ErikaMoen posts
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Space Camp: Making Page 4
Let's look at some more of the edits I made between the two drafts of a chapter from my Letters From Space Camp book! For reference: Day Two: First Draft (16 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier Patrons Day Two: Revised (22 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier PatronsAs you can see, the original pages 21 and 22 had the exact same layout: three horizontal panels. Like I explained in my last post, I was just copy-pasting my text down onto each page as fast as I could go, not considering what the layout would look like ...
COLLAGE: I feel embodied when...
What She Knows is an art practice which prompts you with a daily statement and I am answering in my native language of collage. My previous responses are collected here. The prompt today day was:I feel embodied when...Ok, so I didn’t really know what “embodied” meant. I mean, I sort-of knew? But not enough to answer the prompt confidently. Using the dictionary definition of “be an expression of or give a tangible or visible form to (an idea, quality, or feeling)”, I still wasn’t sure...
Space Camp: Making Page 3
My agent sent me back a bundle of editorial notes on my first draft and, irritatingly, they all were spot-on and would make the story stronger 😤For reference: Day Two: First Draft (16 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier Patrons Day Two: Revised (22 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier PatronsIn the original draft, the class begins with a group member stating "I'm scared to say I'm 'quitting' drinking, so I've been calling it my abatement...' and then my narration takes over the rest of the...
COLLAGE: I Feel Held When
What She Knows is an art practice which prompts you with a daily statement and I am answering in my native language of collage. My previous responses are collected here. The prompt this day was:I feel held when...I feel held when I am in my garden- especially when my hands are actually in the soil or are on the plants in some way.I wreathed the hand-placing-seeds photo with the cut out radishes (and one lettuce leaf) to create the feeling of the gardener being "held" by them. "Engulf...
COLLAGE: I want to dress like...
What She Knows is a workshop which prompts you with a daily statement and I am answering in my native language of collage. The prompt on our second day was:I want to dress like...I like the way I dress. My two default outfit settings are a pretty good visual summary of me as a person, I think.One is tank top, sports bra, and shorty-shorts, the other is flowery, twirly dresses.Utilitarian and decorative, hard and soft, masculine and feminine. Both make me feel happy in my body and show off my fav...
Spot the Difference - Space Camp Pages
So! I made both a lot of changes and also kept a lot of things exactly the same between my two drafts of the Day Two chapter from my Letters From Space Camp book! Let's dive in to that, eh? For reference: Day Two: First Draft (16 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier Patrons Day Two: Revised (22 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier PatronsFor my first draft, I was copy-pasting my text from the script into my comic page template as fast as I could go. I didn't have any art directions in there as I wrote, I was just...
PROJECT: What She Knows
My brilliant, beautiful, bootylicious friend Lucy Bellwood is running a kind of workshop (although she does not call it that) which centers on answering a question about your core beliefs and senses over the course of 100 days. It is called What She Knows. (Enrollment for this non-class is already closed, but you can still create your own answers to her daily prompts!)Once again, I return to collage as my medium of choice for this project. It enables me to be a lot more creative with my response...
Digital Downloads - Public View
Bookworm tier patrons get 11 digital book files!These titles would retail for $62 if bought individually (some are not available publicly at all), but are exclusively on Patreon for a lump sum of $20! Patrons save $42!Books Ready For Download: DAR! Volume 1 (retails $5) DAR! Volume 2 (retails $5) Drawn to Sex: The Basics (retails $8) Drawn to Sex: Our Bodies and Health (retails $8) Oh Joy Sex Toy: Volume One (retails $5) Oh Joy Sex Toy: Volume Two (retails $5) Oh Joy Sex Toy: Volume Three (retai...
COMIC: Space Camp: Complete Revised Day 2 Chapter
Alright, alright! I'm done enough with this revised chapter of Space Camp to post it as one long read! But first... The original rough draft of Day 2 (16 pages) The expanded and inked pages: 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-18, 19-22And now...The touched-up and re-ordered pages!Current plan is to send these off to my agent for her feedback while Matt takes a pass at giving them a slightly-more-professional color treatment.One step closer to getting it sent out as part of a pitch to publishers!I'll w...
COMIC: Quarterly Tradition
Welding: Metal Flowers? Botanical Illustration? Classic Spanish Soups? Making Food Models? The Celtic Consciousness: Irish History, Literature, Culture? Black Artists of Oregon? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?I WANT ALL OF THAT.YES AND PLEASE.Someday.
July Art Round-Up
Now that we’re halfway through August, let’s catch up on all the shit I made in July! A Touch of Cloth (Historical Costuming Project)After spending hours and hours (and hours) cutting out, sewing together, and lacing up my stays pieces (it’s sort of like a corset) using shitty fabric as practice, I finally got to cut out the same pieces again but on my nice, fancy fabric!Not gunna lie, this was a SPACE CAMP-heavy month.Last year I finished the first draft of my memoir about my month in the...
COMIC: Space Camp Revised pages 19-22
Final batch of pages!I edited and inked the Day Two chapter from Letters From Space Camp. You can compare the first draft of the chapter with these finished-ish pages below! Catch up on the previous batches of revised pages: 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-18Ta-Da! The sample chapter is completely inked!Nowwwwww I'm gunna reshuffle some pages to make the the narrative stronger, tweak some of the toning throughout the chapter, and then I will post the final-final pages all in one post for you guys so yo...
COMIC: Space Camp Revised, pages 16-18
I'm editing and inking the Day Two chapter from Letters From Space Camp. You can compare the first draft of the chapter with these finished-ish pages below! Catch up on the previous batches of revised pages: 1-5, 6-10, 11-15Four! Pages! Left!!!!I just have four pages left to ink and then this chapter is done! ...Except.... I'm pretty sure I'm going to move around some of the pages that will technically be out of chronological order but it'll give a stronger through-line to the ch...
SPACE CAMP: Inked Pages 11-15
I'm editing and inking the Day Two chapter from Letters From Space Camp. You can compare the first draft of the chapter with these finished-ish pages below! Catch up on the previous batches of revised pages: 1-5, 6-10I'm too hungry to write any real notes! I'm off to eat!!!! BYE.
A Touch of Cloth (Historical Costuming Project)
Matt gave me a glass with a faint yellow-y tinged transparent drink and a straw so of course I took a big ol' slurp from it, assuming it was a fruity-flavored water, but NO.NO.IT WAS NOT.It was a canned mojito? I actually shrieked when my taste buds spiked on that weirdo fermented off-taste. I mean, it's not bad. It's actually nice! But I drink alcohol so infrequently that... mother. If my tolerance were a person, it would stand as high as my knee. Which is to say: my tolerance? She ...
SPACE CAMP: Inked Pages 6 - 10
As explained in the last post, I'm editing and inking the Day Two chapter from Letters From Space Camp. For fun, compare the first draft of the chapter with these finished-ish pages below!I'm almost halfway done inking this chapter! (Once I finish inking page 11, then I'll be halfway through) Here's my little progress chart to track my progress on penciling, inking, and coloring the revised pages:Years and years before she moved to France to work in animation, Natalie Nourigat wa...
SPACE CAMP: Inked Pages 1 - 5 (Day Two)
My last post shared some of my progress on revising the Day Two chapter of Letters From Space Camp and now I have the first batch of inked pages to share with you! For fun, you can open up the first draft of Day Two in a separate window side-by-side with this one and compare the differences in these first five pages ;)Each Friday I'll post that week's worth of inked pages here- at least, that's my plan. The new Day Two chapter is 22 pages (originally 16 in the first draft), which mea...
SPACE CAMP: The Revisoning
Matt and I had a check-in with our book agent and I kinda-sorta out-of-my-ass estimated I'd be done revising the sample chapter of Space Camp in the next few months and she was like 'Great, I'll start shopping the pitch around to publishers in the fall then." which means I.................. actually have to finish revising that sample chapter now and put together the pitch package 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬The chapter I'm polishing up is Day Two, which was 16 pages in my fi...
June Round-Up
Mending my ancient curtain with a stranger's skirtI fixed our ancient curtains! ……………………………………………...or did I. COMIC: #IsawU 🔒 Patrons OnlyBack in 2012, when Twitter existed solely to make jokes with your friends in 140 characters, Brendan J. ran a short fiction project where he wrote fake Missed Connections ads. I then bullied him into granting me permission to illustrate them and turn them into a tiny minicomic that has not seen the light of day lo this...
I've Been Framed (Joy Project Update)
My one goal going in to Goodwill was to find a frame for this really pretty 12" x 18" print I bought at a craft fair and suspended in its flimsy plastic sleeve on my kitchen wall.As you can see in my photo on the left, the plastic sleeve is not doing the beautiful art by Joe Wirtheim any justice. This bad boy needs a frame. So! To the secondhand shop!While they did not have anything quite right for my medium-sized print, I did find something just a touch... larger. Like. Basically two an...
COMIC: #IsawU
Journey back with me, dear patron, to a time long, long ago. A time when Twitter was new and used almost exclusively to make silly jokes with your friends in 140 characters or fewer.The year: 2012The game: Tweet fake missed connections ads (The classic "I Saw You" set-up) that doubled as complete short stories with the hashtag #IsawU.The tweeter: Brendan JBrendan's missed-connection-short-story tweets so delighted me that 11 years ago I wheedled him into letting me turn them into an ...
Wrap It Up In a Rainbow
For my 40th birthday, I flew across the country to spend it with some dear friends. At this moment I am on the return trip home, killing time until my connecting flight back home.I had intended to write about Pride but…I had a really good Pride. It’s the first one I’ve gone to in about 20 years. I associate Queer Spaces with identity gatekeeping and bullying so I stopped going to them after committing the cardinal sin of falling in love with a man. Hurt people hurt people, you know? And qu...
Stay(s) With Me (Historical Costuming Project)
Slowly but surely I am making progress on my 18th century outfit with my Historical Costuming sewing group! Having wrapped up my strap-on pockets, I now commenced on my very first set of stays.Commonly confused for a corset, stays actually pre-date them and are their own distinct form of underwear.At this moment I haven't actually watched this video by Abby Cox yet (I was just googling for images of stays to share here and I'm on a time limit before my flight leaves) but judging by the t...
This is How I Love You (A Jeans-Mending Project)
You wear your favorite jeans until they are shreds.Your body rubs away denim, fiber by fiber, until the light shines through them.It takes years, but all through the power of your body moving and living in these jeans, rubbing against them every day, grinding them away from the inside, you wear right through them.One day you put them on like normal and then you crouch or you bend and we all hear the rip.This is how I love you.With my needle and my thread, this is how I do it.I cannibalize denim ...
Mending my ancient curtain with a stranger's skirt
"You're the only person I know who would bring an entire CURTAIN to a hot springs." -Matt, after asking me what entertainment I was going to bring on our weekend retreat two hours away in the woods.When we moved in to our house ten years ago, the previous tenants left two long brown curtains up in the dining room window. We never got around to replacing them because if it ain't broke, why fix it.Then we got Tig.Above you can see one of Matt's earlier attempts at repairing the...
May Round-Up
Here's the stuff I made and/or posted last month! I got some art, I got some essays, I gotta lotta photos, man, I got a bit of everything for you! ART: The Making of ConsentaclesHere's how I made my big ol' faux-Ancient Greek pervert painting, from reference images to sketches to paint! COMIC: Coffee to Go (2001-ish?) 🔒Clocking in at 15 pages, this was my first long-form comic that I made as a senior in high school. It's a story about my best friend and me as we try to plan fo...
COMIC: Coffee to Go (2001-ish?)
My senior year of high school, I took a comics class taught by Lin Lucas. His teaching was profoundly impactful on little teenage-me and it makes my heart so happy to still cross paths with him to this day in the not-so-tiny world of comics, now as peers and friends.The following is the first long-form comic I made as my final project in his class. It's a compilation of the many real conversations my best friend, Liz, and I were having around that time, a lot of the lines repeated verbatim. ...
Marvel at the Cabbage Flower
My brassicas are flowering.I grew them both from seed, my cabbage and kohlrabi (on the left and right, respectively). In fact, the current cabbage may have been a seed I harvested by hand from a previous cabbage that I grew some years ago. I’m not 100% sure, but I’m, like, 85% positive that it is from one of the plants I let go to seed and then collected for the next year’s crop.Cabbages are part of the brassica plant family that also includes broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, Brussels spro...
Not to be nasty, but I'm digging my stink
I smell like sunblock and dirt and sweat.Well, I smell like sunblock, except for those two patches over the bottoms of my shoulder blades, where my tiny t-rex arms can't reach. They're not sun-burnt yet, but they will be if I keep this up. "This", meaning "Biking to work in a sports bra and gardening in a halter top."When I took this picture, I couldn't see the clouds. The raspberry stalks were glowing from the backlight and that's all I was trying to capture, but...
Space Camp - Revision
Ok.Ok. Ok. Ok.So I did the whole rough first draft of Letters From Space Camp, right? (My memoir about going through the Intensive Outpatient Program at the mental hospital in 2019)Before my agent can pitch it to publishers, I need to actually draw up one of the chapters all nice and finished as an example of what the entire book will look like, so the Big Wigs will be like "Yes, we definitely want to spend money on this book because the art looks clean and professional, not dashed-off as fa...
