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Skook WiP #99

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November 18th. I hope you are well. Well groomed, well fed, and well thought of.

I’m working at updating and expanding Daughter of Spiders for NaNoWriMo. It’s taking the majority of my words this month.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of an illustration of the sort of tree you want to have around if you want to read outside on a dark night.

This design can be found on:
A mug in my Zazzle store
All sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The seventh page of the first Mighty Nizz story can be read now. A scan of the original art is below. The colored version is at MightyNizz.com.

Thanksgiving is next week. Be the best company you can. Eat as much as makes you happy. Reject the Puritan strain that infects American Culture. Those guys were anti-fun.

See you on the day after!

Skook WiP #98

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It’s 11/11/22. It’s the 11th day of the 11th month. The war to end all wars ended today back in 1918.

Yeah. No comment.

I’m off social media and putting my best efforts into updating Daughter of Spiders as my project for NaNoWriMo. Any internet use has to be for historical research for the story. No current news. No gossip. No reviews of old b-movies.

Mugshots

This month’s process GIF features a girl and her dragon. Or perhaps a dragon and her girl. Or maybe the tragic death of a lollypop. It’s all a matter of perspective.

It’s available as:
A mug in my Zazzle store
A lot of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The latest page of the first Mighty Nizz story is up. The scan of the original art is below. The final colored version can be seen at MightyNizz.com.

Versus

Back in October I was commissioned to do a portrait of someone, a friend of a friend. The initial suggestion was to portray the fellow taking out a giant bug.
The commissioner also thought it might be fun to portray his friend as Katsuki Bakugo (a character from the anime My Hero Academia) fighting Meruem (a character from the anime Hunter x Hunter).
My client gave me the choice of depicting either scenario. I sent him sketches for both and asked him to choose his favorite. He went with the anime version.
I worked up pencils for the portrait. I’m not familiar with either of the animes from which these characters originate so I had to do some research to get their details right. I think I did fairly well.

Once I got approval on the pencils I moved on to inks and then spot blacks and shading.
Below is the final version. I had to be a little more careful with this project than with illustrations that are intended for print. I can fix errors on those pieces digitally. The physical art for this one went to the client so it had to be as clean and mistake free as possible.
That’s it for this week.

Take care. Take charge. Take flight.

See you next Friday!

Skook WiP #97

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How are you doing? Are you getting enough to eat? Getting enough rest? Did you vote?

It’s the fourth day of November. That means I’m four days into expanding Briar Rose Taylor’s memoirs. I’m not expecting to get the 50,000 words written necessary to turn Daughter of Spiders into a novel. I’m using National Novel Writing Month as a prompt to get work done now that otherwise I’d do … someday. I’m putting in at least an hour first thing in the morning before breakfast, chores and then doing time at USPS. In the evenings I’m having dinner, hanging out with Sarah and illustrating the next Mighty Nizz story. I’m taking a break from social media. I’m writing the bulk of all of November’s newsletters in October and doing quick additions and edits before they actually post.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features a space station with infinite living space. Infinite corridors anyway. For infinite running from infinitely hungry aliens.

This design is available on:
A mug at my Zazzle store
All kinds of schtuff at my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The latest page of the first Mighty Nizz story is live at MightyNizz.com. A scan of the physical art is below. The final, color version of this page can be seen at the website.

A New Mouse

Part of the advantage of print on demand is that I can change the designs if I think of ways to improve them and I’m not stuck with a bunch of stock I don’t want to sell. I recently started wearing a t-shirt with the image below emblazoned on it. At the end of the first day I thought of a way to improve the design.
Below is the new version. It’s available on all sorts of stuff in my Redbubble store. Both the original (because it looks better on some products than the update) and the new version are available in my Zazzle store.
Have a great week!

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #96

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Greetings and salutations!

This issue and, most likely, November’s newsletters, will be shorter on personal news than previous issues. In order to give myself time for NaNoWriMo in November I’m writing at least the basics of the letters in October. Given that I have no powers of prognostication I’ll be leaving off the “These Days” sections. Let’s just pretend that I’m having fun delivering mail and getting lots of writing done in my off hours.

Mugshots

This month’s process GIF is … hmmm. One of those images that came to me without any explanation. I’m sure there’s a story to be told here but I’ll leave it you to start it.
This design can be found on:
A mug in my Zazzle store
A variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

Below is the scan of the latest page of the first Mighty Nizz story. The finished color page can be found here.

Sketches

Practice, practice.

Daughter of Spiders

I’ll be setting up a gallery (or galleries) for the illustrations featured in this project. The text will be going away on November 1st. If you’d like to read it before then I recommend starting here.

I hope your week goes smoothly and is dotted with plenty of joyful moments.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #95

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Yesterday was Thursday. That means today is …
Newsletter Day!

These Days …

Last week we went to Mississippi. I’m supposed to schedule my vacations at the beginning of each year. That week wasn’t scheduled. We had friends who decided to get married after all my vacation time had been nailed down. All the slots last week were already taken. Fortunately I was able to get one of the other carriers to give up her vacation time so I could use it.

Monday and Friday were both spent traveling. Monday involved getting to the airport. Going through security. Waiting around. Sitting on a cramped plane. Trekking across the next airport from our arrival gate to our next departure gate. More sitting on another, smaller cramped plane. Getting a rental car. Getting to the hotel. Friday was basically the reverse. The folks who work at the airport and on the planes were generally kind, friendly and helpful. The people who run the airline industry and profit from it are horrible monsters who deserve nothing but contempt. I’d rant more but I’ve already given them two days of my life.

Our time in Mississippi, Tuesday to Thursday, was quite pleasant. We’ve known the bride for decades, me since high school, Sarah since the beginning of this century. We met the groom on Tuesday and, thankfully, liked him and enjoyed his company quite a lot. We’ve been considering moving to Mississippi when I retire (living in Seattle gets more cost prohibitive every year) so we were also doing a little exploring when we weren’t hanging out with our friends.

The wedding on Wednesday evening was small. I performed the ceremony. The bride and groom wrote their own vows. They’d intended to have it outdoors in their backyard (they have five acres) but, after days of sunshine, a storm had rolled in, so we did it in their living room.

Thursday Sarah and I did some more exploring in the morning and hung out with our friends in the afternoon. We talked. We cooked. We listened to old records. We ate. It was very good.

This week has been one of my scheduled vacations. As is traditional, we haven’t gone anywhere. We just hang out, I do some art and spread out the chores that I would normally be trying to stuff into my evenings and single days off.

Process Writing

David Mann has written a process post about the comic I illustrated. Follow the link to read all about it.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a trio of faces. Mugs for mugs. Or whatever.
Available on:
A mug in my Zazzle store
A variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The third page of the first Mighty Nizz comic is live at her website. Below is the scan of the original art. Follow the link to see the page in color.

Sketches

I do a lot of sketches. Most of them are a patchwork of faces and partial figures and random things. This week I’ve been doing some sketches with the idea of depicting full figures in relation to each other. I liked the way these turned out so I’m sharing them here.
NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. I usually forget about it until I see someone posting about it early in November. Life is too busy for me to play catch up so, at that point, I figure it’s too late for me to participate. “Maybe next year,” I tell myself.

This year, on October 15th, Facebook tossed one of those historic “Maybe next year” posts into my reminders feed. That’s an early enough notice for me to think about whether I could join in with any success. NaNoWriMo considers a novel to be about 50,000 words. 50,000 words divided by 30 days is about 1700 words a day. A double spaced manuscript is about 250-300 words a page so I’d need to average about five and a half pages a day.

Given the other things I am responsible for and want to accomplish, I don’t think I could succeed at writing a novel.

Except.

I can use NaNoWriMo as a prompt to make progress on updating one of my earlier projects.

Daughter of Spiders is an illustration/writing project that I posted here daily in 2013. Back in (I think) 2010 I’d had the idea that it would be fun to do a portrait of every version of the Frankenstein Monster. I thought it would give me subject matter to post here. Then I thought of adding portraits of monsters/creatures that were take offs of the Monster, mostly from B-movies. And then I thought it would be fun to do portraits of other monsters from B-movies. And, for me, every picture tells a story, I started thinking of a story that would connect all those portraits. And that led me to invent some characters and scenarios and an overarching mythology to tie things together. It became something very large, featuring illustrations of beings inspired by pulp fiction, horror movies, fairy tales and … stuff.

Originally I planned to start posting in 2011. As the project got more complicated I pushed the start date to 2012. I finally started posting on January 1st, 2013. Each illustration was accompanied by a short “excerpt” from Briar Rose Taylor’s memoirs.

Every once in a while I’ve thought about expanding those excerpts and doing new illustrations. This last Wednesday I read through the whole project. For a moment I thought about trying to put out a new version starting in 2023 – ten years since the first version was posted! Cool!

Dumb. 2023 is set aside for the Mighty Nizz.

But I did decide that I will do a revision and expansion. At the moment I’m thinking I could be ready to post the new version in 2024 but I’ll be okay if I can’t do it until 2025.

Skookworks.com is already a massive website. Rather than create 365 new posts I’ll be pulling the original posts, expanding them and reposting them with new illustrations in 2024 (or 2025). If you’ve never read the original series you have until November 1st to do so. Start here. Click on “next” at the top right of the post to go to the next installment.

And that’s it for this week.

May the next seven days treat you well!

Skook WiP #94

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Greetings from Sunday past!

We’re going to Mississippi for a wedding. Of course, by the time you read this we’ll be on our way back from that wedding. No doubt our housemate will have taken advantage of our absence to throw wild parties and not do the dishes for days at a time.

Given that I haven’t lived this week yet I don’t have much to write about so I’ll keep it short.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a few young dudes hanging out and doing young dude stuff.

This design can be found on
A mug in my Zazzle store.
All sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The second page of the first Mighty Nizz story should be available to read at the Mighty Nizz website. If not I’ll fix that tomorrow.

Below is what that page looked like when I scanned it into my computer. For the colored version, follow the link above.
I hope your week was a good one! Thank you for reading.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #93

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Hello World! Hello hello! Thank your gods it’s another day above ground!

Unless you’re a troglophile. In which case, go deeper!

These Days …

More overtime at USPS.

A couple of veteran carriers retired last week and we’re trying to cover. One of those carriers was an overtime king, regularly casing and carrying multiple routes in addition to his own. He’d put in 35 years and had over 3000 hours of accumulated sick days.

Today will be the last day for three of our sorting clerks. They’ve made “career” and are being sent to the plant. So tomorrow we’ll be running behind getting parcels and magazines and mail distributed. Management asked for volunteers from the carriers to come in early to help out and I was tempted to volunteer. I keep thinking that I’m not really that injured. That my knee is more functional than it is. It can do all things the other knee can. For a while. A few hours of standing and walking and it reminds me that it is, in fact, weaker than the other knee.

I do my best to help out. I volunteer to carry off other routes. Before the injury I always volunteered for walking routes. I like walking. Now I have to restrict myself to carrying off mounted routes – the ones where you drive along filling mailboxes from the window of your truck. Even then I’m trying to keep my work hours as close to eight as possible. I’m not going to put in 35 years but I’d like to make it to a designated retirement age.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features a lovely lady. If you like blizzards and ice.

This design is available –
On a mug in my Zazzle store
On schtuff in my Redbubble store

Tintin in the Land of Disillusion and Aching Bones

I discovered Tintin when I was a kid. I don’t remember how old I was. I’m sure I’d been reading American comics (especially Spider-Man) for awhile. My family was visiting a friend of my mother’s and the woman had copies of The Shooting Star and (I think) both parts of Tintin’s adventure to the Moon.

I  recently found a site that has a treasure trove of Tintin covers – the originals, parodies, homages and take offs. The site is running a cover contest. A few years ago I did a watercolor painting of a middle-aged and weary Tintin. I combined that painting with some stolen Tintin cover dress to produce the image below.

After I submitted, I got this response from Swapmeet Dave –
“I put together the Tintin pages some time ago and got a good response then, but in each of the years since, I get just one or two submissions or comments. But then, just last week, I got 3 new pastiches and now yours! I’ll get them on the site the next time I update it. As a deaf 83-year-old geezer, I just don’t have the energy that I used to.”

That was back in August. Dave hasn’t added my submission yet but I don’t mind. I only hope I’ve got it together enough to think about running a website when I’m 83.

Mighty Nizz

The first page of the first Mighty Nizz story is live!

I installed the Toocheke webcomics plug-in at the Mighty Nizz site. Once I figured out that it didn’t want to play with the WordPress theme that was already there I installed the Toocheke theme. Now it looks very different from this site. I’d like having a standard appearance across my mob of sites but I’ll take functionality over conformity. Some of that functionality (the navigation buttons for instance) won’t be apparent until multiple pages of the story have been posted. I’m still playing around with the layout and organization. If you have any problems or suggestions, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Below is a scan of the physical art of the first page.

The final colored page is here.

May your Friday be a good one and your Saturday be even better!

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #92

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These Days …

I’ve finished coloring the Mighty Nizz story. I’m planning on posting the pages, one a week, hopefully starting next week, over at MightyNizz.com. I’m now working out the best way to present it. There are plug-ins that are designed for serializing comics on WordPress and I’m trying to figure out which one to use. I have one here at Skookworks (Comic Easel) that I’ve never gotten around to using. The developer hasn’t updated it in four years. That’s the Jurassic Age in internet time. WordPress just updated to version 6 point something and there’s no guarantee that the two programs/apps/code gardens will play well together. I could just put up the pages as individual posts but a webcomic plug in would make it easier for a reader to scroll between pages and stories.

I’ve also been watching videos about flatting for coloring comics. “Flatting” is the process of separating a comic page into the individual sections that you plan to color i.e. tree trunks/brown, pants/different brown, Mighty Nizz’s wolf cape/red and yellow, etc. I kept hoping I’d find some trick that would make the process faster. Based on what I’ve seen, the trick is to do it enough that you get faster at it. Or hire someone to flat the pages for me. And that’s not in the budget. It was somewhat reassuring to see that I’m already basically doing what the pros do, just more slowly.

Sarah has written the next story and I’m the process of breaking it up to fit a layout. It looks like this one will be a twelve pager. I have annual leave scheduled soon and plan to spend a good chunk of it working on illustration.

And, of course, I’ve been delivering mail. There’s a lot of construction currently happening on my route, five blocks of it interfering with my regular method of delivery. Four blocks of it is road work. The city is putting sidewalks on SW 24th between Barton and Thistle. Prior to the work, these blocks were mounted delivery, that is, I drove along the street and fed the mail into boxes while sitting in my mail truck. Currently, if I am lucky, I can drive down the street, stop near a mailbox, get out, walk across the ditch/rubble/new curb, and place the mail in the box that has been located out of harm’s way and out of arm’s reach from my vehicle. When I am not lucky, and the street is occupied by large trucks and vehicles with plows and shovels and things, I park my truck on another street, walk down the block delivering to each mailbox and then walk back up the block to where I have parked my truck. The fifth block, on SW 26th, is less difficult. It borders a condo development that’s being renovated. The street itself is being left alone but there’s a lot less parking than normal because of all the construction workers. All that activity means that my delivery time is longer than it used to be. It rarely means overtime but it does make it hard for me to estimate how long each day will be.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features one of my favorite subjects – bloodsucking atomic zombie fishmen! These critters are inspired by the classic b-movie The Horror of Party Beach. No, I’m not recommending that you watch the film. I saw it once when I was a kid, young enough for my imagination to compensate for the ridiculous costumes, script and low budget. I haven’t tried to watch it since. I don’t expect it would fare as well with my adult sensibilities.
This design is available on:
A mug in my Zazzle store.
A variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Eldritch Horror in the Great War

A few years ago I did a series of illustrations for a Call of Cthulhu RPG manual featuring scenarios set during World War One. The book will likely never be published so I’ll be posting sets of the illustrations here for the next few weeks.

This set is from a scenario where biplane pilots run into a swarm of newly awakened (and very cranky) Byakhee over the Alps.

And that’s it for this week.

Be good to yourself and your friends and your pets and … whoever needs it.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #91

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Short newsletter this week. My time in front of the computer has mostly been spent coloring the Mighty Nizz comic. I am slow at it. I had a good process worked out for my individual designs but comic book pages are more complex. I know it’s possible to be more efficient and much faster. The comic book industry couldn’t function if all colorists took this long. I’m letting myself be okay with turtling for this story. There are videos online that teach the digital coloring process. I’m watching them. I don’t learn skills well from videos. I can’t stop and ask questions. The instructors often seem to think that their audience is more familiar with a program than I am. Or they’re using a different version of Photoshop than I have. But, little by little, I’m figuring it out.

Five out of the ten pages are finished and the other five are in progress. I expect that I’ll be able to show off the story in next week.

Until then –

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF:
This design is available –
On a mug in my Zazzle store.
On all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Take care of yourself. Eat off the good china. Drink from the special cups. Toast the expanding night.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #90

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Good morning! Have you had your coffee? Your breakfast? Or are you one of those folks who skips all that bounds forth into your day without a need to fuel up first?

If you are … Good for you! I’m a “drink two mugs of coffee before I can deal politely with other humans” sort of person. In years past I have tried giving up caffeine and the resulting headaches and sluggishness were so lacking in fun I just decided that I’d rather be an addict.

These Days …

We seem to be recovered from covid. I’ve got a lingering cough. I’ve always had a lingering cough after a cold, so why not?

A lot of my fellow carriers caught the bug at around that same time. We all seem to have bounced back. When customers asked where I’d been and I said “Covid” a large number of them said they’d caught it recently as well. Only one said she’d had to spend time in the hospital.

I finished inking and grey toning the Mighty Nizz comic. It’s been scanned and I’m in the process of making corrections and coloring it. I’m hoping that all the color work I’ve done for my store designs will have given me the practice I need to color this story quickly. I will be posting the final story over at the Mighty Nizz site. With a link in this newsletter, of course.

Until then –

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a very large someone taking a stroll among the cliffs.

Available:
On a mug in my Zazzle store.
On a variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Before the Rainbow

Below is the scan of the physical art for my latest Land of Oz/Oz Squad design.
After the Rainbow

And here is the design post digital coloring.
If you’d like to own a version of it, take a look in one of my stores.

Today is a work day for me. Mail to sort. Packages to deliver. Dogs to avoid.

Take care of you and yours! See you next week!