Barrel Scrapings

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Waiting Game

Inspired by true life events. A few weeks ago about 3 smoke alarms all went off at various points in the night needing their batteries changed. Not the best way to be woken up, especially not multiple times in a row! Kudos to my wife for the title and feedback throughout the creation process. Time lapse: I’m missing the first drawing session from the time lapse, but ah well.

Set for Life

Here’s a timelapse of the creation process: Kudos to my wife for the suggestion of ‘Set For Life’ as a title.

Rocky Road

I keep seeing these painted rocks on my walks with various bromides. I thought it might be funny to imagine a more apt/necessary message. All of these were based on real rocks I saw, with the exception of the message on the last rock (in reality it said, “Stay Safe!"). Timelapse:

Forget-Me-Not

Time lapse: Unfortunately once again Comic Draw glitched out on me and I lost a big chunk of recorded video for the time lapse. C’est la vie.

Schrödinger's List

(Click to see larger) This one was a big undertaking. It’s a somewhat silly take on “What if Schrodinger’s Cat wasn’t just a thought experiment?” I was struggling with how to end the comic until I stumbled onto some old mugshots; I thought this would be a great opportunity to try to do something a little more realistic in that panel, and to play around with ink washes which I’ve never done before.

Teeth Dreams

This is one of the oldest comic ideas I have; I started this before Barrel Scrapings even existed. Here is the original sketch: I’m pretty sure dreams of losing your teeth are a fairly common occurrence but it never ceases to freak me out when it happens. I thought it might be fun to imagine why those teeth were in such a rush to exit someone’s head. Hopefully it’s not too disturbing.

You Say Tomato

First try using bristol board and dip pen. I think I broke a nib while trying to do this. And turns out this paper is pretty garbage for watercolor (dries too quickly and isn’t strong enough). I also have a very hard time photographing these images to have them display properly; they come out far too dark. I played around with it as best I could in GIMP but this doesn’t quite do the real thing justice.

Message in a Bottle

I had the idea for this one while walking along the water a few weeks ago. It’s a simple premise, so I wanted to have somewhat more fully rendered/realistic art. I worked extensively from photos I took of myself, and contrasted the flat look of the figure with more depth for the background. I’m mostly happy with it, though the water looks a bit like starry night rather than the dazzling shimmers you see in real life.

Fat Cats

I had this idea a few weeks ago for an absurd advertisement. I tried to mimic those ‘As Seen As TV’ type infomercials with the desaturated colors for the ‘before’ and bright vibrant colors ‘after’. I also tried a technique of outlining by using a darker version of the in-fill color rather than just black, which borrowed from “The Good Boy Gang.” (I see now they used the same outline color for each character, which would have saved a lot of time.

Those Were the Days

This comic came out of another I was working on; I had the panel with the fetus dreaming of fertilization, and thought it would make a better comic about nostalgia than what I was originally doing. I used a similar technique as Let’s Go Fly A Kite for the fetus (with the airbrush tool rather than the alcohol marker). Although it’s a very time consuming process, I thought the technique would give a womblike feeling.

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© Nicholas Dunn 2025