Chapman Kids Blog

"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

San Pedro Garza Garcia

Tag: Betty Blonde

Will Kelly share her art with us again?

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On Thursday, March 3, 2016

In Art, Blogging, Homeschool

KellyCaricatureKelly went to a conference in Las Vegas. While she was there, here group gambled at the craps table for a little while. Since did not gamble, one of the guys in the group had her roll the dice for her several times and she won him $300. The guy gave her $25 for her trouble which she promptly blew on the drawing she holds in the picture. It was from a slightly tipsy street artist and you can see it is a monumentally bad likeness. You know what they way about ill-gotten gains!

This has inspired Kelly to start to share her art once again. She has started a new Instagram account named Betty Blonde Draws. She has her first three caricatures up there now. They are very good likenesses, but of the very quickly drawn ones. She plans to do more quick ones, but she also plans to spend some time to create some that are more thoughtfully drawn.

This is all great because she is kind of an amazing caricaturist. One of biggest worries is that the kids would have a lousy art education if we homeschooled. It turns out the had a fairly amazing art education including the study of art history. Maybe it was because I am so weak myself in that area, we worked harder to make sure we overcame my weakness. It is certainly true that I also received much more art than I had before we started the effort.

So if you want to be drawn, send her a picture of yourself. She is always looking for more material.

Betty Blonde #491 – 07/02/2010
Betty Blonde #491
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Programming and comic strips: An example

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On Wednesday, December 17, 2014

In Art

Kelly has decided she wants to start drawing her comic strip again as she has time. You can see an example of what she did before at the bottom of this post. She is going to do something different now, but plans to do a four panel strip like before. I wrote up some code to accumulate the hand draw single panels, add titles, copyright notices, borders, etc, and then post the results to our website. I could easily dust off the old code and use it again for her current efforts, but have decided to try to rewrite it as a way to improve some new skills on which I am working.

The idea will be to write a series of blog posts on how to set up an environment to write low level code that needs to go fast in C++ and the GUI and everything else in Python. I plan to talk about how I use Qt Creator, OpenCV, SWIG, PyCharm, PySide, some batch files, and a merge tool to automate this and make it easier. I am at the beginning of another series called Our Homeschool Story that I will also continue, but this is a very different thing that will provide some variety. I hope to start sometime over Christmas break.

Betty Blonde #220 – 05/20/2009
Betty Blonde #220
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Kelly’s comic strip apropo for her new home in Seattle

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On Sunday, October 19, 2014

In Art, culture

I noticed this awesome Betty Blonde comic strip Kelly drew over five years ago. It truly captures the pretentiousness and ambiance of Seattle, Portland, Starbucks and most of the rest of the Pacific Northwest. I just thought I should draw a little attention to it.
Betty Blonde in Seattle

Self-teaching: Kelly’s comic strip

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On Wednesday, January 22, 2014

In Art

Day 883 of 1000

We took down Kelly’s old comic strip site.  We wanted to have a home for the comics she drew for two years from ages 14-16.  Over the last couple of days, I was reminded of when how she learned to draw the strip.  Of course the start was our homeschool art with Kistler’s Draw Squad, but there was a lot more than that.  She and Christian drew lots of cartoons before Kelly even got started.  Then, Kelly started picking up cartooning books at bookstores and reading everything she could find about cartooning.

One of the things she learned and that I noticed in yesterday’s and today’s comic is that she often experimented with angles, distances, foregrounds, shadows, and a ton of other stuff.  The comic got a lot more interesting to me when she started pointing out the different techniques she used to make the drawing interesting, pull interest a certain direction, set the tone of a given panel, etc.

Some of the stuff I am noticing was from her earliest work so the implementation is a little rough, but she is definitely experimenting with stuff she has read or seen in other comic strips.  Here is yesterday’s strip.  Notice the third person view through binoculars in the third panel.

Now in today’s strip she tries a couple of different techniques.  The first panel shows the kids talking in the foreground with interesting stuff in the background to set the scene.  The las three panels are from a balcony or stadium point of view with a narrator at the top.  I love it.

There are lots and lots of different things she tries.  Some of it has to do with the narrative and different ways to show people talking to each other–how they are positioned, their angles, etc.  I am enjoying looking at these again as I re-post them.  I really hope she takes up her comic stripping again very soon.  I know she wants to start a new strip.

Betty Blonde #49 – 09/23/2008
Betty Blonde #49
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.

Betty Blonde redux

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On Friday, November 15, 2013

In Art, Homeschool

Day 816 of 1000
Betty Blonde #1
Betty Blonde #1
Click here to see full size strip.

Kelly drew a daily comic strip for two years from when she was fourteen until when she was sixteen.  I thought it might be fun to start posting these strips again, one at a time until they are all again available for public consumption.  My recent start on an index to all our homeschool art program posts got me to thinking about it.  The drawing of the strip was not bad when she started because she and Christian had practiced quite a lot on comic strip art before she started the daily strip.  Christian actually drew a graphic novella that I will eventually put up here, too.  We had all her comic strips up on the internet until a couple of years ago.  I hope to create an index for them as I have time.

Web comic artist starts spring training

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On Thursday, March 14, 2013

In Art, Blogging

Day 570 of 1000

Kelly is starting to practice for her new daily comic strip.  You can see her old one here. Kelly will reconstitute her old blog at KellyJeanChapman.com to complement her comic strip.  We are not sure where we will put that yet, but will keep you posted.  We will send out an email to the old mailing list so people can sign up again if they would like.

Kelly Jean Chapman coffee doodle

Revisiting comics and other web stuff

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On Tuesday, March 12, 2013

In Art, Blogging, Software

Day 568 of 1000

Betty Blonde 2010_07_14

I talked to my buddy Eric last night.  He described some very interesting ideas about the internet and blogging that has me thinking I might be able to improve my efforts.  He gave me some homework and I plan to do that, but it also got me to thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to spin back up my comic book aggregation and web publishing software (BleAx).  Kelly really would like to spin up her comic strip efforts again this summer.  She is not sure she wants to continue with Betty Blonde even though she has two years of strips under her belt.  I would like to have a side project I can do from my hotel room and this sounds like a good one.  It will take me awhile to get back in the saddle, but I think it will be a lot of fun, especially if Kelly is wanting to publish strips again.

Kelly trains for future cartooning

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On Wednesday, July 4, 2012

In Art, Education

Kelly has been working on her portrait skills by sketching her friends. Really, she wants to cartoon, but she has such a heavy school load that she cannot work it in other than about one drawing per night and a few on the weekend.  She figures if she keeps up her drawing skills for the next couple of years she will be ready to dive in again on her cartooning during graduate school.  Kelly started drawing a set of comic strip characters based around a little girl named Betty Blonde since she was nine.  Then she drew and published a daily comic strip for two full years starting when she was fourteen. You can check it out here:  Betty Blonde

Stuck in a “project” rut

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On Monday, November 7, 2011

In Education, Technology

Day 77 of 1000

Our 1000 day plan has given everyone in our family lots of energy to get on track with a lot of stuff.  Now that we are in the last third of the semester, Lorena and the kids hit the books hard most nights and most of the time on weekends.  We miss workouts more often than we would like, but that is because of all the school work.  I like to fill up the time when the kids do their school work with learning projects.  I am all fired up to do something cool, but now that Troy has moved on to more important research and we have hit most of our big milestones for the GaugeCam project, I am struggling with finding something that really excites me.  It would be very cool to work on a project like this Flying Machine, but do not have the mechanical skills.

I have what seem like very good options, but every one of them have some caveats.  BleAx is great, but Kelly will not have time to really jump back into her Betty Blonde comic strip until after spring semester. I could move on with GaugeCam, but we have not really defined what we want to do next.  The Android programming is fun, but I have not identified anything that is not already done that I want to do.  I work want to work on SQL, but that suffers from the same problem as Android.  Maybe I will talk to my buddy Jeff to figure out something to make that requires a control system and vision.

Update:  And another thing.  I am WAY to fat.  When I get in this mode and do not have a project to distract me, I eat way too much.  I have to find a project.

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