I posted a thread earlier this month that captured some of the cartoons or little clay things I’ve made in the last decade, and well, since Twitter is a sucking hole of darkness where everything is lost, I thought i might want to capture the same content here. I’ll copy the content of the thread to be consistent!

Over the Years

I stumbled on an archive of images, namely comic and graphics that I made over a decade ago (or longer) and wanted to share! These were my pre-Linux days when I had Photoshop. I sometimes miss those times, because Gimp was never the same lovely experience. Let’s get started!🧵

Banana

This is probably the earliest one, and goes back to college. I am fairly sure I drew this by hand first. It was a pun, of course, “Going bananas.” 🍌 I think it was likely a doodle from class that I later scanned and then colored in, and would print to put on my notebooks.

Pumpkins

When I was much younger I would get immense joy out of making tiny things with clay! This was a creation from just after college, my little pumpkins! 🎃 It was most definitely around Halloween, and I was taking joy in the careful shaping, baking, painting, and glossing.

Tux

After college was also the first time I was exposed to Linux, or doing anything beyond word processing and using Windows for that matter! Of course I needed to express this through another clay creation… my own little Tux! 🐧

Sudomance (two panel)

During these early years of work I had immense freedom to learn, and really start to come into myself in terms of realizing what I loved to do. Around this time (still using Windows!) I found myself with free time and started drawing comics. Here is “sudomance” (drawn by hand).

Sudomance (three panel)

Of course I realized the middle panel was entirely missing! The comic was much more complete with it added. You’ll also notice this is in xkcd style, which I absolutely loved. Side note - I didn’t find any of the SUDOERS list attractive, it was more a society derived list. 😆

Catsup

This is probably one of my favorites! I drew it right toward the end of my time in my post-college job, directly before graduate school. I used to eat the same dinner every day at a campus eatery, and well, they had ketchup bottles. This is where my imagination went, of course.

Compiling

As I started to establish myself as a programmer, the mental imagery funnies started flowing! If anyone else is like me they might relate - every day (conversation with others in meetings, reading things online) is a constant joke reel. You fantasize about funny twists on things.

Cookies

Here is another one! This one is probably one of my favorites. I mean, cookies, right? That’s what people are talking about, right? Right? 🍪😆

Q-tip infultration map

Now we head into graduate school! I made a few early on and scattered throughout, but these were incredibly hard years for me, and I lost the spirit and energy to make more. This first one is (what I thought) most people understood about ear hygiene.

Super Kaus

After that, my Windows crashed, and that along with huge challenges and lacking Photoshop largely put a stop to making graphics. But it wasn’t a complete stop - I made this for one of my first colleagues as a PhD student. He was a man of few words, and I wanted to capture that.

The Velvet Stallion

This was an emotional poem of self-reflection for which I drew a stallion, but it was colorful and a bit magical. See the Velvet Stallion.

Fitgrad vs. PhD grad

And then towards the very end, maybe as things started to look up, I helped a friend with ideas for a T-shirt. It was a joke about the battle between the PhD students in the BioSciences program vs. the MD students. We both shared the 4th floor gym. Of course, SCIENCE wins! 💪

And that’s it! I find that I don’t need to make much digital art anymore because DALL-E and stable diffusion are so good! But it’s fun to look back on old memories and remember that underneath my programmer self there is a very creative beastie.




Suggested Citation:
Sochat, Vanessa. "Cartoons." @vsoch (blog), 26 May 2023, https://vsoch.github.io/2023/cartoons/ (accessed 23 Mar 24).