Thursday, January 4, 2018

2017 Roundup



Here's where I guess I would post one of those photos of all my comics printed this year, except I didn't have any comics published in 2017.
Despite this, I drew a fair amount of comics and here they are in one easy post: http://www.alixopulos.com/news/2017/12/17/2017-comics-roundup.html
Hope you enjoy. -TOA

Friday, February 17, 2017

Saturday, November 12, 2016

the Luna Negra Cocktail

Every so often I come up with cocktails. The Luna Negra is a drink I made last spring, it's really best as a spring or summer drink but it can be enjoyed any time. 




It was inspired by a song of struggle by Los Cojolites. The Luna Negra recipe is made of everyday things but is dense with mystery.




How to make the Luna Negra:
stir in Old Fashioned glass with ice
2 oz 100% agave silver tequila
Juice from one quarter a lime
3 dashes orange bitters
root beer (w real sugar)




Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Summer Slam


Last month I drew this cover for the North Bay Bohemian:





....
I usually get a bit of inspiration in Fall, that manages to pierce the general cacophony of life and paying the rent and make it onto my sketchbook. We'll see, cautiously optimistic:





\\\

Thursday, August 20, 2015

All asleep

A comics version of a poem about sleeping by Alcman, who wrote this in 7th Century BCE Greece:

Saturday, August 8, 2015

fashion spread

Sketchbook page of women and their outfits in DTLA:
 

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Re-drawings: 2015 vs. 1969



 Here’s a roundup of all my redraws of the Bob Lubbers’ “Robin Malone” strip. I saw the originals when the comics reporter site posted a link to http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2015/06/you-are-not-malone.html . I thought it would be a good drawing exercise, and I’ve enjoyed it when other cartoonists like John Porcellino or Kevin Huizenga have redrawn comics. 

A few random thoughts from the experience: 
Even though I tried to blast these things out quickly, there’s no doubt that Lubbers’ was working even faster creating the things than I was copying them. And he’s a lot more tidy, accomplished and detailed than I am while likely working twice as fast. (In my defense, I was cramming this in between working a day job).

It was instructive looking so closely at his work while copying it. A lot of great little details that you might think extraneous if you had to draw a daily strip, but he still does them. The pose of Robin’s assistant in the background of the first panel of strip 3, doing some light filing. Or the production team in the background of the third panel, the guy has some card in his pocket, he’s holding a baton. Lubbers’ clearly took pride in his work. 

Besides forcing you to imagine different ways of composing, different perspectives of scenes, re-drawing is also a negotiation. I had to constantly check myself to neither mimic Lubbers’ too slavishly, nor veer completely into my own style and use his strip as a script, essentially. I wanted to attempt the gestures Lubbers uses without creating some ungainly hybrid. Lubbers draws extremely articulated hands, and I deferred to that because I thought they were a strength I might learn from. 


On the other hand, his faces are kind of dead to me, they’re in the Rex Morgan style that I was bored by as a kid and only sort of interested in as an adult, so I didn’t mind jettisoning that and imposing my own hyper cartoony faces on them. Trying to keep the whole thing from looking freakish was a good challenge. 

Saturday, November 1, 2014

October Ink

I decided to do that inktober thing where you draw something every day of october and post it. This was an easy decision because I decided to do it a few days before the end of october. These is they: