In which I draw horses rather badly, plus FAWM update, plus Vicious Visjes

I like horses. I don't like drawing them, but they're better than bicycles at least.

Today

This panel, from today's new Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan page, “Clippety-Clop”, still cracks me up, years after I drew it:

Read the full page through the webcomic's own website! That, after all, is where webcomics belong, on their own websites, with archives and proper comic navigation.

This page is also one of the last, at least for a while, in which I draw horses. These are not that bad, honestly, but I can tell which parts of the horse I avoided drawing:

There have been some earlier panels where I could not avoid drawing the whole horse, like on this page, and yeah, that doesn't look that great. Donna Barr once told me that men can't draw horses and while I was able to point at counterexamples like Franz Drappier, I do think there's something to it. Horses as a hobby, or an obsession, have become a feminized domain and as usual when that happens, men bail out for fear of not being seen as manly, so men and boys don't interact with horses that much. But I did, as a boy! So what's my excuse?

The horse club I took riding lessons at even showed horse drawing instructions in its newsletter. And honestly, as a breakdown of a horse into its basic shape, the instruction set was not bad. Something like this, but even simpler. But at that time, I wasn't that much into drawing yet. I was just starting to realize that comics were made by people, that I was people, and that therefore I could make comics, and the time between that realization and the end of my riding lessons was very short. So unlike Donna Barr, who drew horses in motion obsessively as a child, I've only ever dabbled. And for most normal kids, that breakdown into basic forms only gets you so far; you need to understand how everything fits together and what every part is for. Maybe next time I need to work on a scene with horses in it, I'll study them a little more. It's much easier now with so much photo reference at your fingertips, as long as you take care not to use reference created after 2022 or so.

Earlier

At the time of writing, I'm three songs into February Album Writing Month, and I've contributed to a four-way collaboration in which the person starting the chain came up with something completely left-field. I don't think I've ever felt as out of my depth in that type of collaboration before, but I managed to get a part out. My solo demos are still some of the roughest I've ever made; I don't bother with properly producing or even arranging them any more and the third one got posted with unedited GarageBand Drums throughout the track. This is why I donate to the organization: because they provide hosting that disappears some time after the year's project has run its course, usually early April, I think.

Way back in the 1990s

My brother asked me to share this and why not? I'm not on this but I do have a personal connection with it. For a while, this band was one of my favorite local bands from Groningen, the Netherlands.

After the end of The Hooded Crow and Alpha Alpha, Johan again teamed up with Michel Bouma to form the crossover band Vicious Visjes, who did pretty well locally. Here's the video for their usual set opener and album opener, “Miss Tits”. Yeah, they were that kind of band and it was the late 1990s. It's still pretty catchy.

Bonus comic for paid subscribers

An older version of the page below can be read for free (supported by those ads) at Keep an Eye On Things. You can read on from there, or binge-read the comic from its very beginning.

And the full page:

See you on Friday!