Category Archives: Web Comic

Princess Pricklepants Presents Stoats as a Measurement – Delightful Details

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In case you missed it, here is the full comic:

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We updated the masthead to use “An Artful Web Comic of Delight and Wonder” a while back, but sometimes accidentally use the old one. Whoops. While this is sort of issue 14, issue 12ish had a few posts, so we’ve decided to count them as one since it’s just easier that way.  We haven’t mentioned it before, but we always put the issue number in the upper left hedgehog.

This comic was dedicated to a running joke from March Mammal Madness where Stoats as a Measurement has been ongoing in describing various mammals stats for many years now. If you search for the #StoatsAsAMeasurement on Twitter you’ll find a treasure trove of wonderful things.

(2019’s March Mammal Madness is coming pretty soon, and should be excellent. Mammal battle brackets, science, education, interesting mammals you’ve probably never heard of before, lots of things coming together. On Twitter you can follow 2019MMMLetsGo and search for the  hashtag, there’s much to see. There’s also a Facebook version though Twitter’s where the action really is.)

There’s even an excellent print by Charon Henning:

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(available here)

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The updated Pricklepants Labs logo featuring a stoat nucleus really just pleases us somehow.

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We made the art for this a good while ago in prep for this comic, and liked it so much we had to share back then. We still like it.  The little paintings, the serious expressions of hedgehog and stoat, the careful drawing of the quills. It really comes together.

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We initially were thinking we were going to draw a big pile of 1,200 stoats for this, but since we started working on this comic two days ago, we realized that wasn’t going to happen. The American black bear’s weight actually has a wide variation, from 90 lb/41 kg/297 stoats to 550 lb/250 kg/1815 stoats.

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Tardigrades are fascinating, microscopic, nearly indestructible little water bears. When they go into their state of cryptobiosis, tardigrades can survive extremes of temperature, radiation, and even the vacuum of space. They’ve been around since the Cretaceous and survived multiple mass extinction events, probably thanks to this microscopic superpower.

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You might have wondered why we included a picture of a 737 in our comic. We have been busy with a lot of things (and have been playing far too much Disney Emoji Blitz) and sort of lost track, so we started this Thurs. night in a panic. We happened to have done a drawing of a 737 in October that we liked. Problem solved.

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Don’t forget Valentine’s Day is coming! We had made a Stoat Valentine a little while back, so this was another case of recycling to save time. While the original’s style is pretty, it wasn’t well suited to a comic.

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Since Valentine’s Day is coming up, here’s a free, very affectionish Valentine for you. The bee, stoat, and chickadee aren’t to scale with each other, but to took some artistic liberties. It turns out we really like drawing bees and birds. That chickadee still really pleases us. Perhaps a Princess Pricklepants, Ornithologist will be coming up since we’ve discovered we really like drawing birds.

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We hope you enjoyed this comic, even with a subject matter that wasn’t very hedgehog-centric, and with a rather abrupt ending.

Princess Pricklepants Presents The Quilluminati – Delightful Details

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There’s so much history people don’t know, and we are always excited to get to be an educator! This strip packed in a lot and here we enumerate some delightful details.

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This is a very good title panel if we say so ourselves, and we do say it. So there it is. The currency stylization of the background doesn’t exactly make sense if you really think about it, so don’t.

 

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The intense conspiratorial stare of Grand Quillmaster in the center is very pleasing to us. We spent a very long time drawing a background for this panel. We went with halftone shading, abandoning the proper clean shading of ligne claire stylization and regretted it a little, but there it is.

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Do you see how the plasma engine’s flaring obscures the line of the pyramid? We do. It is sightly wrong. But the composition really tells the story of “hedgehogs built the pyramids and also are the reason people believe in flying saucers,” which is a story that needed to be told.

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This is the best. Just say it. Admit it. It’s true. You know it’s true. The original this is based on is an Egyptian Book of the Dead funerary text, so if you were to go to the trouble of reading the legible parts of the hieroglyphs you could read all about that.

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Very legal & very cool. Not everyone learns about ancient hedgehogs riding dinosaurs to build Stonehenge in school, and it’s a shame.  It’s an apatosaurus, in case you were wondering.

 

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The secret phrase is one more people need to hear, but no one wants to see how things would have worked out if the Quilluminati’s tiny quilly guiding paw hadn’t restrained humans’ terrible ideas.

Princess Pricklepants Presents Bat-Hog vs. Count Hogula Part II – Delightful Details

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Today we published Princess Pricklepants Presents issue no. 8: Count Hogula Part II (we forgot we needed a title until it was too late).  In case you missed it, here it is:

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We didn’t go into the details of the previous comic since it was a little less exciting art-wise, and seemed pretty straightforward. It was mostly prep to get us to this comic.

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Since Bat-Hog entered the graveyard Hogula is in, we got to make everything Goreyesque, which is good. We’re not great with the comic styling we were using in the previous comic, and don’t especially like it, so we were very happy to escape to this.  Also coloring is hard, so all black-and-white is nice, except shading with crosshatching is harder than coloring, so darn.

The highly hatched hog-rocket landing generally pleased us. We fiddled with it a lot, and would have fiddled more only at some point you just have to stop. It doesn’t quite draw the eye to tell the story of the landing as much as we’d like, but we’re picky. Bat-hog’s determined walk through the bleak snowy graveyard towards the crypt, the tombstones, the crypt in the distance, these we like. In the layout we bled the two top panels together to give some sense of motion.

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A dramatic meeting. We worked on each expression for a good while to get a very serious, stern Bat-Hog. Empty white holes in a mask are nice and easy for making expressions. We made a much more mysterious Hogula that invited multiple readings. Bat-Hog’s quills are a lot more varied than Hogula’s since he just crashed in a Hog-Rocket. The conceit for the bottom panels gets set up here, writ small.

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We put a tiny message in here about the shadows, because it’s not how shadows work. We fiddled a while, reached a point where we could live with the wrongness, and left a confessional note. Nice dramatic left panel, I think. We added the bats late, but once we thought of it, they really helped things pop.

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Bat-Hog’s quills will never settle until crime has ended. The shadows again, let’s not talk about those. We played up the mirrored Bat-Hog and Hogula, each with their long dark cape/cloaks, their bats, and other similarities for the comic, but now we really want to make a vampire Batman just to test things out some more.

We left things hanging with poor Hogula complaining about suffering unfair prejudice by the living, next week we will fill in more, so stay tuned.

Princess Pricklepants Presents Hedgehogs In Space – Stellar Details

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Today we published Princess Pricklepants Presents issue no. 6: Hedgehogs In Space.  In case you missed it, here it is:

ppp-comic-1-6This is the intro comic boldly going where no hedgehog comic has gone before. While this particular issue has some Star Trek influence, now that we’re through this intro comic, the goal is to be more akin to Muppets in Space, the single greatest sci-fi show ever produced. Every real sci-fi fan knows in their heart that the Muppets in Space Star Wars episode was the most ambitious crossover in history.

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It’s always helpful to start a sci-fi thing off with an explosion. This helps the audience immediately know that we’re dealing with sci-fi, and not, say a torrid hospital-based hedgehog soap opera (which starts with a hospital scene) or a hardboiled hedgehog detective (which starts with some moody, noir setting). We bet you knew this was a sci-fi episode right away. Explosions. They work.

Another fascinating explosion fact we’d like to share is that the model for the explosion we used to make the drawing say “explosion” was the Atari 2600 Missile Command box art.

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Excelsior!

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We don’t have a lot to say about this panel, since it really speaks for itself. We’re very pleased to be able to bring Boris in as Boris here. You might be wondering why Boris is calling the robot a “little robot” when in terms of the scene, the robot’s not small. The reason has nothing to do with the robot, and everything to do with a bear who wants to pursue a science of scent-based phenomenology.

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Crew members complaining and gossiping behind the backs of other crew members are a staple of sci-fi. Fun fact: the background of the bear and cow scenes are the same drawing mirrored. We liked a lot of the details the bear’s speech bubble hid and didn’t want to waste them. That bear’s a talker.

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We think this panel pretty much speaks for itself and manages to say a lot with one image.

We are still generally following ligne claire here though we were looking at a lot of Möbius drawing when coming up with a setting. Apparently we really like the Franco-Belgian comic artists.

One little detail we haven’t mentioned before but which is nicely illustrated here is that we follow the Law of the Simpsons: hands have three fingers and a thumb. We’ve been quite consistent with this from the start.

final-panelWe think this one came together pretty well. We’re back to the view screen from the beginning, the crew is all together save the robot, and we have some new mysterious bits like the hedgehog-esque shuttle. The robot is flying the shuttle, hence not in the scene.

If you can identify the blue planet with two rings you’ll find the text has a richer, deeper, more symbolic meaning.

We hope you liked this one, and we look forward to future Hedgehogs In Space where we can explore things like Space Madness, Existentialism In Space, Cows and Bears Bickering In Space, etc.

Princess Pricklepants Presents Pricklepants Labs – Delightful Details

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Hello everyone,

Today we presented our third comic, which unlike “It’s The Great Pumpkin Princess Pricklepants” will be the first of a hopefully long running series. In case you missed it, here it is:

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While we’ll be doing a few other things for a while after this, we will definitely be periodically returning to the Labs. Science, the future, inventions, experiments there’s a lot to show and tell you about.

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You won’t recognize this from the comic since this was a pane we developed but skipped.  Crosshatched black and white ink drawings produce such lovely art, but clashed with the rest of the styles enough that we didn’t use it. Crosshatched black and white ink drawings are on the way once we meet Count Hogula.

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Take a nice long look. Glorious, isn’t it!?  So much science!  So much art!  If you don’t think it’s glorious, take another nice long look a the hypno-disc…

keep looking at the hypno-disk…

the nice round hyno-disc…*

Clicking here to see a shirt dedicated to this panel feels oddly compelling, doesn’t it?

* Note that according to traditional hedgehog orthography this term is spelled hypno-disk, with a K, but due to scribal errors, it’s been spelled hypno-disc, with a C, often enough that both spellings are considered correct.

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At some point you’ll really admire this schematic. Maybe even yesterday! Waka waka.* This comic combines science, line art, and the Little Mermaid in a way heretofore unseen in the universe. We hope this artistic experience is as fulfilling for you, dear reader, as it is for this humble hedgehog webcomic artist. Click here to make it even more fulfilling with the single best hedgehog time machine schematic tee shirt the world has yet seen.

*Pricklepants Labs is an imperfect homage to Muppet Labs.

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Getting to draw two flying cars is an automatically good thing.  Except for the part where if you imagine what it would be like if humans had them and rain civilization destroying death on everything it’s less good. So don’t imagine that. Instead consider that we got to return to something like the ligne claire art style we like so much. It’s designed to have great clarity since it was designed for children’s book illustrations. There are clear border lines around every distinct form, shading that’s lower contrast but still uses distinction in bordering hues to define separation, etc. But you can still compose comic art in the style that is interesting as an illustration for adults. By contract we’re required to regularly write on art related topics like ligne claire, since this is an artful web comic, as is stated at the top of each comic. Also we really liked how the trees came out.

There’s a shirt dedicated to this panel here.

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Who couldn’t be pleased with a nice, safe, responsible scientific experiment? We were trying to express growth movement here mostly with color and motion lines. There’s no background setting to force a perspective, which makes things more abstract, and lets the viewer fill in the perspective on the gamma-ray-o-tron. We really like putting little arrows pointing at things with text.

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In this final illustration, the background is less busy to help focus on the hypnosis-disc which you should again look at carefully. Very carefully. You will eagerly wait with bated breath next week’s issue of Princess Pricklepants Presents.

While we’re still learning to draw, we think this one came out reasonably well overall. We managed to include a bit of foreshadowing in this comic, so tune in next week to see what that’s about. In the overall comic, we only used three types of stylization for quills, which is perhaps less ambitious than the debut issue, but it seems nicely balanced. Since we’ve calculated that pi equals three, it’s a nice round number.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Princess Pricklepants And Our Inaugural Webcomic Issue

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Hi everyone!

Today we presented our first installment of Princess Pricklepants Presents, an artful webcomic of delight and wonder. The single greatest webcomic ever created by us. Since this is our first comic, we had a lot to say that didn’t fit in the little speech bubbles, so in this post we’ll share details of the art, comments on things, and notes about notes. In case you missed the comic, here it is:

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In this comic we managed to include references/homages to Alphonse Mucha, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Magritte, Rembrandt, the Flammarion Engraving, Hergé, with subtle references to a few other artists of note, as well as hitting the minimum recommended daily allowance of jokes, both visual and written. We also drew a whole lot of quills.

Perhaps you’re asking, “why a web comic?” Well, you might remember that Princess Penelope Pricklepants used to write stories on our blog featuring herself as a model. Now take a look at this rare behind the scenes photo of Princess Perdita Pricklepants.

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As you can see, Princess Perdita is not at all fond of posing, and immediately on coming on set, is ever intent on climbing under any and every element of the set, making the old format much, much more difficult.

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But we still liked telling stories and we’ve been making art that told stories. We even made a few early web comic sorts of things like Princess Pricklepants and the Mystery in the Hundred Acre Woods and Princess Pricklepants, Astrophysicist. Also we’d made little single panel comics like this off and on.

 

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So a proper webcomic is a natural progression, and it seems like a nice way to do the kind of things we like to do. Doing these is a fair bit of work, so we created ten comics before we published to make sure we were up to the task, so you’ll be (hopefully) happy to know there’s definitely more to come. We also have many plans for more comics, and hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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While this might come as a surprise, we’re huge fans of Art Nouveau and especially Alphonse Mucha, so our title image is a cartoon homage, mixing the silly and sublime in what we hope was the right ratio.

 

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Now you probably noticed the Magritte between the Leonardo and the Michelangelo, and thought to yourself that there had to be some kind of symbolism of a surrealist sandwich with Renaissance bread. You are very astute, dear reader! There is indeed symbolism there.

While not so easy to see in the full comic, we were really happy with the comic version of Magritte:

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The apple’s brush strokes, the subtle two-dimensional cubist geometric clouds, the hat’s shading… It is a tiny happy thing.

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Michelangelo in comic form. I bet if he’d thought of it, he’d have done it this way.

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It’s a self-evident truth that monkeys and squirrels improve everything they’re involved in. While drawing this panel, we learned a few things. First, drawing each quill and coloring them individually is a lot of work. Second, hand painting each individual square in the gingham tablecloth to define the form was probably a mistake. Third, chairs are surprisingly hard to draw.

If you’ve ever read the Tintin comics by Hergé, you’ll be familiar with the comic style called ‘ligne claire’ or ‘clear line’ which we’re using here. It’s one of our favorites. The lines are drawn with a consistent pen width, there’s no hatching/shading lines, there’s a consistent naturalistic perspective, all forms in the image are in focus with each object clearly outlined, coloring tends towards lighter tones, and in general there are no shadows. (We took a few liberties with the tablecloth and chair cover because we’re free.) We’re not going to be using this style aways, but we really like it, so expect more.

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You have no idea how many times we repainted this and changed colors around and fiddled with the stars. The hedgehog running in the wheel space station is a highly hedgehog-centric joke we couldn’t resist. If you’ve looked somewhat obsessively you’ll have noticed that we’ve drawn hedgehog quills in three different styles in the first three panels.

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If you’re new to this blog, you might not be familiar with our cow, bear, and robot friends. We’d encourage you to catch up on some of our favorites:

Princess Pricklepants, Startup Founder Extraordinaire

Princess Pricklepants’ Guide To Politeness, Manners, Delightfulness, Grace, and Related Things

Princess Pricklepants, Magnificent Mender of Monkey Manners

Princess Pricklepants, Blogger, Anarchist (An early work, and odd, but still a fave.)

There are many more in the archives.

There’s much more to say about our friends, but we’ll be introducing you over time. Now, let’s take a closer look at that cartoonified Rembrandt hedgehog in the back.

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Just look at it!  Magnificent gloriousness.

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And of course, we had to include a close-up and a nerd joke. Penning those quills took much time. Since this was our inaugural comic, we perhaps took the detail in the art a little further than we’re going to for every comic. In the end, we used five (or maybe six) stylizations for quills. We believe that is a record, and will be contacting Guinness.

We’re looking forward to sharing our comics with you. We’re currently planning to publish weekly on Saturdays, though there’s a chance we’ll change to biweekly, since they are actually a good bit of work to make.  If you’re not following us, please follow us on social media where we share comics, art, jokes, and all sorts of wonderful things.

Facebook: https://facebook.com/princesspricklepants/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PPricklepants

Tumblr: https://princesspenelopepricklepants.tumblr.com

or you can follow our blog with the little link thing on the side.

We also have an Instagram account, but note that we won’t be posting comics there (with the scale we prefer, they just won’t fit): https://www.instagram.com/princessperditapricklepants/

If you like our art, you can find shirts, posters, mugs, notebooks, zipper bags, and other delightful things on our Etsy Shop.

We also have a wider variety of tee shirts on Amazon.

Do let us know if you have any feedback, questions, or comments, we’d love to hear from you. (Twitter/Facebook preferred, but any work). See you next week. Excelsior!

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Princess Pricklepants Presents Princess Pricklepants Presents

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Hi everyone, we have exciting news!  We are starting an artful webcomic of delight and wonder titled ‘Princess Pricklepants Presents.’ And look! Here it is!

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next: Princess Pricklepants Presents It’s the Great Pumpkin Spice Princess Pricklepants