I told my followers on Twitter that I was going to do a blog post this week. I intended it to be about something else, but that fell through, so I decided to sketch up an idea from my friend EditorGeek instead. This one’s his fault:
May 12, 2012
March 24, 2012
Flamingoes
Random sketchbook comic from about two months ago.
I’m not entirely happy with it, to be honest. I feel like the punchline could have been written much stronger. Oh well.
March 9, 2012
Hour One
In 2003, I heard about the show “24″, in which each season has 24 episodes, each being the next consecutive hour of a day. It inspired me with an idea… what if there was a 24-hour comic strip? No, not a traditional 24-hour comic (although I greatly respect any who completes one of those). No… a comic where each new strip is the next minute of a day, making 1440 comics in total by the time that day is done.
So, I started the comic. And here it is, with all the strips that I actually finished:
And… that was all I wrote. Want to know how the rest of the comic would have gone?
(click to read the rest of this post…)
February 10, 2012
Remix: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – Oil Ocean
I was a pretty big fan of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in the early ’90s, and this was due in no small part to the music. Oil Ocean, a level near the end of the game, had some of my favourite music, so I decided to do a remix of that song:
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I don’t get to play with Middle Eastern and Indian instruments very frequently, and this seemed like the perfect place to give that a shot.
January 14, 2012
Cookie Minstrel Love Songs about Cookies
Random sketch of the day.
I can only assume that, after a rousing rendition of “C is for Cookie, That’s Good Enough for Me”, he promptly devoured his lute, with pieces flying everywhere.
December 9, 2011
Camp Skookum Theme
A new song has been added to the Music Player. It’s the theme for Camp Skookum, a virtual world in development.
The creators of the site asked that I create a simple, catchy tune, so I did. Beware, though… if you listen to it too much, it will get stuck in your head for days.
November 11, 2011
XI/XI/XI
In honor of today being 11/11/11, here’s a quick puzzle. Every one of these answers has XI in it:
- _ _ XI _ _ – Country south of the United States
- _ XI _ – Leave
- _ XI _ – Planet’s center of rotation
- _ _ _ _ XI – Mississippi city
- _ _ XI _ _ _ – Nervous, experiencing worry
- _ _ _ _ XI _ _ – Hydrogen ____, hair bleaching liquid
- _ _ XI – Cab
- _ _ XI _ – Poisonous
- _ _ XI _ _ _ – Upper limit
- _ _ _ _ _ XI _ _ _ – Die from lack of oxygen
November 8, 2011
November 2, 2011
JiA #23 – Dragons on a Campout
Yep, I finally got around to coloring it. Thanks to everyone who encouraged me that it should be a Jellyfish in Armour toon!
September 13, 2011
An Orchestra of One – Chapter 14: Humbled by Beethoven
This will be my last “Orchestra of One” post for awhile. It’s been fun, but I only have so much time available to me, and I want to put other things on Screenhog.com (comic updates, for instance, have been pretty sparse lately). However, before I go on my hiatus, I’d like to share a story.
Last year, I attended a concert in which an orchestra was about to perform Beethoven’s Symphony #5. Now, I’d already been composing music commercially for a few years, and I was feeling pretty confident about my own skills as a composer, thinking that I was a pretty awesome composer, if I said so myself.
However, any pride in my own abilities was pretty much crushed as soon as the orchestra started, though. The entire symphony was absolutely beautiful, and I sat in my seat amazed by the skill in what I’d heard. “Beethoven was able to come up with something this beautiful? 200 years ago? Without computers? WHILE DEAF?!?”
Clearly, I still have a lot to learn.
You do too. Beethoven1, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach… we will likely never get the point where we’re considered a master like they were. In some ways, that’s kinda depressing.
But on the other hand, we also have advantages that they could never have dreamed about. We have access to instruments that weren’t even invented when they were alive. Every major song created in the last 200 years can be instantly available to us to learn from. Musicians are paid more than they ever have been in history.2 And, most importantly, we have tools at our disposal capable of almost perfectly recreating the sound of an entire orchestra… by ourselves!
There has never been a better time to be a composer. I hope that the articles I’ve written so far have helped to inspire you, and I imagine I’ll be writing more in the future. If there’s a song you want to share, put it online3 and post about it in the comments! I’d love to hear what you’ve made.
Previous: Chapter 13: How to Get Noticed
Footnotes:
- It’s difficult for me to think of Beethoven without thinking of Schroeder from the Peanuts comic strip. So, here he is. ↩
- Yes, despite the high number of “starving artists” out there. It’s a frequently ignored fact that, throughout most of history, artists didn’t get paid (or if they did, it was in tangible things like room and board, not in money). ↩
- Getting a song online is actually pretty easy. There’s a lot of free webhosting out there. ↩
