Bonnie N. Collide Update!

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Finally, right? I've been a bit incommunicado recently because I was whisked away to the great north (i.e. Maine) for a couple days last week. What was my impression of Maine? Unfortunately, it wasn't the quaint town full of hot storybook characters bumping into one another, as Once Upon A Time has led me to believe. No, rather it was a vast, wintry landscape full of people in plaid and stores with names like "Dave's Adult Supermarket", where the sun set at 3:30pm. No joke, the moon was out at 5:00pm and I had no idea where the hell I was.

But anyway, I'm back and in a flurry to try to grab hold of Christmas spirit before it's actually Christmas and I've missed it. I've already baked cookies and watched Love Actually, so I'm off to a good start!

Ahem, anyway, here's your Bonnie!

 

Wrist Cuffs are Back!

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My Which Greek God are You? wrist cuffs are back in my Etsy store! My mom foolishly let me borrow her sewing machine. Which has been a pretty crazy adventure (sewing), considering how many times I was convinced that I was going to remain stuck to the machine for life. FOR LIFE! Leggo me, crazy bobbin. But it's cool, we're friends now, and as long as I speak in quiet, melodic tones, the sewing machine respects the boundaries of my personal space.

More Spirit Guides

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I'm chugging along with my next print project, so here's a peek at the next couple of Spirit Guides I've finished and have in the queue .... What's a spirit guide, you ask? Wellll, it's just my latest idea for a quirky way to celebrate some of my favorite characters, and package them in a portable medium that could be displayed anywhere! That way, people wouldn't have to deal with the age-old question floating around prints - to frame or not to frame? With these cute little hanging prints, they can dangle wherever suits your fancy!

Ron Swanson is my Spirit Guide is finally up in my Etsy Shop!

Next up is Roger Sterling, who's progressed from this:

... to this! He's almost done and ready to go on the market.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next up is Joan Harris ....

 

I'm still not sure if I'm going to go ahead with the Sawyer and Anna Lucia and Herman Blume prints I talked about here. I love them as characters, but I'm not sure my drawings do them justice. I'm going to hold off on finishing them until I tackle some of these other characters that I've been dying to draw.

 

Printsy Prints

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My first two Spirit Guides are done!

Margot
Ron Swanson

Since I want them to be portable and hangable, I glued the prints to thin sheets of wood, attached a piece of jute cord to the back ....

... and then I added just a few key qualities of the spirit guide to the back.

I'll post some photos of Ron once I've assembled him too, but for now Margot's up in my Etsy Store!

Spirit Guides

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My latest idea for a fun project to work on, which capitalizes on my fondness for characters, is to create little mini Spirit Guides. I'm taking a bunch of my all-time favorite characters from movies and TV shows and re-imagining them as inhabiting certain qualities I wish I had, or just wish I had on a particular day. For example .... Here's Margot Tenenbaum.

She's someone I view not only as the mopey playwright created by Wes Anderson (whose style I drool over), but as someone who possesses certain qualities I wish I had. Sure, she's sneaky, purposefully vague, and not the most loyal. But she's also romantic, resourceful, and unabashedly enigmatic. She's found a way to control her misery in a way that remains appealing, as easily as she carves out spaces in her bathroom and a museum to be her private sanctuaries.

Each Spirit Guide I create will be colored, printed, and assembled similar to my Giles Print:

 

They'll be hangable, so they can be displayed wherever you need them. At work, at home, in the kitchen, in your gym locker, wherevs. I'll post the finished ones as I do them, but in the meantime here are some more characters I can't help but love ....

 

 

 

 

Webby Webby Bang Bang

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So I'm working on revamping my website. Which is a pretty daunting task, considering how much time it normally takes me just to edit one page or (god forbid) revamp the entire concept I have for a series of pages. When you have 291 pages of one single webcomic, the thought of restructuring it usually doesn't go too far in my head before it hits a brick wall. I could spend 4 hours revamping a series of pages, or actually post a comic page. Or, y'know, go get something to eat.

Over the years I've gone through a few design phases, but mainly I've relied heavily on image maps.

Image maps always appealed to me because I could switch up the layout, images, and color palette without having to do to much coding around it. I loved the idea of big, bright images that people could click on, rather than having to navigate through tables and text links. But anytime I wanted to change a page, I did it individually, without considering the bigger picture. So my site has haphazardly grown over the years into a bunch of pages that may/may not match one another's overall theme:

As you can see, any sense of an overall design scheme is pretty much nonexistent. Recently, I've learned a lot more CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript, so I've been itching to redesign it. But if I worked in the way I normally work, it would remain pretty much the same. An updated piece here, an outdated piece there. I'm terrible at stepping back and painstakingly planning a process once I'm excited about something. I want to DO it, so let's do it! Instant gratification! Yay!

Luckily for me, I attended the HOW Interactive Design conference last week (as I may have over-mentioned already), and it helped me realize the value of putting on the brakes. Since this is such a HUGE change I'm looking to make, I'd like to make sure and do it right. (And by right, I mean the way that I define right, which could very well still include fake links and messed up pages. And probably will.) So, like  a proper grown-up, I've started with the first steps. Some sketches of the overall page structure/layout.

Next comes the wireframe, which is a black and white no-frills version of the navigation and what needs to happen.

(Okay, truth - I started the wireframe and then got excited/sidetracked by creating a mood board full of different things that I want to include):

Yep, off to a good start already. But I'll keep you guys updated on my process along the way, and I'd love to hear if any of you out there have gone through a similar site-wide redesign. Were you able to wait until the entire thing was planned? Or did you just start coding left and right, process be damned?

Trips Be Necessary

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Sometimes it's so durn hard just to retain a little positivity throughout the day. I let myself get bogged down in the minutiae of the gridlock and mind numbingly dull work conversations to the point where I forget about stuff to look forward to. But luckily . . . that's where random road/plane trips come through to save my outlook.

Last week I got to attend the HOW Interactive Design Conference in San Francisco, one of my favoritest of places. I used to go to San Fran on a yearly basis, thanks to the kickass indie comics show APE, that takes place annually at the airy Concourse Exhibition Center. For four lovely years in a row my friends and I would pack our gear, pick a pink hotel to stay in, and immerse ourselves in the hilly chilly lifestyle of that fair city. Sadly, when APE moved from APE-ril to November, I stopped going and haven't been back since. I also started going to Portland in April, and was forced to make a West Coast choice. I'm sorry San Fran! I'm so sorry!

Anyway. Just being back flooded me with warm snuggly memories. (Despite the fact that the homeless population has gotten a wee bit more aggressive since the last time I was there. Oddly enough, I can now say I haven't been trailed by scary guys in Baltimore as much as I have in SF.) And I'm not sure if it was the uber inspiring conference, the chance to meet up with friends AND family AND meet faces in person (the amazing Adrianne Ambrose), or the major bucks I dropped at H&M (it was RIGHT. ACROSS. THE STREET!!) ... but I've returned home feeling full of things to be happy about.

Thing #1: My new book to read

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I've been a drooling fan of  his since Virgin Suicides, and although I haven't read all of Middlesex yet, I was dying to read this one. Happily, it hasn't disappointed and it successfully kept me entertained through the multiple bumpy plane trips I endured in the last week.

Thing #2: My new way to run

It looks totally silly, and I've already lost my balance AND made my calves super sore by attempting it, but I love the idea of this Once and Future Way to Run. Although, admittedly, my favorite thing about this could be the random Peter Sarsgaard in the video. The world would be a better place if it had some more P.S. Or is this just because I've seen Skeleton Key too much lately, and my logic is all skewed?

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/02/magazine/100000001149415/the-lost-secret-of-running.html

 

Thing #3: My extra hour

That's right, it's mine, that hour. For all the people who complain about winter and the darkness creeping in on them at 5:00 when they're trying to leave work and make it home before the vampires get out ... I say "God, finally!" Fall is engulfing us and winter is right around the corner and everyone is batting down the hatches trying to get ready. Here's to layers, gray mornings, crisp weather, and all the loveliness that is November!

Trips Be Necessary

/

Sometimes it's so durn hard just to retain a little positivity throughout the day. I let myself get bogged down in the minutiae of the gridlock and mind numbingly dull work conversations to the point where I forget about stuff to look forward to. But luckily . . . that's where random road/plane trips come through to save my outlook.

Last week I got to attend the HOW Interactive Design Conference in San Francisco, one of my favoritest of places. I used to go to San Fran on a yearly basis, thanks to the kickass indie comics show APE, that takes place annually at the airy Concourse Exhibition Center. For four lovely years in a row my friends and I would pack our gear, pick a pink hotel to stay in, and immerse ourselves in the hilly chilly lifestyle of that fair city. Sadly, when APE moved from APE-ril to November, I stopped going and haven't been back since. I also started going to Portland in April, and was forced to make a West Coast choice. I'm sorry San Fran! I'm so sorry!

Anyway. Just being back flooded me with warm snuggly memories. (Despite the fact that the homeless population has gotten a wee bit more aggressive since the last time I was there. Oddly enough, I can now say I haven't been trailed by scary guys in Baltimore as much as I have in SF.) And I'm not sure if it was the uber inspiring conference, the chance to meet up with friends AND family AND meet faces in person (the amazing Adrianne Ambrose), or the major bucks I dropped at H&M (it was RIGHT. ACROSS. THE STREET!!) ... but I've returned home feeling full of things to be happy about.

Thing #1: My new book to read

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I've been a drooling fan of  his since Virgin Suicides, and although I haven't read all of Middlesex yet, I was dying to read this one. Happily, it hasn't disappointed and it successfully kept me entertained through the multiple bumpy plane trips I endured in the last week.

Thing #2: My new way to run

It looks totally silly, and I've already lost my balance AND made my calves super sore by attempting it, but I love the idea of this Once and Future Way to Run. Although, admittedly, my favorite thing about this could be the random Peter Sarsgaard in the video. The world would be a better place if it had some more P.S. Or is this just because I've seen Skeleton Key too much lately, and my logic is all skewed?

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/02/magazine/100000001149415/the-lost-secret-of-running.html

 

Thing #3: My extra hour

That's right, it's mine, that hour. For all the people who complain about winter and the darkness creeping in on them at 5:00 when they're trying to leave work and make it home before the vampires get out ... I say "God, finally!" Fall is engulfing us and winter is right around the corner and everyone is batting down the hatches trying to get ready. Here's to layers, gray mornings, crisp weather, and all the loveliness that is November!