Stardrop. . . Mini Mysterious Theater. . . back next Jen Jacobs, aka, "Regular Jen" is in her student apartment.   She has just returned from a successful shopping excursion to the local thrift store. She found cute skirt and a flashy pink top for which she paid altogether only $8.59. —An unbelievable steal when compared to the average sticker price common in any modern fashion boutique. —And neither article of clothing bore any defect or trace of having been worn by previous owners. Jen wonders how this is possible and suspects the local thrift store might be involved in some kind of racket.   Now, a skirt and top like these are by no means the sort of saucy ensemble Jen would normally feel comfortable wearing around town, (though Ashelle had been so excited that she had managed to convince her to wear them home from the thrift store. A daring and somewhat anxiety-hued bus journey was the result). So no, not regular day clothes to be certain, but they will compliment nicely her on-stage persona.   Jen Jacobs is the lead guitarist in the super-cool, all-girl 80's punk rock band, "The June Rocks!".   The fact that both the 80's and the mass popularity of punk rock have long since faded into fond and slightly embarrassing memories in the collective human awareness before Jen was even out of junior high is of little consequence. The guitar case is sturdy and not yet terribly travel worn. It bears only two stickers from two un-paid but memorable gigs, performed in establishments which were both within walking distance of Jen's house.   In truth, Jen is new to the whole performance scene. In this decade, anyway. Okay. Not really much to look at actually.   One was from a bar and the other from a coffee house, both free to the public events where anybody could get up and play. And the coffee house sticker wasn't even an actual sticker, but rather a cut-out from a flyer Ashelle had found and helped paste to her guitar case the morning following Jen's first public performance. So, no, not exactly badges of severe road trip cred, but they had been nice events and she had played well, right out in front of everybody. That had been a very big deal for her back then.   So pardon her for loving her dorky stickers.   Oh, how she loved them! Nowadays, Jen was a real pro. Dozens of gigs and a growing fan following. Recording contracts being looked at. The June Rocks! were making serious waves. No kidding around!   Of course, nobody knew about any of this but a very select few, tucked away here as she was in the safety of her little university town. It was her big secret. She hadn't even told her parents!   —It wasn't that she felt embarrassed about the whole punk rock thing. Jen was pretty sure her Mom and Dad would be supportive of the direction her musical investments had taken, (veering a hard left from the conservatory), even if it did involve jumping around in sweaty night clubs and very occasionally having to plant a kick on the chin of those over-enthusiastic fans who made ill-advised gambits for the stage. Her parents were not the most with-it people in the world, but their affections were relatively iron clad. —So long as she didn't do anything particularly stupid. Jen was almost certain of this. Her Mom and Dad were the best!   No. . , parental support wasn't the problem. Rather, it was those awful, horrifying stories Jenny Mysterious had told her by way of warning. The one about electroshock therapy had especially wigged her out. And Jenny Mysterious' mom had loved her too. . .   So Jen was keeping her big-shot music career to herself for the time being. Just to be on the safe side. Ah! The new acoustic.   Not particularly punky, but this is a really nice instrument. A gift from her parents last year as a going away present before she headed off to university. Or given to her never, if Jen was in the habit of keeping track of conflicting time lines. However, as funky thoughts of that variety tended to fog up her brain, she preferred not to ponder such mysteries as deeply as she might.   A day might come when it would be necessary to work out all that tangled stuff, but now wasn't it. No sir! Not with such a beauty of an instrument resting ever so lightly in the same room with her. No, not terribly punk rock at all, but still. You get the idea.   The last time Jen saw her stalwart ladybug electric guitar, it was under a couch somewhere in 1985.   There was the cruddy loaner she'd been playing when Ashelle's weird alien cohorts had stormed the El Mocambo's dusky tavern and pulled her back home. But that thing was a hopeless piece of junk, and it had Marie's lipstick stains and other gross stuff on it. She'd stuffed it under a couch here in the present day. So, no decent electric.   No matter. She was classically trained anyway, and acoustic is her special place. Oooh.   The angelic voice of the instrument carries through the room with a ring both crisply defined. . , yet somehow smooth and warm. What a great guitar! —And still in tune from all of four hours previous when Jen last visited her beloved.   Jen Jacobs has music in her DNA and the calluses to prove it.   It's very weird to recall an entire lifetime, from her earliest memories to only recently this past Summer, where she couldn't have even held a guitar correctly, let alone know the thrilling sensation of taut steel string humming beneath her finger tips.   Foggy-headed thinking threatens for a moment to creep back into her mind with its aggravating questions, about paradoxes and quantum something or others. Jen makes the proactive decision to banish all that stuff away by letting loose with some sweet kickin' guitar love! There isn't really time for this. School work. Hmmm. Yes, that.   Two papers and a lab report due over the next two weeks.   Jen hasn't been finding it easy to stay focused; hardly surprising given the various upsets marching through her life lately. It was forgivable even, but enough was enough! Jen had always been one of the smart kids in school.   Not a genius, mind you, but definitely smart. And diligent. Good grades. Proud parents, fruit scented smelly stickers and happy check marks all in a row. And as she got older, Jen learned how to do the grindstone thing with the best of them when it came down to a calender crunch. In fact, when all the gears of the world were clicking around in orderly fashion, (and there were no errant space princesses crashing to Earth to knock everything out of place), Jen could be reliably counted upon to keep her calender from ever becoming crunchy in the first place.   There would be plenty of time, she calculated, to turn in some solid, grade 'A' work if she hit the books today and stuck with it without any unreasonable interruptions over the next two weeks.   Also. . , Ashelle was getting better at respecting the study boundaries Jen had put in place.   It had been a necessary maneuver.   —Being disorganized and flung crazily about on big adventures with no plan and open arms and open minds. . , that was fun for a while, even healthy, but Jen's natural resting state was one of relative peace and inner order; Being away from it for too long tended to make her grouchy and miserable. And so. . , boundaries. Ashelle, in her barely restrained manner, made an effort to observe these rules. —though, to be honest, Ashelle's recently increased level of respect for Jen's academic career likely had a fair deal more to do with agriculture than anything else.   Ashelle now lived and worked out on a farm quite some distance beyond the town limits.   Come to think of it, the fact that Jen saw her best friend at all was somewhat remarkable. Farm work was hard, and yet, almost every day without fail Ashelle managed to stop by for a couple of hours. Jen savored these engagements and looked forward to them. Ashelle was always full of stories and affection, questions and ideas for things they could do together. By contrast. . , Jen had only visited the farm twice.   Ashelle's brand of friendship dedication was something to be admired, and Jen wondered how she was able to do it.   *sigh*   Even including all her daily farm chores, personality kinetics and adventuring around, Ashelle still seemed somehow to have a better grasp on time management than she did. How was that fair? Intelligent time management was supposed to be Jen's thing. As per usual, Jen felt a wistful combination of awe, adoration and self-reproach when her thoughts settled upon the Blond Wonder for any length of time. Right! Time to get down to business.   First of all, it'd be good to get out of these punk rock clothes and into something more suitable for a long afternoon of paper and computer work. The lack of closet space in these student residences is appalling, but then, as Jen's mom often advised, "she was at school to study, not to be studied."   Eye-roll-worthy advice to be certain, but Jen found herself keeping it in mind nonetheless. Substance over style. That was her. Even on stage in punk rock mode, she held a satisfying, secret awareness that she wasn't just prancing around and making noise. She was actually really quite good. Some solid, hard-earned talent sat at her core. She was anything but just style. Though, as it happened, it turned out she was pretty good at that too. Hence, the value of a good wardrobe.   The muted scent of moth balls and dust waft up. Who even uses moth balls anymore? Their moth-offending odor has seeped deep into the old wood grain.   Jen's modest array of fashion sense displays itself before her, all hung and folded neatly from hooks somebody's grandmother probably hung her clothes on long ago. Moth balls or not, the wardrobe is actually a bit of a life saver.   As fate (and Ashelle) had arranged things, this rented room received her arrival fully furnished with this lovely old closet box. Beautiful, deep and olden wood. Very C.S. Lewis. In fact, Jen felt slightly at odds with the idea of storing her modern day sweaty punk threads in its august timber. She felt the old miser might not approve. Jeans and a Tee.   A classic since 1950. Um. . . Deep in the back of Jen's neck and skull, she experiences the onset of a really weird tingling sensation. She has felt this before. . .   Check out the guitar. Admire stickers. Review fond memories. Sigh. . ! Enough depressing reverie! Get out the guitar. Check to see if the guitar works with the new outfit. Strum out a couple of chords. Let loose with some sweet kickin' guitar love. Nice! Though. . . Okay, enough messing around. You have work to do. Consider work to be done. Again. Enough with the depressing reverie. Put the guitar away. Check out the wardrobe. Open it up and browse the selection. That's silly. Find something to wear. Pick out Jeans and a Tee Shirt. School book time. What's up? Oh boy. That can only mean. . . You. . ! Scene II scene 1 scene 2 Jump to last page you read STARDROP Next Episode, May 30th Previous Next Stardrop Vol 2 "A Place to Hang My Spacesuit" $12.95 A huge THANK-YOU to all those who participated in the Crowd Sourcing campaign. There are dozens of packages now in the mail, and dozens more going out over the next few days to all those who contributed! -If you contributed, you should expect to see yours show up soon! NEW! Stardrop eBook Now Available! (See the Studio News (below) for the scoop on this!) Here's a little extra item; One of my favorite comic shops is moving location, and I decided to do a little 4-pager about it featuring Ashelle and Tom. The idea is that the comic shop will be giving out this little story to help advertise their new location. Enjoy! Tip StarDrop's cartoonist! Visit the Australian StarDrop Mirror. (Thanks to Andrew and Katherine for their wonderful support over the years!)        Jenny Mysterious. . . First Day Back        Thieves & Kings. . . Sample Chapter from, Thieves & Kings, Volume 3, "The Blue Book" Thieves & Kings is not a webcomic. It is an all-ages fantasy/adventure graphic novel series which I've been working on since 1994. It is nearly done; I hope to wrap up the story in the 7th volume, (currently in production). The chapter featured here offers a good example of what it's like to read Thieves & Kings. --It's a peppy sequence, and it contains both regular comic pages, and some text pages. It doesn't show much of the title character, (Rubel) and none of the Shadow Lady, but Heath and Varkias carry the show quite nicely. I hope you enjoy this sample of my work!        The Walking Mage. . . The Walking Mage is a complete story. Originally it was done in black & white, (which you can check out here, if you like). I wanted to experiment with color and so began by using a computer to color the Walking Mage for its print release. After a few panels I decided that it would be a lot more fun to paint it by hand, and so switched to water-color around episode six. The story itself is quite a good little yarn; funny and pointed in many places, as political satire ought to be. I was actually quite surprised to learn this! I found myself laughing out loud in several places. --I don't know why this story in particular was so hard for me to accept, but it was. I avoided reading it for several years after it first went to press. The ending is rather abrupt, but it was a serial strip, after all. So anyway, after having let this web-comic languish in the digital attic, I've decided to pull it out and post it again for all the world in its full-color glory. This is the first time the Walking Mage has been available in full color on the web. I hope you enjoy the adventures of Quinton and Varkias. Cheers!        News From the Studio. . . July 8th, 2011 The Portable Drafting Board With Summer properly here, I figured I'd write a piece on drawing in the great outdoors. Here's my little portable drafting board. I've written about it before, but I realized that I'd never shown any pictures of it. Given that I use it all the time, I thought it might be neat to share. As any artist will tell you, the idea of working outdoors in the sun is a very appealing idea. Sitting under a nice shade tree to sketch in the fresh air? What could be more inspiring? But then they will try and quickly discover that there's a reason we build houses and put our studios inside them. Wind, rain, bugs and even days with too much sunlight can make it challenging to draw outdoors. But one of the biggest challenges is simply that of trying to carry all your tools and papers with you; -without losing your pens in the grass, without your papers getting bent or dirty and without the whole thing being awkward to carry on a bus or bike. Now, in my school days, I was a large proponent of the Big Hardcover Sketchbook. —The kind you can throw into a backpack and go, and when you want to draw, you can whip out, open up, and there you are, your drafting board is instantly in front of you with a fresh sheet of paper all nicely laid out. I recommend them to anybody who wants to learn how to draw. Nothing beats them for convenience. The only problem is that they are limited. With a sketch book, an artist is restricted to using the paper in the book, which isn't usually the best stuff. If you want to paint in them, the paper can soak through and get things messy. Past pictures you might be fond of are likely to get dirty and smudged over time. So really, sketch books are good for sketching in. . , and that's about it. (I guess they call them 'sketch books' for a reason). If you want to take your more serious work with you, then you need a proper art bag. The one thing that art portfolio bags are designed to do, that they do very well, is protect your paper while you carry it around town. Every artist can benefit from an art portfolio bag. The problem is that a portfolio bag isn't altogether the most convenient shape. They tend to be awkward in the way they take up space. You can't carry them like a backpack, so they're hopeless when you're on you bike. When you put them down, they need to lean against something or they fall over and generally. . , well, art bags are just kind of annoying. Also. . , while they are good at transporting paper after you've left your studio, they don't offer any help once you arrive wherever you were going. So unless you're heading to another place which has another decent work surface, then you're stuck having to solve that problem and your portfolio bag isn't going to help at all. Unlike the noble sketch book, they do not offer that one vital feature every artist appreciates: a nice firm surface to draw on! If only. . , I thought, somebody would just make an art portfolio bag which was ALSO a drafting board. . . How hard could that be? Well, as I discovered. . , not hard at all. The construction is pretty simple. Two matching halves, each a shallow wooden box, held together with a pair of brass hinges and closed up with a brass latch on the other side. When closed, the box is an inch and a half thick, big enough inside to hold sheets of 11" x 15" paper. (In retrospect, I think I should have made it big enough to hold sheets of 11" x 17", but at the time I was trying to make the whole thing small enough to fit inside a standard backpack, so compromises were made.) I used a thin laminate plywood, 3/16" thick, and using some two-sided carpet tape, I stuck down some "Borco" rubberized drafting board skin. (That stuff is simply the BEST work surface in the industry. Ask for it at your local art store if you own a drafting board. It's worth every penny!) Normally, my pencil case will also fit inside, but today I had two full decks of bristol board, so it wouldn't quite go. That little nut and bolt I keep in my pencil case. It's used to lock open the drafting board to full size. Here's the board in the locked-open position. The big seam down the middle means you can't draw with abandon on a sheet of thin paper because your pencil will trip over the seam, but when using bristol board, it's surprisingly easy to ignore. In any case, it makes for a fairly large work surface right out of your backpack. I do find, however, that I rarely need or want to do this as the box is nearly always big enough to draw on when closed unless I'm doing a really big piece. When fully open, there's plenty of space for all my bits and pieces. I can sit with it in my lap quite comfortably, though the downside is that when it is fully open like this, all loose papers have to be taken out of the box and put somewhere safe, or kept on top of the board. This is another reason I prefer to work with it closed and just take out the piece I happen to be working on. It's also good to have a few bits of masking tape available to keep things from blowing around if the wind picks up. I recently picked up a set of art markers. This little bag keeps them together and they can squat comfortably beside me for easy access. Art markers are really fun to use. Here are some pictures of some of my latest designs. . . I'm planning on painting larger versions of these. Markers are nice, but they also look a little un-finished. Not like a real painting. You can see the difference in the little piece below. . . The only thing about paint is that it can be a whole lot messier than markers. I did the above picture of Heath and Varkias away from my my studio, but I needed to take with me a paint brush and an old jam jar filled with water. I used a folded piece of scrap bristol board for a pallet and it worked quite well, but it wasn't as easy to do as it is at home. It was fun though. Always make sure you have a few sheets of paper towel! So anyway. . , that's my little expose of the outdoor travel-board art kit. I encourage anybody interested to bang their own together. They're easy enough to make, though it helps if you have a friend with a wood shop. Even if you don't though, you can generally pay a few dollars down at the local lumber store for them to cut your wood to the appropriate sizes and then assemble it all at home with some glue and finishing nails. (The latch and hinges take a bit more effort and a chisel, but that's pretty basic to figure out). I wish you all a happy and productive Summer!   Mark Oakley Wolfville, NS July 8th, 2011         Previous Comment       News Archive

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