Greetings, salutations, hello and how are you?

I hope your world is treating you well. I hope you are treating your world well.

This week’s process GIF is for one of the illustrations I did for my Ko-Fi account. I’m using it as part of the icons for the Pulp and Circuses and the All the Works membership levels. The hammer wielding woman is Briar Rose Taylor – protagonist of Daughter of Spiders. The big guy behind her is Morgo – one of the main characters of The Surrilana Depths.
The Surrilana Depths is my rewrite/revision/reimagining of Morgo the Mighty, a novel serialized in four parts in the Popular Magazine in 1930. I discovered the story back in 2012. It’s an adventure with a combined helping of two of my favorites settings – a Lost World and an Underground Realm. Surrilana is a Lost World in a giant series of caverns under the Himalayas. I found a facsimile reprint of the story, retyped it and serialized the original novel here at Skookworks. I had a collected version available for download but I took that offline when I started streamlining my website. The original posts (and a lot of related posts with various illustrations) are still up if you’d like to read them.

I will make a new PDF of the original novel available to my Pulp and Circuses Ko-Fi subscribers. The current version needs an embarrassing amount of copy editing. I want to fix that first. If you’d like to read a physical reprint of the novel now, there’s a good looking version available here.

I’ll be serializing The Surrilana Depths in 26 episodes, one every two weeks, starting in July. I’m currently planning to include 2 original illustrations with each episode. Surrilana will differ from Morgo. I’m keeping a lot of the florid prose. I’m sticking to the plot as much as possible. I’m changing … I’ll go into what I’m changing in future newsletters.

I’m working on Surrilana in the mornings before I go to deliver mail. I took a break today to say hello to y’all. Now I’m heading back underground.

See you in seven!

TGIF! Rearrange those letters slightly and you get GIFT! Loose the T and you get GIF! Clearly that’s a sign that I need to gift y’all with more GIFs!

So this week we have a process GIF of the Mighty Nizz!

Combine this kid with last week’s logo for:

This illustration/design isn’t available on anything yet.

I know. Not very capitalist of me.

I’m working to get ahead on the Mighty Nizz comic and other sundries. The Post Office continues to expect me to deliver mail. My cat thinks my drawing board is his playground (so many pencils, pens, markers and other tools to bat onto the floor!). Life is a struggle! To keep track of that I’m going old school and putting up to-do lists. These are pages from an 18×24 newsprint sketch pad taped to the wall behind my desk. They’re a much better reminder of where I’m at than anything I could put on my computer or my phone.

For Nizz –
For The Surrilana Depths (aka the Morgo the Mighty reboot/revision/remake – more on that next week) –

For the Newsletters both here and at Ko-Fi –

I’ve made progress on these lists since I photographed them. More lists are undoubtedly needed. Showing off the progress will be a regular part of this newsletter.

My first Ko-Fi newsletter should post simultaneously to this one. Check it out!

Time is short. Y’all are beautiful and talented and I appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings.

I hope your week has been a good one. The days are getting longer. May you have more joy as well.

See you in seven!

Good Morning! Welcome to the second Friday of 2023!

Thank you for your votes on the Skookworks banners. I’ve tallied the votes and the winners are:

My big illustration project this year is the Mighty Nizz comic. I got stalled in inking at the end of last year because of the extra hours I needed to work at USPS. With package volumes back to “normal” levels I’m able to go back to “normal” work hours. Y’know, ten hours or less instead of 12 hours and more. Less time delivering mail means more time writing and doing art. My goal is to have the second Nizz story inked and toned and being colored by the end of the month. Fingers crossed.

I was intending to do all the coloring using Clip Studio Paint but there’s enough of a learning curve that I’ll probably only do the lettering there. I’m moving toward a more digital work process. Partly that’s to make it possible for me to produce work more quickly. Partly that’s to eventually have less physical art to store. We’re expecting to move out of Seattle in a few years and the less we have to move, the easier it will be.

And partly … it’s to make it more difficult to spill ink all over my art. I’ve done it a few times on my own. I’ve moved my grip wrong and dropped my brush on the page. Mostly I’ve been able to clean that up digitally. A few times I’ve needed to print out new bluelines and start over. Most recently the cat knocked over my ink cup and got spatters on my thumbnails and the page I was inking. Fortunately, that time, the ink hit the part of the page that I was going to fill with black anyway.

I’m moving from Photoshop to CSP for two reasons.
Number One – screw Adobe and their rental model. I own my copy of CSP.
Number Two – Photoshop is a massive program and I only use a small part of it. CSP was designed for Japanese manga artists. Mangaka are expected to produce as many (or more) as twenty pages a week. CSP is designed to make that workload easier.

My first finished image done with CSP is the Mighty Nizz logo.

My other big projects are auxiliary to the Mighty Nizz comic – my Ko-Fi page and the Skookworks store.

I’ve set up three support tiers at Ko-Fi.

Nothing but the Nizz
Level One. For folks who are most interested in the Mighty Nizz. Weekly newsletter. Sketches. Process GIFs. And more!

Pulp and Circuses
Level Two. For folks who like pulp fiction and weird illustration. And the Mighty Nizz. This tier includes all the Mighty Nizz content. Regular chapters (with illustrations) of a scifi/fantasy/magic realismish serial. Plus schtuff!

All the Works
Level Three. All the Nizz. All the Pulp. Plus new short comics. Revised classic comix. Downloadable PDFs. Plus schtuff!

The Skookworks store will be similar to my current Zazzle and Redbubble stores but you should be able to make purchases directly from one of my sites – Mighty Nizz stuff from the Mighty Nizz site, Oz Squad stuff from the Oz Squad site and everything else from the Skookworks site. If there’s a design you’d like to see on a specific product please let me know.

Today is the fifth day of my six day USPS work week. I’ll get to rest on Sunday and Monday.

I hope your New Year is treating you well. Look out for yourself. Be as kind as you can. Take joy where you find it. Don’t listen to crazy people on the internet.

See you in seven!

Good morning!

It’s a New Year and I’m making some changes. If you have a moment, I’d like your opinion. I’ll be asking for it wwwaaaayyyy down the page after the images.

Out with the old.

In with the new.

The first set of banners (the old) have been on my website since January 1st, 2020. I posted the second set of banners (the new) to Skookworks.com on Sunday, the 1st of this year. Here’s where I’d like your opinion – I’m going to be streamlining and simplifying the website over next few months. I made 12 banners this year because I made 12 banners in 2020. The banners show up randomly when someone looks at the site. Five banners would be more streamlined than twelve banners. Which five banners are your favorites?
1. Flying Turtles
2. Dragons
3. All Better Now
4. Black Cats and Jack O’Lanterns
5. Yellow Alien
6. Nizz out standing in her field
7. Yellow Brick Road
8. The Face
9. Stardust the Super Wizard
10. Octobriana
11. Fantomah
12. The Heap

Please choose the five banners you like best and reply to this email with the numbers of those banners. (For example 4, 7, 9, 11, 12 or maybe 1, 3,4, 6, 7.) If you’re reading this post on the website you can either post a reply or use the “Contact Me” button at the top right of the page. Thank you!

If you’ve made New Year’s resolutions (or set New Year’s goals) I’d love to hear what they are. For myself, I make New Year’s plans. I give myself annual projects.

For the last couple of years I’ve been posting the Skook Works in Progress newsletter. Every Friday I would post a process GIF of a design I was selling in my Zazzle and Redbubble online stores. For 2022 I’d given myself the specific project of doing 52 designs, one for each week. I’m happy to say that I exceeded that goal. I’ve currently got 230 designs available in Redbubble and more than 300 in Zazzle. (Zazzle doesn’t give me a count.)

This year my main big art project is drawing Mighty Nizz comics. I’m sure I’ll add more designs to my online stores but my focus will be the girl in the wolfskin hoodie. I considered taking a break from writing a newsletter. I’m not expecting to make process GIFs of the Nizz strips so …

So I’m changing the title of the newsletter. Writing to you each week is a habit that I will be maintaining. Once I start posting the finished pages for the next Nizz story I’ll post the scans of the physical pages here. That should start happening on February 1st over at the Mighty Nizz website and here (or in your email if you’re a subscriber) on February 3rd.

Some of my other projects –
I’ve set up a Ko-Fi account. Ko-Fi is a crowdfunding site similar to Patreon. Ko-Fi has options for payment and services that I think will work better for me than Patreon. Please come visit. I’m still figuring things out so any suggestions you have will be welcomed.

I’m working on creating a store here at Skookworks, similar to what I’ve got going at Zazzle and Redbubble but without the noise that is endemic to those platforms.

As I mentioned, I’m streamlining and simplifying Skookworks.com. I started posting a blog at skook.blogspot.com on January 8th, 2003. That eventually grew into this website. I’ve published over 3400 posts. Some years I’ve posted daily. You can find over 2400 images in the posts or in galleries here. I’ve been a packrat most of my life. In the last couple of years I’m been working to become a different sort of rodent, one who can fit all his possessions into a small van. I’m a long way from being that. Skookworks.com doesn’t weigh anything but it’s a huge site. A huge site that, according to my analytics, no one visits deeper than the front pages. I understand. I rarely go deep into the sites I visit.

Over the next few months I’ll be going deep. I’ve already archived the Archives – my older art (portfolios, minicomics, Misspent Youths, Morgo the Mighty). Those pages have only been visited by spambots in recent years. I’ll be deleting most of the old posts. (I’m still a packrat. Anything I delete will get archived somewhere.) If you ever planned to read my ramblings from 2005 or 2010, now is the time to do it.

I hope 2023 looks like a good year for you.

Thank you for reading this newsletter! Remember to send me your banner selections.

See you in seven!