Hourly Comic Day 2023

Hello all, to my infrequent blog!

I thought I'd do a little post about Hourly Comic Day this year. I'll call it my first post of the year, in hopes that means I do another one!

Hourly Comic Day happens on the first day of February every year. I've done it for the past three years, though only shared my drawings for the past two as the first ones were a real learning curve (read: totally rubbish). I'm hoping to do it every year I can into the future, as it's a nice time capsule - even until the year where social media doesn't exist and we only know the date by looking at the moon because all the calendars were hijacked by aliens after the meteors hit. If I can still find pencils.

It might not be the way most people do it, but I tend to do a drawing on the hour, and post it at the beginning of the next one (so I do my 9am drawing at 9am, but post it at 10) so there's some lee-way to make sure I've finished it!

9am

Overtones of saving money on gas heating, undertones of disconcerting adult foetus.

I tried to use two incompatible coloured pencils here (orange polychromos and blue luminance) so the electric blanket wires showed up through my body. It didn't really work, but I had to move on to...

10AM

You'll notice here that I actually did several versions of the *closing laptop*, only the best two shown here. Again, no time to revise etc.

Also, I've only just noticed this, but the colour palette I used was Red and Blue (on White). Which is fitting both because I was feeling depressed about the British News, and also because I was angry then tried to calm down. Funny how these things subconsciously happen.

11AM

I think this might be my favourite drawing of the day. Partially because it features my wonderful new mirror. Partially because it is very accurate and will hopefully serve as motivation to Book a Damn Haircut.

12pm

(It's the Innocent Berry Set Go juice. It comes in lots of colours and I like all of them.)

1pm

For some reason, I much prefer physically hand-drawing on HCD. I think it's because it's satisfying having a wad of physical drawings at the end of the day. But doing it all digitally would save a lot of time and faff with photographing and scanning and editing.

2pm

3pm

The perils of being the same height as Michelle Obama strike again.

4pm

The phone alarms! The papers! The pencils! The chaos !

5pm

The daylight had disappeared by this point and I didn't have the energy to sit by my scanner for the rest of the day, so I went digital. Which is a shame as I wish they were all the same medium. But the greatness of Junior Bake off softens that a bit, somehow.

6pm

Then I started scanning everything in, and my phone died so I gave up with posting for the day. But 10 drawings isn't too bad? Last year I managed about 14. There's always next year...

Unless otherwise stated, all images are (c) Gracie Dahl. Please do not re-share or reuse without permission.