Hmmm. I’ve now seen this morning’s newsletter on both my phone and my desktop. For some reason the system decided to reserve most of the images in the gallery for the Skookworks website. Sorry about that. If you’d like to see all the colorful pictures, please click on this link.

If you’re already reading this on the website – Hi!

Greetings and salutations to all you fine folks! We’ve arrived at the 15th day of the 2025th year of our Lord. And what a wonderful year it looks like it will be …

These Days …

We’re starting out our year by moving. The place we’ve lived for the last fifteen years is wonderful but, in order to afford it, for the last ten years we’ve had housemates. We’ve been mostly lucky there. We’ve basically gotten along with all of them and have no nightmare housemate stories. However, the process of finding a new housemate is always stressful and, with our current fellow moving out, we’ve decided to relocate to a place we can afford without needing to share it with a stranger in exchange for cash.

At this writing, we’ve still looking at places. By the time you’re reading this we should have settled on one. I’ve scheduled the first week of February off from work so I can pack and move stuff. Slowly. The idea of moving everything in a single day gives me the shivers.

Thinking (Silently) Out Loud

I’ve written before about my contempt for generative AI – the programs that produce writing and illustrations based on prompts. I understand the appeal. Humans are animals and, generally, animals prefer to spend the least amount of effort to fulfill their desires. Basically, we’re lazy. That’s a survival skill. The amount of work that most humans have do to survive in the modern world isn’t healthy. But that’s a different rant.

Besides being “trained” on work stolen from humans, besides eating up enormous amounts of power and water and other resources, generative AI makes humans stupider and lazier and more incompetent than we already are. Making art is sloppy and time consuming and weird. The results rarely live up to what is in my mind. By “art” I mean painting, drawing, writing, singing, dancing, cooking, speaking – anything that requires a creative effort. Making art requires work. And practice. It’s a skill.

I understand the appeal of generative AI. You have an idea, you write a prompt and – BOOM! – your idea is given form. Form that is shinier and more detailed than something you could have produced on your own. In a few minutes. Why spend years learning a skill when a machine can create a thing instantly?

Survival. The more skills you have, the better your chances of surviving. For me, making cartoons and illustrations is a mental health practice. So is cooking. And walking. The folks who are jamming AI into everything aren’t doing it to make life better and easier for the rest of us. They’re doing it to eliminate the need to pay humans for their skills.

I make my survival paycheck by delivering mail. Large parts of the mail sorting process have been given to machines. We get trays of letters already sorted in delivery order. We get parcels sorted into hampers based on the routes that will deliver them. And there’s always some piece of mail, some parcel, that’s out of order and requires human intervention to get it to the correct address and recipient. I’ve had the same route for ten years now. I know the names of most of the customers on my route so, when I get a letter with a name I recognize but an address that’s off, I can make sure it gets where it needs to. Same with parcels. Upper management would love to make it so anyone could deliver any route, anytime. Upper management has either never delivered mail or has made themselves forget what it was like.

I understand the desire to just have something done for you. Life is exhausting enough without having to learn new skills. But learning requires thinking and thinking is a skill I always want to have.

Postcards For Practice

I’ve been practicing digital coloring for years. The images in this gallery were done over a decade ago. I drew a series of illustrations in ink on blank postcards. I mailed the original illustrations to friends and colored scans of the illustrations in Photoshop.

This Month’s Comic –
OCD
Story by David Mann

This is the first of two stories that I’ve illustrated for David. I will post the next one next month. David writes stuff all of the internet. The best place to start reading his stuff is probably his newsletter.

Nine Panel Sketch

Practice, practice, practice.

That’s it for this month. I’ll be back on February 15th.

Have fun, practice your skills, learn some new ones and, what the heck, go talk to real people in the real world.

Cheers!

To everyone who has been visiting Skookworks in 2024 – Thank you! I had a great time creating the daily illustrations and I feel like I’ve mastered Clip Studio Paint enough to get back to drawing comics. My first story will be a second Mighty Nizz piece. You’ll be able to read that at MightyNizz.com. I’ll provide links when it is up.

Because I’ll be focusing on comics (and commission work of various types) I’ll be posting here once a month instead of once a day. Right now I’m planning to post on the 15th of each month. Subscribers will get those posts as an email newsletter. Each issue will feature my ramblings, a gallery of images from the archives and … a short comic story. Some of those stories have been posted at Skookworks in past years. Some of them have been posted elsewhere. Some have never been posted before.

While my frequency of posting here will go down, I’m posting daily on a couple of other platforms –
Substack (https://substack.com/@davidleeingersoll)
Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/skook.bsky.social)

These are single images from years past. No particular theme. Just what I find on my computer that day. It’s the same image to both platforms.

What else? I guess we have to see. Stay tuned!