. Yes, it feels good to gt this idea out of my head and on paper...and now online. I have tried in the past to make the color strips the sort of things that are worthy of rendering in color. I really liked the idea my friend Bryan had of blending works from the history of art into the library setting, such as Strip #30. I'm a big fan of the surrealist painter Dali (and most of the rest of the surrealists actually) and so for this one, I settled on his The Persistence of Memory as a subject. It is not an exact copy as the Magritte was, but more like a homage to the painting. This strip is my tribute to the mind numbing and ongoing task that many student workers perform called Inventory.

In my student worker days, inventory was a regular task we were asked to perform for almost the entire school year. I think that anything we didn't finish during that time would be finished over the summer. The data would be analyzed and put to use, and the process would begin again the following August. I hated doing inventory. I hated it even more when the clipboard I had been using was replaced with a 5 pound portable barcode scanner that was not only unwieldy but emitted a loud beep for every barcode it scanned. Even now, sitting in my library office, comfortably away from the possibility of having to perform the task, I do not think of those times fondly.

This is for all of us student workers who were at one time or another called upon to sacrifice sanity in the stacks with a clipboard and a pencil (or a portable barcode scanner.) Enjoy!

Search and Research #104

Yeah, it's been a while. And, as the strip indicates, I've been super busy. Things have calmed down though, so hopefully the weekly strips will be back on schedule soon. Enjoy!

- Eli

Search and Research #103

How about these Olympics huh? Yeah...I'm really into 'em too. I've had this idea for like, 2 weeks now, but all my evenings turn into an "All Olympics, All the Time" situation. So, yeah, I'm finishing this strip a little later than I wanted.

This is a real situation...I spilled soup on my shirt during lunch one day, and there was a very obvious stain on my shirt. Not being able to go home, I had to cover it up and the only thing I could think of was the two name tags I have (one old, one new) and sat at the desk thusly attired, enduring many strange looks.

For the purposes of this strip, I envisioned that Marc had an old name tag that was misspelled, which he pulled out of retirement to cover a stain. Enjoy!

Search and Research #102

Hey! Here we go with a new strip. I had my week as a camp counselor, and a week of recovery, and I've got a couple of funny ideas for upcoming strips, so the strip is moving along. After I scanned this strip in, I realized that I really made a mistake trying to put lips on Marc from this angle. I've never tried to draw Marc from this angle, but it's how I envisioned this strip working so I had to try. I don't think I'm going draw him from this angle again.

I also noticed that Boük's head shape changes in each panel, although I think that it is sort of interesting that maybe his head changes shape with his expression. We'll have to see. Enjoy!

Search and Research #101

As promised, here is a new strip! I'm going to go ahead and confess that I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to keep a "strip a week" schedule through the summer. I have a lot of stuff going on that keeps my free time tied up, but I will try to put up more strips than I did last summer. Here's to eating watermelon, raising tomatoes, and reading online comics. Enjoy!

Search and Research #100!!!

Yay! It's done, this colossal strip is done! I had wanted to do something big and special for the 100th strip, but really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I thought about doing a super long strip with maybe 12 panels or something, or one that was just one big image. i decided that one image appealed to me more, and the initial image I had was SCOM, having just watched the Transformers movie, tearing through the library having constructed a body from the office equipment that had been laying around.

I couldn't make that work though, so I decided it would be more exciting to draw SCOM in a robot body fighting a dinosaur. Obviously my favorite dinosaur is the Tyrannosaurus Rex. I used to draw dinosaurs all the time, but it has been a while, and I wanted to get it right, so research was in order, which is what I spent much of last week doing. Anyone who visited the Facebook Fan Page last week noticed that I put up a picture of SCOM in his robot body, which I also had to work out last week, because historically I'm pretty bad at drawing robots and I wanted to do this right.

So anyway, here we are. I usually draw these strips on regular, letter sized sheets of card stock which are 8.5 x 11 inches. The paper I drew this strip on is 12 x 17 inches, which just happens to be the scanning area of the scanner outside my office. So, this is a huge sheet of paper, which will soon be framed and hanging on my wall in my office. I think I can speak for Jason too when I say that this strip has been a delight to draw, a wonderful creative outlet, and great way to meet librarians from all over the world who I would not have otherwise met. I thank you all for your support, encouragement, and kind words over the past couple of years, and I look forward to what the next strips have in store.

It's going to be a couple of weeks until strip #101 due to my buddy Jason's schedule. He is been working feverishly on a big programming project, and has had almost no time to collaborate with me on future strips. He and his family are going on vacation this weekend and next week, and he will be out of touch, so I'll have to wait 'til he gets back on the grid before I can start even writing the next few strips (unless inspiration hits me during his absence...which usually doesn't happen.)

I'm going to post some of my preliminary sketches on the Facebook Fan Page in the next couple of days, so be watching that. Ok, I think that's about everything. Enjoy!

Click this image for a higher resolution image!

Search and Research #99

Hey! I want to thank all of you who became fans of the strip on Facebook this week! If you haven't seen it yet, I've created a 'fan page' on Facebook for Search and Research and there is a link to it in the links section of this blog. I'm in the process of scanning some of the sketches I've done for this strip that haven't been posted online which I will be posting over there, and there's also a discussion board feature which I'm hoping to use. So, if you haven't already, I'd like to invite you to come on over and join the fan page.

You may notice that the jargon SCOM is spouting in panel two borrows heavily from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I love all the techno jargon they used on that show! I used to try to reword sentences in highschool using Star Trek scientific jargon to make myself seem smarter. All that positronic, neural net, venting plasma through the warp engines, dilithium crystal chambers, and tachyon pulses...it's just great. I was glad for the opportunity to work it into the strip. Enjoy!

Search and Research #95

I want to thank everyone for bearing with me last week. It feels good to get this next one out. Enjoy!

Search and Research #94

So, it's just like the caption says. My buddy Jason and I have been working out ideas and details for the next several strips, but our busy lives have kept us from really having time to connect all the dots. In the meantime, I wanted to do just an art piece. This is exactly my favorite thing to do on a cold day where I don't have to work...curl up under a blanket on the couch and read, particularly the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This was an experiment in using lots of lines to try to render objects in gray scale. I think it works in some places here, and doesn't in others, but overall I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

I thought some of you might be interested in what drawing this was like, so I scanned in my penciled strip. I sort of shaded in areas to help me remember what I was going to darken in, and as you can see I've sort of indicated where things are going to go, but I haven't tried to make every pencil line perfect. I then inked over these pencil lines in pen and added in all the cross hatching and other detail. Enjoy!

Search and Research #93

And now the explanation for the big reveal last week. After we initially revealed that SCOM had guns, even though it was pretty funny to me, it sort of bothered me that he had them. I mean, nobody is going to let anybody, even a machine, into a library with a gun. It's true that reality is suspended in that we have a walking, talking, abbreviating office machine in our strip...but we do try to keep everything else somewhat grounded in reality. So, this was a perfect solution for the whole gun thing. Enjoy!

Search and Research #92

What! What's this? A salad shooter and a caulking gun? Where are the machine guns? Tune in next week to find out! Enjoy!

Search and Research # 91

I have to say, I'm glad I didn't commit myself to getting a strip up last week 'cause I came down with a pretty bad cold last week and couldn't draw anything. I'm better now though.

Ok, so this strip features Randall. You can see the old version of him in strip #89. In that strip we have him complaining about a hair appointment SCOM made for him. If you look at strip #90, in the first panel you'll see a little guy in a hawaiian shirt with spiky blond hair. I drew that as my conception of Randall after the hair appointment. I thought it was funny enough that I wanted to deal with his feelings about the whole thing, and give us a better look at the new 'Do'. I'm including my little prelim sketch I did of Randall's now look. Enjoy!

Search and Research #90

I honestly worked on this strip for 5 nights. I started on Tuesday of last week, and finished up tonight. I really thought I'd have it up last wednesday, but alas, this was a much longer project than I anticipated. First, this was a color one, so I drew it on watercolor paper, which has little bumps and ridges. This made the penciling stage a little harder. Also, I couldn't erase mistakes much because if I did, the paper would become weak and the ink would run when I inked it. So I had to be much more deliberate in the lines I put down. Also, my pencil lines smeared a lot more than the normal paper I used, so that didn't help when I started inking. Tonight and last night I worked on coloring the page. I have to confess that I'm not much of a colorist, so making color choices sort of stresses me out and I spend a lot of my time mixing the colors...probably more than I actually spend putting colors on the page.

On top of all that, Jason and I decided that this should be a double sized image to really tell the story we wanted to tell, and I really could have used about 2 more panels to get the timing down. When I realized I didn't really have enough room on the page for the panels I wanted, I had to figure out how to combine some elements and shift stuff around, so that took some planning. Anyway, this was a lot of work, which is why it wasn't up last week.

Depending on whether Jason and I can nail down the finer points of the next few stories, we may not have a strip next week to allow us time to write scripts for the next few strips. We have some ideas cooking, but need to work out some details, so thanks for understanding. Enjoy!

Search and Research #89

It always feels good to get one of these strips done, especially when I've been putting it off unnecessarily. I spent most of my weekend, and my evenings this week, playing video games with my wife and losing track of time. Here's a tip for you aspiring artists out there...it's hard to feel creative with a video game calling your name (especially if you have to sit on a very comfortable couch to play said video game, which happens to be my situation). But, I managed to overcome my propensity toward laziness and get this strip done. Next one is a color strip, so we'll just have to see how long that takes! Enjoy!

Search and Research #88

It feels good getting this strip up each week. I wanted to try to get this one done yesterday, but watching the Packers lose to the Giants (talking football here for those of you who may not know...) really sort of ruined the rest of my evening artwise; I just couldn't seem to find any creativity in me the whole rest of the night.

It was good to get to some of our other characters as well. I really like drawing all of our characters (except Randall, whose first appearance is the only time I've drawn him well) and the past few strips have mainly been SCOM and Marc. And Wai Fai too I guess.

Having scanned this in, my first thought was, "Look at all those Jelly Bellies. That must be at least $50 worth!" Stuff I don't really think about when I'm drawing the strip. Anyway...Enjoy!

Search and Research #87

Welcome to the first strip of the new year!!! The new year is a time to reflect on our lives, make changes to our habits, routines, and in some cases, personalities. :0)

I am starting to try some new things with my pen and ink technique. As these strips go along I'm going to try to drop in some backgrounds and things behind our characters that, while being unobtrusive, will hopefully work to fill in the blank spaces. For instance, I liked how #86 came out, but I can't help but look at it now and notice all the blank white space behind Marc and Wai Fai. I usually don't draw backgrounds because they tend to clutter up the main action (at least my backgrounds do) but I think I need to branch out. So get ready. See you next week. Enjoy!

Search and Research #86

Well, well...I did actually get this done tonight, so here it is. This will be the last strip of 2007. See you all in 2008! Peace!

eli

Search and Research #85

Last week was exam week for my wife, which meant that I spent a lot of time fetching water and chocolate, and not drawing. But, she's done now (yay!!) until spring so I'm back to getting this story line together. I added the cool little powering down flash effect on SCOM's screen in the last panel by filling in the screen black, and then making a flash with a white out pen. Once the white out dried, I came back in with a pen and made the ends of the flash pointy. It was pretty cool (at least to me.) Enjoy!

Search and Research #84

Wai Fai? Eli, what does that even mean? Well, it's pronounced Wi Fi...ahhh...now you get it. I don't know, I just thought it was funny. And, just to show you that I didn't totally go off my rocker, here is a gentleman listed on IMDB with this name. Why does she have a sword? Well, in my initial doodle, she had one. I don't know, it seemed funny. Totally implausible, but I like drawing samurai swords, and how else would I be able to draw one? I guess it helps her fix things. Where is it in this scene? Well, Marc couldn't very well allow here to just leave it on the desk while she fixed SCOM, so he is keeping it safe for her in his office. I think that's about it. Enjoy!

Search and Research #83

Introducing...a new character!!! All colleges have (or should have) a dedicated ITS person handling computer issues, and here is ours. We're going to try to keep working her in, as well as our other staff characters (who, it has come to my attention, are not showing up very frequently but will be soon). I've included the initial character sketches I did for her for your enjoyment. If you are celebrating the American Thanksgiving holiday, Happy Thanksgiving!!! If you are not, I hope and wish you a wonderful week! Enjoy!