blog: drawings

Good news, everyone! I’ve created a repository of Roll-a-Sketch drawings on the Internet!!

I love doing randomly-generated Roll-a-Sketch drawings for fine people like you. As you’ve probably seen, I post a few examples after each convention, but at any given event I’ve usually drawn many, many more than just those. Over the past few years I’ve drawn hundreds of fantastic chimeric creatures, and only a small percentage have been posted here.

So I’ve set up a new daily blog just to showcase these drawings! You can follow along at:
rollasketch.tumblr.com or
facebook.com/rollasketch

This is also a great time to recap the various things I do, and the various ways you can follow along if you like:

• My personal Twitter is @malki and I usually mention all the various things I’m working on! I also tell JOKES and post pictures of my CATS

• My personal Tumblr is davidmalki.tumblr.com and I post interesting stuff there sometimes too!

• I have a Vine account too — vine.co/malki — which I use ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY for conversations with my adorable kitties

• For Wondermark comics, you can come to the site directly (of course), or you can subscribe via RSS, the Twitter account @wondermarkfeed, or daily email delivery — all of those mirror every post that appears on this site. There’s a LiveJournal feed too, if you still have that.

• I post every comic on the Wondermark Facebook page too, but Facebook is underhanded: they only display page content to a small fraction of subscribers, because they want to get page owners to buy advertising and pay to promote their posts. It’s a dirty trick! So just be aware that if you follow along on Facebook, you may not always be seeing everything.

• Of course, I also collaborate with Ryan North on our ongoing Bookwar, and over at Machine of Death, the retail release of our card game grows ever closer.

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SPEAKING OF FUN SKETCHES

I drew a dinosaur dancing vaudeville! You can read more about why I did this, here.

It was a little sketch in a notebook that I liked enough to turn it into a shirt, which is available on TeeSpring now — it’ll be available for pre-order for two weeks, and if we hit the order threshold (45 copies), it’ll be printed. If we don’t hit the threshold, it won’t! THE CHOICE…IS YOURS

So, if you’d like to bring this fun li’l guy into your life, pre-order a copy of the shirt right now!

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A CORRECTION

Earlier this week, in my post about Artifacts From My Mom’s House, I showed a picture of jars and said they were spices used in making the beverage arak. My mom, the prolific correspondent, wrote me to clarify that the jars, in fact, contained various seeds, not spices.

Wondermark regrets the error.

Here are a few of the many Roll-a-Sketch drawings I did for folks in Seattle a couple weeks ago!!

Roll-a-Sketch drawings, of course, have their elements generated from lists of attributes by the rolling of dice! Like this CROCODILE + WHALE + POLICE + VICTORIAN:

Or this ELEPHANT + CACTUS + ROBOT + VICTORIAN:

Or his buddy/long-lost twin (we decided), ELEPHANT + CACTUS + HELICOPTER + BATMAN:

Finally, that old chestnut, the BEAR + ANGEL + SPORTS + CLOWN:

Would you like to get your very own Roll-a-Sketch? I will be at WonderCon tomorrow, in Anaheim!

IMPORTANT: I will not be there the whole weekend, and I will not have a table! I’ll be around on Friday the 18th only, to check out the show and visit friends.

BUT: A few times during the day I’ll set up shop for Roll-a-Sketches!

If you will be at WonderCon tomorrow, and you would like me to text you when I’m doing sketches, here is a form:

(Update: form removed! We’re done with that)

I’ll only text you tomorrow, up to three times maybe, to let you know where I’ll be — then I’ll delete your number when I leave. Is it weird? I dunno!! GO FOR IT

Just look for this!!

Will I have a banner fluttering from a flagpole like a royal herald?

I DON’T SEE WHY NOT

Here are a couple Roll-a-Sketch drawings I did in Austin at Webcomics Rampage last weekend!

RHINO + PARROT + CHICKEN + ROCKET:

RHINO + TURTLE + FROG + ACCORDION:

CROCODILE + TURTLE + SAILOR + VICTORIAN:

RHINO + WHALE + ZOMBIE + LAMP:

In case you’re not familiar with Roll-a-Sketch, here’s the gist, in the form of a sign that sits on my convention tables:

The columns are in pencil so I can erase and rewrite the options when I get bored. Someday when I have the time I’m going to make a fancy dry-erase version.

Then I draw! Sometimes I add commentary too.

The 2014 Wondermark Calendar features a Roll-a-Sketch drawing on each page, along with a bit of historical or biographical information about each made-up creature! And the watercolor treatment on each one (being created by Max Loren Shepard) really brings them to life:

As of this writing, there are only about 80 of the limited run of calendars still available, including only 13 of the Art Collector options (original paintings from last year’s calendar). UPDATE: They’re all gone!

These sell out every year — which, of course, I’m super-pleased about! I work really hard to make them a lovely piece of entertainment that you’ll be thrilled to keep nearby all year long. Yes, I assert that you will be THRILLED.

Don’t wait — get yours today!

Of course, if you’ve already ordered a calendar, or if it’s not your thing, OR EVEN IF NEITHER IS TRUE, I’ll also quite happily point out that the story collection I co-edited this year, THIS IS HOW YOU DIE, was just declared one of the AV Club’s Favorite Books of 2013!

Tasha Robinson writes:

…There’s an impressive amount of color and genre range in these stories, but also a touching amount of humanity: The theme keeps pushing the individual authors back toward the idea of understanding and accepting their mortality. Some of the stories are funny, some are odd, and some are brilliant, but they’re all deceptively smart about exploring all the ways individuals come to terms with death.

I just posted a sample of the audiobook (one full story that you can download for free) right here on the MOD blog!

The book is available on Amazon and everywhere else too! I hear that GIFT-GIVING SEASON IS COMING UP???????????

I had a good time in San Diego the other week! And I also had a good time at the Toronto signing earlier this week! If I saw you in either place, I hope you came away as delighted from the encounter as I did. At both places I had my full-scale mockup Machine of Death, and it was a real eye-catcher — in San Diego specifically, where the aisles are full with people shuffling along waiting for anything at all to catch their eye, it was neat to see people stop, squint at my “Free Death Predictions” sign, look at me quizzically, and actively volunteer to have their death predicted.

Here’s one account from someone in San Diego who’d never heard of the MOD before:

While we were staring at the machine trying to figure out what the hell it was, a bearded man approached from behind the counter and asked us if we would like to give it a shot…

THAT’S ME. I’M “A BEARDED MAN”!

Anyway here are a few of the Roll-a-Sketches I did at the show!

RHINO + TURTLE + MERMAID + TANK:

PIRANHA + PENGUIN:

ELEPHANT + SAILOR:

TURTLE + VADER:

PIRANHA + JELLYFISH + PENGUIN:

That last one was drawn in a copy of my recent book Emperor of the Food Chain! Perhaps you recall SOME MONTHS AGO when that book was released, I made sketched copies available online.

Now that I’ve been doing these sketches in earnest for over a year (last year in San Diego was when I came up with the idea), I’d like to put together a little book collection of just Roll-a-Sketch drawings. I’ve tried to be diligent in photographing the sketches I do at conventions, and back when I drew in all those books last fall, I made sure to photograph every single one.

Unfortunately, I lost the memory card that I used to photograph the book drawings. Tragedy!! But luckily, those drawings are all in your hands now.

So I need your help:

If you have a Roll-a-Sketched book (or multiple books) that you ordered last fall, I would really like it if you could send me a scan or hi-res photograph of the drawing(s).

If you do so before the end of August, I will put your email address on a list and send you a free PDF copy of the complete Roll-a-Sketch book collection once it’s done!

To ensure book-print-level quality, the images you send should be:

• If a scan: at least 300dpi. Grayscale is fine. Crisp with no blurry areas.
• If a photo: evenly lit, in sharp focus, no lens distortion. Grainy or blurry photos will be unusable. The photos I post here on the blog are the sort of thing I’m looking for: straight-on shots with no shadows. Any camera these days should probably take a high enough resolution picture for my purposes — please don’t re-save it at a lower size.

Email your images to dave at wondermark dot com, subject: “Sketch Rescue”. I’ll write back to let you know if the images work OK.

Thanks for your help with this!! You can send them anytime, but again, if you can send in yours before the end of August, I’ll send you a free PDF of the finished book. To reiterate, I only need copies of the drawings I did in books last fall — I do already have pictures of all the convention sketches. UPDATE: Actually I would like any sketches from 2012’s SPX (in Bethesda) or APE (in San Francisco.) Thank you for your help!

NEXT CHANCE FOR SKETCHES (and other goodies): GEN CON, in Indianapolis! Booth 743!

Here are some Roll-a-Sketches from recent shows! It’s funny how the dice work — even though it’s random, often a given element will pop up over and over for a while. Just the nature of chance, I guess! This bunch had a lot of mermaids in it. Saucy mermaids, as you can see!

RHINO + MERMAID:

CACTUS + MERMAID:

BEAR + SHARK + MERMAID + TANK:

MERMAID + HAMBURGER:

And just for good measure, HAMBURGER + GIRAFFE:

If you’ll be at the San Diego Comic-Con this week, come and get your own Roll-a-Sketch from me at booth #1229! (Mnemonic to remember: just think 1-2-3-4. We’re like 10 feet away from #1234.)

I’ll be there the whole time except for Friday morning from 11-12, when Ryan North and I will be signing copies of This Is How You Die at the Hachette booth, just an aisle away at #1116.

Comic-Con will mark the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the invention of the Roll-a-Sketch. I will celebrate it by continuing to populate the strange world that all of these creatures live in. IT IS MY HONOR AND MY DUTY.