Sabine Ganezer
My Sketchbook
the "Thank you for sharing, who's next?" section of this site
May 2020
The Fairly Oddparents Season 10 Fan Art -- Timmy & Chloe
A dark comic idea based on real conversations
Further development of the above dark comic -- some character design aspects ended up transferring into "Schmandemic"
"Suicide of Fries" would essentially be a cartoon about kids (circa ten years old) yet geared towards extremely jaded adults such as myself. It was the predecessor/ an offshoot of the "Schmandemic" idea where some kids are abandoned on a doomed earth, but here it's just two kids, Mickey and Yammy, and they don't really have superpowers. They just live in a dilapidated building passing the time until the end of the world according to their two contrasting personalities/philosophies.
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Mickey is an anemic, pessimistic girl who spends most of her time being annoyed by Yammy's antics, being disgusted by the human condition, being nasty, and contemplating suicide. Yammy, on the other hand, is a simple, fun-loving boy who sees the apocalypse as an opportunity to have more fun, and who accidentally ends up saving Mickey from herself multiple times.
This follows a common formula of the rather dim-witted, yet accidentally good-at-life male character and the jaded female character who sticks around him for some unknown reason while her superior intellect leaves her an unhappy person. I took some inspiration from Billy and Mandy in "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy;" I also wanted to create a young male character who could pull off the pink shirt as well as Timmy Turner, without being a rip-off of "The Fairly Oddparents."
Since I'm mostly cartooning for myself, I tend to indulge in concepts that cater to my own emotional and psychological needs. Writing is therapy if you don't expect or hope for anyone else to ever read it. Therefore, I find myself creating character pairings over and over again that mirror myself and the soulmate that the sick codependent part of me wishes to find -- thus, the (usually female) unstable sack of darkness paired with the (usually male) sloppy overflowing ball of sunshine.
June 2020
Digital Father's Day Card for my Dad
The "front" of the card shows cartoonified versions of our cat Artemis, myself, my mom (with her snake) and my brother (with his guitar.) I was still exploring the different brushes and getting used to the Procreate and Apple Pencil, as you can see. The "back" of the card is a paw print with lots of the fun brushes layered in.
Digital Father's Day Card for my Grandpa
Napoleonic Nudibranch card for my aunt
My aunt liked my cards for my dad and grandpa so much, she asked me to draw her a card, even though it wasn't her birthday or Aunt's Day or anything. I accepted the challenge as a learning experience.
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This is supposed to be Napoleon Bonaparte as an emperor shrimp riding a nudibranch. Emperor shrimps really do that in real life, just not with fancy French hats or ambitions to become ruler of France. (My aunt is obsessed with Napoleon. I, much more reasonably, am obsessed with marine invertebrates.)
July 2020
Cartoon/Comic Idea Inspired by "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy"
Working my way through the cartoons I didn't watch in my childhood has been an entertaining experience. At first "Grim Adventures" disgusted me, but I kept watching and it grew on me. The episodes got more compelling and less gory-just-for-the-sake-of-being-gory. Also, it's an example of "ugly" character design that seems unappealing at first -- I thought, how can I ever feel drawn to and invested in the feelings of this egg-boy with a removable boogar-filled deformed hot dog for a nose? -- but with slight refinements of the character designs and with my spending contextualized time with them in more emotionally compelling stories, they won me over. I got to the point of finding all the main characters cute, in their own weird way.
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Anyway, some of the episodes teetered on the edge of story concepts I found super intriguing, but didn't really focus in on those concepts as much as I would have liked. It got me thinking, how would I have told a story of the grim reaper falling in love with a goth girl?
Above: an earlier character lineup; Below: further design evolution
At the same time, I had been reading Graveweaver's Webtoon series I'm the Grim Reaper, which is much darker than a child's cartoon can be, but also has its moments of lightheartedness layered on top of an obviously dark general mood. That series influenced my perception of "Grim Adventures" and vice versa.
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The concept in these drawings, while I did spend some significant time developing characters and even writing the whole first draft of a first episode for page or screen, now seems more like an intermediary step towards some of my more differentiated ideas, which have a wider net of inspirations and could hopefully go in more different directions while still exploring the concepts and ideas that I find so alluring from both of the Grim-Reaper-themed cartoons that inspired this still-untitled stem.
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Basically, in this version of the supernatural cartoon world, being a Grim Reaper is passed down from parent-skeleton to progeniture-skeleton. Lucifer, or Lucy for short, was supposed to be initiated into his role by reaping a stupidly optimistic child during a series of household accidents, but as it turns out, Lucy takes a liking to the boy and refuses to reap him. So Lucy and Sunny spend a day together on the run from Lucy's parents and the other authorities of the Underworld. The situation escalates as Lucy spins a web of lies, having his parents believe he is just waiting for the right moment to initiate his destined art form while Lucy believes they're just having a fun day in town. But finally, the DMV (Department of Morbid Vocations) opens up the earth and forces a trial where Lucy must admit to his parents that he renounces their plans for him, and he and Sunny must work together to get back to Sunny's home. And yes, in the next episode, Lucy meets a disenchanted goth girl at school... but the outcome is much different from "Grim Adventures" Season 1 Episode 13.
The Princess and the Teakettle Character Design Prototypes
Obviously (or maybe not) I spent a long time on this, coming back to it, adding, refining, the colors, shapes, sizes, and even the placement of the characters to best stand out on the page. For the most important characters, like the princess in the far left-hand corner, I often went through several designs on a separate file before choosing the definitive one to paste on here. With each new character, I began brainstorming who inhabits these shapes, how they might enter the storyline, and I used that information to guide my design principles. When I finally made the first episode of the Princess and the Teakettle series, this page was a convenient reference -- even though I deviated from it in some cases, like Queen Clawdia's stripes and dress. These characters continue to evolve, but this lineup gave me a starting point and a source of inspiration.
August 2020
Just cartoon me with some kitties
When I started making this website, I wanted to get some pictures of myself that I would actually not mind sharing with humans, which meant drawings were my best bet. This one lives out a fantasy for me of cuddling with a bunch of kittens (and yes that little white psycho is drawing blood from my foot.) Just don't tell my Artemis I was unfaithful to her.
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I mean, Artemis is my life, it's not that she's "not enough for me," but you can never have too many acquaintances, as long as all of them are cats.
September 2020
Cat Petting Chart (specific to my beloved feline overlord princess, Artemis)
Benthophonicks Redesign Sketchwork
The first comic I started (and intend to continue) hit a roadblock when I began to find that all the complex layers and textures I'd been using were taking too long to recreate in each panel. I was publishing it in my dad's weekly newspaper and so I had a weekly deadline, once we ran out of my small backlog. So I put Benthophonicks on the back burner, and started working on The Princess and the Teakettle, which, while it also can get labor-intensive, has the advantage of having been started once I already had the information of how much detail I can expect myself to be able to put in over a one-week period, so it's slightly more manageable to maintain the style of the comic and finish one issue per week. As for Benthophonicks, I still love the concept and the characters, but the way I was styling the thing has to change if I ever want to successfully continue the series, so I started thinking about streamlining the design. Eliminating all but a hint of textures and making the color combinations more to the point and less finicky will hopefully allow me to get back in the water with this cartoon sometime soon. For now, enjoy this no-commitments sketch (and if you can read my handwriting, take my scrawlings on names and characteristics and such with a grain of salt.)
October 2020
Questing for Quasarella?
This sketch started as a desire to explore an outer-space fantasy where the sky was no longer the limit. I'd been watching Futurama, and I was interested in how the robot Bender is sometimes nearly invincible and other times extremely sensitive. I wondered how I could explore that idea in a human character. The crab-clawed guy on the far left is the design I stuck with for a character that might have been created by a lab in the hopes of providing an indestructible, ultimately disposable, and totally devoted soldier-servant to a dystopian future empire. Crabs and sea stars (look at his shirt) are two very strong, resilient sea invertebrates I have always admired, and often end up channeling in my human character ideas. On the far right was my idea for a prince the soldier was engineered to protect: perhaps a reverse Cinderella story, where the prince must fulfill a prophecy and find the being who fits into a shoe (or similar sort of thing) to be his bride and unite the galaxies or whatnot. The soldier is engineered to self-destruct once his task is complete, and they are traveling through space with the spoiled-brat prince, his royal fam, and perhaps some other characters. The purple girl in the middle joins the journey -- maybe she is running away from her own destiny on her planet? -- she is magical or something.
So I started designing more characters, and even the spacecraft they might travel the universe in... but I still couldn't come up with a good title. "Schrödinger's Slipper" on here was just one of many ideas that didn't quite do it for me.
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I wanted a robot character, so I made one: a royal servant. But I didn't want her to just be a boring mechanical slave... I couldn't quite settle on what her characteristics would be and how she would contribute to the story.
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I gave the prince a gawkish, geeky teenage brother -- the always overlooked sibling (in contrast with most traditional fairytales where the younger royal sibling is overlooked.) I wanted maybe for this older sibling to be into machinery and in love with the robot -- though this might be a bit too derivative/copying since it so closely resembles Sheldon and Jenny in My Life as a Teenage Robot, so idk.
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The beer-bellied weirdo with a beard was going to be maybe the estranged stepfather of the prince? To his left, the prince's diva mother. And finally there's the dog pirate. I'm thinking of him as a washed-up old captain who is in denial about how much of a failure as an evil villain he has turned out to be -- he tries to board and ransack the royal questers' ship but instead they end up taking care of him. Maybe he and the stepfather would drink together and get into trouble.
Above: a (very rough) sketch of a possible introductory episode, with another title idea I'm still lukewarm about: "Questing for Quasarella."
The Claws of Quantum Mechanics
After reading the webcomic series The Adventures of Business Cat, watching some Jimmy Neutron, and enjoying some Litterbox Comics and Pixie and Brutus on Webtoon, I started thinking about the idea of doing my own comic series about a feline mad scientist who uses his genius for the kinds of projects cats would be interested in (optimizing the catnip experience, taking revenge on Schrödinger for the box thing, becoming the dominant species on earth, growing opposable thumbs, eliminating all vets, creating self-aware wet food cans that open on his command, or in the case of the above sample comic, reanimating what he believes will be feline role models based on a miscommunication.
November 2020
Journal Cover -- Rose and Shakespeare
I'd recently started volunteering at a cat cafe connected to a no-kill shelter in my neighborhood. One of the kittens who was there when I started, named Rose, had a huge personality. She was a tuxedo cat -- black and white -- with striking extra toes on her front feet that made them look like mittens, with "thumbs." (This is polydactyly.) She would attack anything that resembled food, and if you tried to give a treat to any other cat -- no matter how big or unfriendly that cat was -- Rose would cut in and steal it. She once stole a tube of wet treat straight from my fingers while it was millimeters away from the mouth of one of the grumpiest kitties in the place. Another time, she tried to drink some cat Prozac a staff member was preparing for another resident. She had a funny relationship with a chunkier, adult cat named Badger, also a tuxedo cat. They would wrestle on any surface -- on top of a cushion, on top of a crate -- biting each other's necks and grabbing on... I was afraid they were going to kill each other, but staff reassured me that they were just playing. If there was any forbidden door, Rose would stalk it and dash inside the first chance she got. She had a sweet side too, it just didn't come out as often. But once, while I was petting one of the shyest, most picked-on cats in the cat cafe -- a special-needs grey cat named Parker -- Rose approached. I was afraid she was going to take a swipe at the adult, who had a permanent head tilt. But instead, under the flickering light of the nighttime catio, Rose gave Parker a little kitty-kiss, or nose-booping, and then rubbed past him with her cheek. A sign of friendship and acceptance. It was then that I knew I loved that little kitty.
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I'll be sad to see her go (she hasn't been adopted yet as I write this, but I know she will go to a forever home soon [hopefully] which is why I wrote the whole previous paragraph in the past tense, to help myself prepare to say goodbye.) Meanwhile, to remember her, I designed a concept for a journal fangerling on her with a Shakespeare quote, spoken by Helena in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The original quote is, "...And though she be but little, she is fierce." To cat-speak-ify it, I changed it to "& though she be but little, shee are feerce."
"Disenchantment" Fan Art Journal
I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed the Netflix animated show "Disenchantment" (produced by Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama.) My favorite character was definitely Bean's "personal demon," Luci. He's so irreverent, ahead of his (medieval) time, can be mean on the outside but really does things out of a conscientious intention. One might even suggest he really loves his friends, despite his intense objections to such an absurd proposition.
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The design aspect of this character also draws me in -- while the other characters have some dimensionality and multiple main colors (skin, hair, clothing, etc.), Luci is flat, truly 2-dimensional, and completely black. You only ever see one eye at a time. Despite the limitations this design concept imposes, the character still shows just as much expression, emotion, acting and attitude as all the more 3-d-hopeful characters with their schmancy shading and perspective. Normally designers would advise against having two characters in different "registers" like that interact closely in the same frame for prolonged periods, but the wizards in this production pull it off well.
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Below, the front of a journal cover I designed with Lucy lounging on top of a stack of books; underneath that is the back cover I designed with a sketch of the character that came out better than I'd expected.
