Huh. I think this is the last Backyard Enterprises area rug design. We’ll move on to posters, brochures and incident art next weekend.
Read the Label
Only a few more of these area rug designs to go. There will be more Backyard Enterprise materials to follow but there will be a bit more range in the coloring to those.
Keep Those Barrels Safe and Dry and Warm and Snuggly
Doesn’t that look comfy?
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There will be no further posts until the 18th. I’m flying up to Anchorage, Alaska for a wedding and I don’t expect to have internet access while I’m there. And even if I have access it would probably be rude to take much advantage of it. It’s not like the family gets together very often.
Chemicals Are Dumb
Another Saturday, another cautious message about the intellectual capacity of toxic substances.
Sargasso, the Series
This was the final cover art for my Sargasso proposal. As I said, the proposal was rejected. All of our proposals were rejected. This wasn’t really surprising. Based on the cartoons that were already been presented on the company’s website our work wasn’t likely to be a fit. And that’s fine. Our stories are still ours. If things go well, eventually we’ll present them to the world in some form. Maybe as novels. Maybe as comics. Maybe even as cartoons. Who knows?
The Sargasso Sea
I contributed two proposals to serialized internet cartoon pot. The first was The Cauldron, a police procedural set in a world of magic. The second was a very loose adaptation of William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the Glenn Carig that I called Sargasso.
The Cauldron got rejected because it was thought to be too similar to a television series that was about to begin on the UPN network. I don’t remember why Sargasso was rejected.
Dot Dash
Kip Manley contributed a couple of proposals to our package of animation serial ideas. I’ve forgotten the title of the other one (and my memory of its premise is likewise very fuzzy) but Dot Dash was a series paralleling the communications boom sparked by the telegraph back at the turn of 20th century with the then current boom of the internet. I put this cover together in Illustrator, one of the few times I’d used the program for illustration work.
Shangri La
In 1999, Nizzibet was approached by a former colleague from the comics industry. Internet startup money was flying about and he had hooked up with company that planned to make short animations for the web. The cartoons were intended to attract investors who then option/buy the intellectual property featured in those cartoons and make television shows or movies based on them. We were asked to come up with some stories that could be made into serialized cartoons. Each episode was to be six to ten minutes.
We came up with a number of concepts, few of which actually made it to the proposal stage. One that did Shangri La, the story of a young woman and the strange book store she worked in. Nizzibet came up with that one and hopefully will find the time to turn it into a story the rest of the world can read. I did the art for the cover of the proposal. I could be wrong but I think Nizzie colored the art. 
The General
This illustration is from 2001. The old man here was one of the first human villains in that version of King Roach. He was retired general who ran a top secret bioweapons research organization. Among other, more conventional weapons, the organization made monsters. Yes, that was a cliche in 2001 even before that became a basic plot element of every other Scifi (Syfy) movie.
Take a Deep Breath
I don’t remember what PPE stands for anymore. And I’m too lazy to google it this morning.
