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Crypto-Lawyer in the Half Shell


Often--and perhaps even too often--I will draw a scene in my mind or a scene from California life and it will turn out to be a decent drawing, in and of itself. Yet because I have created so many cartoons throughout my career, I usually then ask myself the following question; "How can I turn this drawing into a good comic?"

Such is the case with this crypto-art comic featuring a turtle and a woman enjoying some time upon their Southern California balcony. The drawing started out as a quick and simple drawing of my wife reclining in her chair. In the background can be seen the mountains that ever-define the Angeles National Forest, which we have hiked through on many occasions.

Since my family had recently visited a pack of turtles on our walk through the campus ponds at Caltech (which is near our condo), I logically decided to infuse a turtle into my balcony drawing. Then I wondered what a conversation between a turtle and my wife might sound like. This was actually not hard to imagine, since at our previous Pasadena apartment, we had tiny little turtles as pets--yet sadly they all died. Nevertheless, none of those imaginings led me to good material for a comic.

Therefore my drawing just floated in limbo for a few weeks until I decided that the turtle should say something absurd, yet also topical to cutting-edge current events. And not coincidentally, there have been some interesting developments unfolding in the cryptocurrency space regarding various government regulations. My wife and I learned about some of these rulings at a great Blockchain Bash event in Santa Monica last week. In light of such things, I decided that this turtle must become a crypto-lawyer. That's when the comic sort of wrote itself.

Naturally, such a comic strip must be put on the blockchain. And it must be issued as a crypto-collectible. That's why you can now bid on the color comic and buy it using cryptocurrency on the SuperRare digital art market, which runs on Ethereum. With all the California references in this artwork, I also refer to this piece of rare digital art as Cali-Crypto-Lawyer in the Half Shell.

Below is the initial black and white digital sketch. The funnest part was just drawing this sketch here. The more disciplined part of the creative process was then coloring it and transforming that artwork into a finished 3-panel comic strip.


As alluded to previously, I think that my initial black and white digital drawing also presents well as a stand-alone piece of digital art. I drew it on my old Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone using the stylus. The app I used to draw the initial sketch on the phone is called Autodesk SketchBook and it is a pretty nice drawing app for mobile devices. That simple California scene was then sent to my iPad Pro, where I completed the comic using Apple Pencil in the Procreate app.

Case closed!
Joe Chiappetta