It’s going to be just me and the cats for awhile. Sarah will be down in LA managing medical and financial bureaucracies for a family member for the foreseeable future. She’s really good at working her way through the labyrinths that are designed to make people give up and let the powerful, the lazy and the greedy refuse to help.
Me? I’ve got five weeks of physical therapy ahead of me. No mail delivery. I’m filling time where I’d otherwise be at work by making art, doing light chores and catching up sleep. And trying to keep the cats amused. One of their favorite activities is sleeping on Sarah’s lap while she kicks back in her recliner. I haven’t given them much laptime and they seem a bit disgruntled because of this.
I’ve finished a couple of projects! Only a few hundred pages to go!
| Project | Count | Complete |
| Colonial Cthulhu (Keeper’s and Companions Manuals) | 2 covers | 2 covers! Done! |
| Borderland Saints (formerly titled: Abyssal Saints / Goblin Alpha Seven) (comic) | 40 pages | 7 pages |
| John Bell’s Oz Book (illustrations) | 27 illustrations | 20 illustrations |
| Mighty Nizz: Getting Dressed (comic) – 18 pages | 18 pages | 5 pages |
| Mighty Nizz: Tarot Deck (tarot deck) | 78 cards | 4 cards |
| Skookworks Webstore | 248 designs | new store in progress |
| Observations (comic) | 8 pages | DONE! Now I have to figure out what to do with this story. It was originally intended for Strange Aeons magazine but that’s no longer being published. |
| Sunk Cost Elegy (comic) | 120 pages (tentative) | |
| The Surrilana Depths (comic) | 200 pages (tentative) | |
| Daughter of Spiders (illustrated short story series) – number of stories, word count and number of illustrations to be determined. |
So. The Surrilana Depths. In the past, whether I’ve planned to do a comic, I’d write a script, then do thumbnails, then rough out the pages, and then finished pencils, lettering and finally inks and, maybe, shading. I’ve got a lot of scripts waiting to be thumbnailed and another lot that made it to the thumbnail stage before being set aside.
Once I’d decided to do Surrilana as an original graphic novel I planned to write a script. For me, any long form writing requires long stretches of quiet without interruption. I haven’t had much of that in recent years. I also don’t make physical art much. I make art using Clip Studio Paint and my Wacom tablet. Digital art can be easily changed in ways that are frustrating or impossible with physical art.
So I just started. I’m not going bore you with every little step and action. I’ll just say that I finished 9 pages and roughed out at least a half a dozen more before I decided that I wasn’t satisfied with the working method or the results. I like and am proud of most of the finished work but I was doing too much winging it. Too much going back and changing things to make older drawings and characters consistent with the latest drawings. So I’m starting over.
Character sketches. Environment mapping. Script. Thumbnails. Roughs. Finished art.
Anyway. Here are the ten pages I (mostly) finished.
May your week be fruitful and fun! Onward!
