Skook WIP #43

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Hello? Is this thing on? Can you hear me now?

Subscription Changes

At some point before the end of this year I will be going back to newslettering directly from my Skookworks website. Using tinytetter.com has been a fun experiment but, since I try to repost all these newsletters to my website, I’ve ended up creating more work for myself. With that in mind I’m going to be moving y’all who are subscribed here over to the subscription list there. When that happens I think you’ll need to confirm the new subscription. A few of you are already subscribed at Skookworks and have been getting double emails. Sorry about that. Running the newsletter directly from Skookworks will fix that.

These Days –

I feel a little sorry for lower management at the Post Office. I’ve worked for the USPS for a little over eight years now. In that time our station has had five or six managers. (I’m vague on the exact number because my first year and a half is a blur.) In those eight years we’ve also had a variety of supervisors, some pretty good, some not so much. None of the supervisors who were there when I started are there now. If they still work for the PO they’ve been moved around, often to stations that require long commutes.
On Monday the Westwood Station got its sixth (or seventh) station manager and some new supervisors. So far they seem nice and receptive. The new manager brought some much needed new CCAs with her. She seems open to talking about situations before trying to fix them. She said fixing problems would take time. I have more faith in a manager who leads with that than one who talks about how they’re going to turn us all around and get us on track. I wish them well. Mostly I wish that they let us do our jobs and, when they decide to make improvements (and we could use a lot of improvements), they talk to the carriers before they do.

I had Tuesday and Thursday off this week (Tuesday being my regularly scheduled day off and Thursday being a day I took Sarah to get her arm evaluated) so I haven’t much of chance to get a feel for the new management. I got drafted into carrying part of another route on Wednesday. I could have done without that.

With Minimal Comment

Recent sketches. Characters old and new. Practice. I’m looking for something but I haven’t figured out what it is. Yet.

Shop Talk

I belong to a group on Facebook that discusses the ins and outs of running online Print on Demand shops. I’ve watched a few videos on YouTube about ways to run successful POD stores. The gig site, Fiverr, has gotten mentioned a few times as a source for getting designs made inexpensively.Since I enjoy drawing and designing my own work I haven’t paid much attention to Fiverr.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from CreativeLive announcing that they had been acquired by Fiverr. I worked for CreativeLive in its early days. It spun off of CreativeTechs, a Macintosh specializing tech support company. In the beginning CreativeLive focussed on streaming free classes live and selling recordings of those classes. In the beginning those classes were either how-tos of Adobe programs or classes by celebrity photographers. I did customer service – I helped customers buy and access videos. I was laid off after CreativeLive had been running full time for about a year. The company got new investment and the investors brought in their own people.

Until I got the email I hadn’t really thought about CreativeLive in years. I don’t feel acrimony about being laid off. I didn’t like it but I wasn’t surprised when it happened. They’d built out a nice new studio and I hadn’t gotten keys to it. That was a big clue that they didn’t consider me essential. I’d stayed on their email list because it was easier to just delete emails than to unsubscribe.

I looked at their current site when I started writing this issue. They’ve expanded their catalog quite a bit in the last ten years. Good for them. I looked at Fiverr’s site. It seems like it’s a middleman site for creative types. Middlemen aren’t necessarily evil. It’s possible to be an ethical middleman. Fiverr is evil. I say this without doing any research beyond their fee. They take 20% of whatever the artist is paid for a job. Part of the branding of Fiverr is that you can get original art and designs done cheaply. That Fiverr takes 20% from an underpaid artist is awful. I’d be okay with 5%, maybe !0%. 20% is robbery. CreativeLive being bought out by Fiverr is probably good for the investors. It’s probably not a win for any employees or freelancers.

If any CreativeLive folks are reading this and have a different opinion, I’d love to hear from you.

Before and After

Finally, here’s one of my recent illustration revisions. The black and white version below was done as an illustration for an RPG book that, sadly, won’t be getting published.

I really liked the piece so I colored and revised it for my Redbubble shop. This is the new version –

 These goofballs seem to like it –

And that’s it for this week.

Be good. Be kind. Do be do be do.