To be fair, “periwinkle” is a prettier color than “indeterminate blueish-greyish”.
– – – – –
Oh man, new semester started this week, and things are off with a BANG! I am taking a Three Dimensional Design course this semester, and the first assignment the teacher gives? “Make one hundred sculptures. Have them ready next week. No guidance, no advice, no suggestions. One hundred sculptures. Due next Wednesday.”
This assignment smells like a Cull the Herd effort to me. Who will rise to the challenge, who will rage quit and drop the course? Bring it on! Next week I will share a picture with you all of the one hundred sculptures I will make! Yar! One Hundred!
Swinging tangents a bit, I found out the new Decemberists album came out earlier this week and I missed the announcement. I plan to snag that today! The Decemberists are one of my favorite bands, if not THE favorite, and I dig the new folksy/roots direction of the new release.
I love Selkie’s facial expressions on each page, especially when she makes the one in the bottom left panel!
Thank you. Selkie has a great face for emoting. 😀
Holy cow! How large or complex do these sculptures have to be! D:
She said no restrictions or guidelines, so she is getting small fast and cheap. XD
I’m amazed that woman can make snide comments while wearing THAT. Expecting the Vietcong to come bounding down the stairs, are we? Werido.
Seriously. Come on.
-_-
The mental image you just gave me makes me laugh. XD Thanks!
Hey. I just wanted to drop a comment and say how much I enjoyed this comic. I only found it Monday, and I’ve read the entire comic at least three times.
The story is excellent and it really warms my heart to see Selkie and Todd interacting. I’m plugging it as much as I can. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for plugging the comic. I’m glad you liked it so much. Three times in a week? Wow. I am awed. 🙂
How old are you? [Out of curiosity.] Wierd question, I know, but….You darn Web Comic artists…you could 55 or 14 and I wouldn’t know or guess right…
:-3
Also, lol at the old land landys Selkie reaction.
XD
I don’t mind the question at all. I am 28 years old.
Oooh!
Do fishies! Do fishies!
Then if you get to keep the sculptures, you can sell them later as Selkie related. Especially if you do fishies small enough to be jewelry fishies.
Oooh, neat idea. Sadly, I can’t do that because I dunno a thing about metal or jewelry. 😡
You know what’s great for quick, easy sculptures? Clay, especially modeling clay. However, a weird kind of sculpture I had to do for class (still fun though) doesn’t involve an oven- the teacher had us make wire designs planted in styrofoam, put nylons over them, and then use acrylic paint on the result. It was fun, even though mine came out like an armadillo suffering from dimensional warp.
Haha the image of an armadillo suffering from dimensional warp nearly made me spit out what I was drinking. 😛
Personally love Sculpey, mainly because it lets me do the hard work at home and finish in the oven.
Hey! do lots of little balls, and make up chemical/atomical compounds….if you don’t know any, make them up!
Market it as a the atomic compound of ‘artisticness’!!!!!
😀
Fimo is good for that kinda thing!
you can ‘sculpt’ little fishes into it as well!!
ooooohh…..I want to do this project now!!!
At least Mrs Tarenberg meant well. I’m reminded of the story (urban legend?) of American troops who got shipwrecked off Newfoundland during the war. The townsfolk took them in and did their best to get them cleaned, patched up, etc.
The townsfolk had never seen black skin before, and were most perplexed when it didn’t wash off.
I know many an elderly person who don’t comprehend the occasional need for political correctness. Of course, it doesn’t help when the said person thinks you can turn blue from eating blueberries.
You can so turn blue from eating blueberries! You just have to eat them very very messily.
I don’t see why you couldn’t turn blue from eating too many blueberries… lol, you can turn orange from eating too many carrots and other orange vegetables.
lol, if you eat too many carrots it WILL turn your skin orange for a time, beta carotene is a natural pigment, a natural coloring. Excess carotene is stored in your skin until your body wants it and then turns it into active vitamin A as needed. An abundance of carotene in your skin makes you look orange. This condition is called “carotenosis” and is harmless.
Well, technically Blueberries have indigo/purple pigments. So even if you ate too many, you’d turn purple, not blue.
Also, I can already see your drawing skills growing stronger. It reminds me quite a bit of the early days of Questionable Content. 🙂
I have an idea about the assignment. The teacher didn’t say you had to turn in 100 UNIQUE sculptures. I’m assuming this is computerized so, make one rather intricate and competent sculpture then duplicate it 99 times. You could even change colors if you want an extra hedge. At best, the teacher will think you are fast thinking and innovative; at worse, you’ll have to play classroom lawyer and get an extension for the assignment.
How often do one get to say “This is my new daughter” XD
Hey I just dropped by to say I started reading selkie a couple of pages ago, and there is some kind of alluring charm to the whole comic that keeps me reading it. Very Good Job and keep going Dave!
I’ve been wondering, does anyone in the comic realise that Selkie isn’t human? Also, I’ve always found her colour to be more of a purplish-grey.
I figure the “people see what they wish to see” principle applies for the most part, and assumptions are made about skin conditions, bad teeth, etc.
Nice job with this. I’ve really been enjoying the current storyline. Oh and that Decemberists album is only $3.99 at mp3.amazon.com if you’re looking for a cheap digital copy of it.
I love the comic; it’s both hilarious and heartwarming at once somehow!
Also, at least 1 of these sculptures needs to be a foot-tall (ish; just bigger than all the others), anatomically-correct (clothed would be preferable) Selkie statue. Also you could make a chess set. it’s easy, and it knocks off 32 statues all at once.
Yay, new Decemberists album – thanks for mentioning it!
Good luck with your sculptures. I look forward to seeing them. Although I wasn’t an artist, I did attend a school with a huge art program, and I remember several crazy “cull the herd” assignments. The first semester of freshman year was designed to get people to drop out of the school altogether!
“Was?” …still is, and not just in art. My favorite “pick a new major” assignment was to find a bord stretcher. (My favorite answer for this one: a guy came back with a potted pine tree seedling.)
Dave> Cull the herd? Make ’em all Cthulu. Heh. One of my friends makes a lil’ business of making cute little weirdo monsters out of some kind of mold-and-bake clay you can buy at Michaels craft store.
As for the strip, hee hee:) Indeed. She is periwinkle!
I swear Selkie’s getting bigger when she’s annoyed or angry. Either that or the perspective’s messing with my eyes. Or maybe, just maybe its a super power of her people! They might just grow huge when threatened and crush their foes like the Hulk.
In my head, she is standing up on her tip toes somewhat when irritated. Although there is an alternate possibility…
lol, guess I didnt think of that. And cute sketch, she looks so adorable.
I’ve been loving your comic. There is a sweetness that is seldom found in webcomics.
Also, I would have been a jerk and sculpted the number “100”. And that is how *I* got through art school…
I think you would have to make at least 2 “100” sculptures. The assignment did use the plural. But totally agree. Twisting an art teacher’s assignment is one of the few classes where they appreciate it. That and philosophy.
Oh man, I know exactly how you feel right now. Except mine wasn’t “who will drop the course” so much as “who will be able to write a good enough final paper to pass the course.” Ah, the joys of college.
Also, yay, we get to see Mrs. Tarenberg again! Nice that they’ll get to come home again after several months of shopping 🙂 (months in real life time that is, lol).
At least she didn’t think it was due to silver poisoning.
You could Fimo a bunch of smiley faces call each one a different emotion. Or use different colors and call it some kind of statement on diversity.
Hey Dave enjoying the comic. Since you like The Decemberists,check out My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses.
I love MMJ, but never heard Band of Horses. I’ll make sure to give them a look-see, thaks!
OMG Band of Horses!! Though I am not familiar with all of their music, two songs I highly recommend are The Funeral and No One’s Gonna Love You
Also, been reading since late December and I <3 Selkie! Her accent is ridiculously cute, her expressions are fantastic, and she's just… so endearing – great job, she's the best! I look forward to seeing how her new family life progresses.
I love this comic, and I found it a few weeks ago and have been keeping up.
I had to comment because I’m a perler artist, among other things, so I wind up with quite the view of colors.
I love periwinkle (though I have a horrible habit of calling it cobalt, heh)
Are perler beads the ones you iron into shapes? I always used to melt the pegs on the boards from overzealous ironing. XD
Long time lurked since the beginning, now brave enough to comment! I love the comic and your art skills are taking leaps and bounds. Also, I laughed so hard at the dead fish in the car the other day. :3 I look forward to more wonderful Selkie!
Yaaaaaayyyy! Thank you Dave! You’ve finally put my intense color curiosity to rest! LOL.
I also gotta say I love Selkie’s expresions here too.
I tell my friends the same thing. My favorite color is Ulysses Butterfly…not Blue…Ulysses Butterfly is much prettier color then ‘blue’ 😀
“Make one hundred sculptures. Have them ready next week. ”
… two words, particle generator. 😉
.. hmm. apparently this isn’t a Maya/3D Max type of 3D art class….
Ya I thought it was that kind of Three Dimensional Design class too up until the end of last semester. But it’s also a required course. 😡
My sculpture solutions…
1. Bring in all the leftover “nobody likes this kind” Christmas cookies. They’re hard as rocks and there wasn’t any rule about when you had to make the “sculptures”.
2. Fill a bread pan with clay, then quickly cut it nine times across and four long. Dump the pieces out and pull each one in half. Bake until hard as rocks. 😀
The drawing you added (above) is also one of the most awesome, funny pictures of Selkie yet. Puffer cheeks! Hehehehe…
The Decemberists have a new album out?? I guess I’ll have to go to my local CD store to pick up a copy. Been in love with them since I first heard “Yankee Bayonet”
Normally the modern art trend of sticking a couple I-beams at various angles, welding them together and painting them a vibrant color irks me. Here, it could be very useful. You could easily do half of the sculpture requirements with nothing but that shape and intersection, cut commands. if you base them on real sculptures even if the teacher complains, if you can show them pics of the real sculptures and say that if universities, museums and city governments thought they counted as sculptures and voted with tens of thousands of dollars that they should have to count for the course 🙂 Examples of the style I am talking about (I found these in just a few minutes with the google query “I-bean sculpture” and “modern art I-beam” include:
http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/University_of_Michigan_Museum_of_Art
http://susieofarabia.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/modern-red-steel-beam-sculpture/
http://scottaingram.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-i-beam-sculpture.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sneakerdog/2502068828/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smozoma/617594475/
http://www.worldofstock.com/closeups/TNY2189.php
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cseeman/3688110367/
some off of:
http://www.chicoarthouse.com/sculpture_by_Dave.html
http://matthope.org/sculpture/
Since time spent on the comic is obviously more worthwhile 🙂
Keep up the good attitude,
Alexis
It’s funny you mentioned that, because we actually discussed this style of sculptural art in the class, and she mentioned she “doesn’t think they count as art”. A stance I agree with for my part, but it does make one wonder why she then encourages production of fast cheap mass-produced sculptures in the first assignment. XD
She seeks Adonis and his artist all in one go and I don’t always think that’s a good idea in an art class.
In that last comment, I made the assumption that the media was digital/CAD (because that’s what my course of the same name was, looking at the other comments seems other places have other ideas). Oops.
Good luck with all the sculptures, sounds like it could be both fun and annoying.
I really love the comic by the way, it never fails to make me smile.
You could do carvings of bars of soap – I did that for my 3d class. You can save/melt the shavings into another bar – and afterwards you will have decorative soaps to use for the whole damn year. That’s actually kinda cool. Now I have to go buy more bars of soap. Ach.
Holy god, I would drop that class faster than a hot iron skillet…..anyway.
Well, at least I won’t have to worry about that kind of thing…two-dimensional artists ftw! 😀 ….but we have to do the equivalent of sketches. fml. D:
This is very interesting and to be honest I cannot wait to see how this web-comic grows and evolves, Especially art and story wise I’m sure it will be a spectacle of glorious magnitude. 😀
Prehaps it didn’t say in the rules that the 100 scuptures needed to be different, in that case: “Where are the clones…send in the clones”
Otherwise, make a hunderd random heaps of a few matchsticks each, drop a bit of woodglue on each pile, let it dry one night and you’re off to go.
Oh boy.
Looks like Todd’s gonna have to teach some Valuable Lessons about Tolerance!
To Selkie or the land lady?
Bwhahaah that fire hydrant! I love it!
just had to chime in with one more unasked for suggestion for your art assignment.
There have been a bunch of suggestions posted here and obviously you are an extremely creative person yourself. Why not try your hand at a variety of different techniques and showcase your skills to your teacher? I would probably pick some overlying theme (like underwater) and then craft a bunch of loosely related sculptures. Fish in various mediums (sculpy, playdoh, cardboard, clay, soap, etc) underwater plants (great for that wire and nylon method), stack some shells together with glue and paint or glitter, grab some of this stuff http://www.xump.com/science/PlasticBubbles.cfm and make a sculpture of bubbles rising from the water. You get the idea. Yes I’m trying to get you to make a collection that Selkie would want to put on a shelf in her room!
Oh hey! I’d recomend WayWard Sons! That’s another GREAT webcomic!
You’ll be a fan in about five minutes!
😀
She looks to be a 50/50 (give or take) mixture of Space Wolf Grey and Fortress Grey.
(Miniature painting will ruin your colour vocabulary.)
Worry not… Selkie is not suffering the same fate as Violet Beauregarde.