Communities of Practice (Comic #803)

I’m really feeling the beauty of the various communities I get to be a part of right now. What a gift it is to get to be part of things with people.

This comic is inspired by the Communities of practice blog post I created this weekend. I’m quite pleased with how it came out.

 

Thanks to all my patrons and a special big extra thanks to Kate Webb, Erik Owomoyela, Stuart Barrow, Jesse the K, Brian Fies and Jay Hedtke.

 

Good things,

Liz

Communities of Practice, cartoon transcript

If you want to do a thing.

Thing 1 looks sadly at a battered yellow hat.

 

Find the generous teachers, and more importantly the people also drawn to learning.

 

Thing 1 and 2 (wearing hats) look up a t a tall entity wearing a somewhat crown-ish hat)

Paper hat expert: In my travles I’ve explored many paper hat making cultures.

 

Communities of practice can become more than the craft.

Thing 1: I struggle with crisp folds.

Thing 2: Me too! I’ve been using a ruler, but I’m going to buy a bone folder.

Thing 1: Ooooh! What brand?

 

They can be a way to find people just as weird as you are.

Multiple folks wearing different hats, some more silly than others, smiling at each other.

Nice smile

I’ve been at the Nebula Awards this weekend. I try to sketch people during panels. Sketching people can make me very uncomfortable (we know the human face so well that we can easily tell when minute proportions are off) especially when it’s people I admire. Regardless of how unhappy I am with the sketches I feel like time spent drawing 3-d humans is never time wasted. It helps me develop my craft and it helps me pay attention to the panel. I really wanted to capture Chip/Samuel R. Delany’s wonderful smile. His smile has a way of lighting up a room. I’m moderately pleased with this 5 minute sketch. I almost showed it to him, but I chickened out. 20140519-113857.jpg

Dear Readers

Thank you for being here. It makes me smile. Most of us want to live a life of meaning and knowing I can make people smile or make their day a little better or share a moment is very special to me. It’s really cool you dropped by. Thanks and love. L

Second mini!

A second mini comic has been created! It will have its debut at Boskone (on Friday I posted some to a friend to distribute there) and other locales TBA. Please let me know if you would like to be a fabulous Things distributor at a convention near you (with enough time to send media mail, phew first class mail gets spendy!) There will be a third mini-comic available this year as well, if you want to get your hands on that one you’ll have to ask Ye Olde Dragon’s Hoard Games and Collectibles…. But not just yet. I still have to finalize a few bits and draw the cover! Exciting in print times for the Things ^_^

Would you like to be a super Things volunteer?

There’s lots of stuff that needs to be done when it comes to having a webcomic. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming as a one woman operation. One thing that is a simple job and I should just be able to do is to write transcripts for each of the comics. That makes the comic more accessible for anyone vision impaired, has English as a language they struggle with or doesn’t like reading my handwriting. It should also create more written content that might help the Things show up on search engines. For some reason trying to do transcripts is really distracting in a way that makes it hard for me to draw comics! I would love a volunteer to write them up (the first 20 or so comics have transcripts if you want to see samples). You can either write it up in plain text and I’ll add or enter it straight into WordPress. Let me know if that tickles your fancy, as either a big one off project or a little bit here and there as you can manage it. For this you will get my love and appreciation, I’ll post you Things mini-comics (and possibly shrinky-dinks if I can make something pretty enough) and other yay you are a life saver stuff (TBA). If you want to commit to it on a regular basis I’ll create a special support staff page so we can appreciate your awesomeness sufficiently. If this interests you please email [email protected] and we can chat. Thank you!

Sketches

These are the kinds of things I draw when I’m trying to come up with an idea and I liked some of the expressions so much I wanted to share them with you.

Comic in Progress

20131122-115145.jpg 20131122-115200.jpg 20131122-115210.jpg 20131122-115220.jpg 20131122-115519.jpg Mixed media with 3Doodler. Box of mystery, what will you hold!!! Letters to boot during the time of Nanowrimo has been an interesting adventure, if only because I’m spending more time in dangerous art supply stores. I don’t think of myself as a particularly crafty person (she says peeling glue off her fingers), I’m not tidy enough and I’m very absent minded, but this is quite satisfying. FYI, with multi-panel pages like this you will find the next button at the top of the comic instead of the bottom.