Xmas Gift Tour

Last holiday season I made three paintings as gifts: one for each of my two daughters, and one for my oldest daughter’s partner. Each one was its own picture. Here they’re laid end to end and told as one story, a holiday trip. A goat tows a bicycle across the desert, a manta ray glides beneath an empty kayak, and Jessica waves up at a funnel branch, half laboratory and half plant.

It works like Story Strip. The whole trip lies folded flat on one line, and rubbing the line makes each scene stand up out of it. Two things are new here. The drawing comes up first and the color rises in behind it once the drawing is all the way up, the way you’d ink a page and then paint it. And you don’t have to keep rubbing to travel: rest your cursor or your finger near the right edge and the trip rolls along by itself. Rest near the left edge and it rolls back.

And now it talks. Once a scene’s color is in, the comic lettering arrives in the order you’d read it: the narrator’s caption boxes first, then a speech balloon or a thought cloud, then a sound effect, and last a little dashed whisper, the kind of aside you catch out of the corner of your eye. The bicycle bell rings. Bubbles rise from Jocelyn’s snorkel. The funnel branch waves in the breeze like a windsock. On a phone it reads best turned sideways.

What I’d like to hear: does the lettering arriving one piece at a time feel like reading a comic, or like waiting for one?

Where this comes from

This is the second story built on the same idea as Story Strip, and the first one in color. The paintings were made in Illustrator, with the linework on one layer and the color on another, and that split is what lets the drawing and the color rise separately. As with the other line pieces, I built it with Claude, writing the code from scratch.