#17: Eyes closed, covered, and on

Hello window shoppers,

It’s that time again, time for a cartoon for all the parents out there, a cartoon for all the pirates, and a cartoon for all the people trying to escape the wrath of a calculated bird or two.

This and more, right here.

Keeping the keys in and the engine running,
Chris

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Caption: “We lost your mother somewhere around the third, ‘And after that I'll…’.”

This one goes out to all the parents out there. Maybe you’re trying to work a few jobs, or maybe your little ones are more than a full-time job.

I’ve heard from a few parents recently who, when they describe everything they are juggling, appear almost super-human. This cartoon goes out to them, and out to the parents everywhere who are doing as much in a day as I do in a week.

A little artist’s note: I can’t actually remember when I did the first draft of this cartoon, but what I know is that it didn’t look like this. As it turns out, getting the right composition using a square table is a lot harder than it looks. On top of that, this is my first run at drawing a high chair and a child hanging out in it. Complicated matters, for me at least, all round.

Caption: “Oh aye, one is practical, the other is for fashion.”

There really is soooooo much joy in this one. I mean, pirates!

There is something inherently fun about eyepatches. I mean, they are very practical, but they’re also a little bit silly. And, I suspect, if I bothered to look deep enough, I’d probably find that pirates didn’t even wear them or if they did, they wore them as some sort of battle armor.

But just look at those eyepatches.

A little artist’s note: So many of my cartoons take a zoomed out look. There are two advantages there, first it means I can fit more in and, second, it means that I don’t have to add so much detail. But with this one, it’s all detail. And I genuinely lost count of the amount of times I drew and redrew these pirates to make them felt like, well, pirates. The other challenge was to draw the eyepatches, because they really had to look like eyepatches for the joke to work. In previous drafts, they looked more like sunglasses which, while it made the pirate captain look very cool, it also meant the joke didn’t work. In the end, this is just fun, really.

Caption: “We've got a clear shot of the head. Go. Go. Go.”

Birds. They’re just so damn crafty! We just don’t know what they’re really up to. But we can guess.

When I was a kid, we all lived in fear of this. It was the swoop, and you didn’t know if the birds were going to attack you, if they were trying to annoy you, or if they were going to leave you a deposit. In the past, I’ve had all three although, thankfully, not all at the same time.

But what if it was all organised?

A little artist’s note: I know, I know, another bird cartoon. But, I should add, that the birds are far nicer and more detailed than they have been in the past. I mean, just look at those feathers! I really love this visual. With the bird in the, literal, war nest wearing the tiny helmet, as if it is preparing for an airstrike. Question: should the other bird have had a visible earpiece too? Who knows? Who knows what birds really get up to. That is my fence-sitting answer.

Thanks for reading MiddleSquiggle!

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