Yesterday Nizzibet spent four hours getting her teeth deep cleaned and, most importantly, having a cracked, infected tooth removed. There’s more work in future. Seems that many of her old fillings are cracked and leaking mercury. She goes back on Monday to have that taken care of. This weekend she’ll be ensconced on the couch buzzed on Vicodin and getting treated better than a queen. At least better than I’d be interested in treating a queen. I don’t think much of queens.

I’ve made a minor adjustment to the illustration. Our damsel in distress got her position shifted in order to make sure that Chaosium’s logo doesn’t get slapped on her during production. The feminist in me wants to have her doing something other than being a Willie but I don’t know what I could have her doing that wouldn’t make the image even busier. Weilding a gun? A machete? She’s really not dressed for hunting. She seems like she was along on the safari for the scenery not the shooting of the exotic animals. I did give her boots at least. The woman in the image I was using for photo reference didn’t have those.

This is the approved base drawing that the Secrets of Kenya cover will grow from. I’m going to be making some adjustments to accomodate the text and logos that Chaosium will be putting on the cover. Updates to follow.

I’ve been commissioned to illustrate the cover of Secrets of Kenya, written by David Conyers and published by Chaosium. My deadline for the finished color art is April 3rd. Charge!

My cover for The Black Seal #4 is posted on the Black Seal’s homepage. You’ll need to scroll down a bit to see it.

Page six of Oz Squad is posted at Steve Ahlquist’s blog. No lettering.

Get your position here

I feel like I’m asleep. Dreaming. I get up, work on art, take the bus to work, play office manager for eight hours, take the bus back home, work on art and go to sleep. There are variations. There’s eating and cooking and taking showers and talking with Nizzibet and occasionally watching a movie and a host of other little activities throughout the day. It’s not that I’m tired (although I often am) it’s that I don’t feel awake. I don’t know that I’ve felt awake for more that a few minutes at time in … Months? Years?

It’s easy to exaggerate. I love a good story. Most stories are, if not a little exaggerated, shorn of the dull minutiae that fills up most of our lives. When telling about my life I try not to exaggerate. That’s probably why I don’t talk about myself much in company. I tend to think I’m a bit dull. My life seems to be mainly the minutiae. And, in the middle of sleep, I seem to be doing some very good art work.

I wonder what it will look like when I wake up?

In the course of our bank’s investigation of the money stolen from my account they discovered that Nizzibet and JayDogg’s business account got ripped for a couple of thousand dollars at the same time mine got hit. I don’t know how the villains did it. I don’t have access to that account. Our bank is doing a changeover in credit card companies so we suspect that someone stole the new credit cards out of the mail somehow. There are a lot of holes in that theory but it’s the only one we’ve got at the moment.

Via the Blog of Oz I’ve just been reminded that May 15th is L. Frank Baum’s birthday. His 150th birthday. That gives me a goal to shoot for for finishing the first issue of Oz Squad. Thirty pages in a little over five months. Doable.