Skook Words (and Pictures) #28

Posted on by

Friday stumbles over the horizon, dazed and wobbly. Is today the right day? Is it really Friday? Or has Thursday lingered over, an unwelcome, obstinate guest? Perhaps Saturday has arrived early and will spin Friday around and away for another week?

Nah. That’s Friday alright. Friend to some. Enemy to others. Simply another day of the week in cultures that don’t give the days names.

The Next Five

Last week, over on Facebook, Jason Levine nominated me to post 10 comic book characters that have influenced my interest in comics. One character a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the character.

So I did. I just posted covers on Facebook but here I’m giving a little context to my choices. I wrote about the first five in last Friday’s newsletter. The next five are below:

6. The Spirit


I read the Spirit in black and white reprints published first by Warren Magazines, then Kitchen Sink Press. The stories were original published in color in weekly installments of Sunday newspapers. It’s a brilliant series with a lot of creative storytelling, layouts and design. (And racism. Sigh.) There have been a few attempts to revive the character but none of the new versions have lasted.

7. Modesty Blaise


I spent a lot of time in the library as a kid. I made it a habit to go there regularly and read The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The comics page. I’m sure I read other parts of the paper upon occasion but it was always the comics that I came to read. If I missed a day the library kept copies of the previous week’s issues easily available. The Chronicle ran the daily Modesty Blaise comic strip. The library also had copies of some of the Modesty Blaise novels. I forget which I discovered first.

8. Den


I read the first 15 pages of Den in the trade paperback Ariel in the same little bookstore that I used to visit to get my comics as a kid. The art blew me away. At the time I couldn’t afford the book. Discovering the extended series later in Heavy Metal magazine further warped me and made me a fan of Richard Corben for life.

9. Zot


Zot! was a fun series. A mix of silly and serious. Not much to say beyond that.

10. Shang Chi


I’m not sure which was the first issue of Master of Kung Fu that I purchased. It’s not this one. I picked this one because it features Paul Gulacy’s art. That’s what attracted me to the series to begin with. Doug Moench’s writing kept me engaged until the series was canceled with issue #125.

The Process

Here’s this week’s process GIF –

Subscriptions Delayed

I’d written last week’s newsletter and scheduled it for publication at the usual time. And then I went poking around in WordPress (this site runs on WordPress) to see if I could find the 530 subscribers that my subscription form claimed I had. In the process I did something that removed the emailing function from my posts. I haven’t had time to dig in a figure out exactly what I did. Apologies to anyone who had to come here to read rather than get this newsletter in their email. I will get it fixed.

And, no, I wasn’t able to find the list of 530 subscribers. Maybe my website is hallucinating.

I hope your week goes well. May you experience joy. May you get rest.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #27

Posted on by

Good Morning to all my 530 subscribers!

Really? I have 530 subscribers?

That’s what my subscription form says. I haven’t been able to figure out where that number comes from but, hey, glad to have you reading. Even if you’re a bot. Bots need love too.

Since you’re reading this it means you’ve survived another week! Congratulations! Pat yourself on the back. Scratch someone else’s back and maybe they will scratch yours. I hear, however, that it’s good manners these days to ask first.

Gatekeeping

I started a rant here about the enthusiasm for AI in … far too much. I’ve deleted it in favor of just saying – current human culture isn’t prepared to put it many good uses. The fact that it is was and continues to be generated by plagiarizing the creative work of real humans is, to me, a clear indication of this. I was inspired to rant by going to haveibeentrained.com. This website claims to search the databases that are being used to train art theft AIs. I put my name in the search engine and up popped a number of my images. I put in the names of some of my characters and up popped more of my images.

If you register with the site it gives you the opportunity to both upload images and register websites that you don’t want scraped for AI training. I’ve got way too many images online – just at Skookworks.com – to spend time uploading all of them, so I’ve registered all my websites and marked them as NO AI TRAINING zones. I don’t know if that will make any difference.

I got an email from someone at the site to confirm that my information was real and accurate. I responded to the email and got a response to my response. That was promising.

I don’t know of any site that does the same for the Large Language Model AIs.

The First Five

Over on Facebook my friend, Jason Levine, nominated me to post 10 comic book characters that have influenced my interest in comics. One character a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the character. Each day, I am to nominate someone to do the same.
Rather than nominate anyone I asked for volunteers. If someone wanted to play, they just needed to say so in a reply. One person each day.
And, while I’m not going to give any explanations there, I’ll be doing so here in this newsletter. The first five are in today’s edition; the next five on the 21st.
The hardest part about this challenge is that, at this point in my life, it’s not specific characters that interest me. I pick up comics and graphic novels based on who is writing and/or drawing them. And even when I was a kid there are a number of characters whose comic I read only because of the artist drawing that comic. I mean, I don’t care about Dracula, in general, but I loved Tomb of Dracula by Wolfman and Colan. Most of the characters on this list fit that criteria. They were only done by one creator (or creative team) and I’m not interested in reading versions done by other folks. I did start collecting a lot of series because I liked one creator’s version and then kept collecting it when that creator moved on because I’d grown to like the character.

1. Spider-Man

This is the first comic I ever owned. It’s not a standard Spider-Man story. It’s a riff on King Kong with Gog, an alien, standing in for the big gorilla and the Savage Land, standing in for the lost world of Skull Island. Also, Gwen Stacy plays the Ann Darrow role and gets carried off by Gog. I had a small allowance that, for a few years, covered the purchase of one comic a month. At the time, Spider-Man only appeared in one regular comic so that worked out for me.

Amazing Spider-Man 103

2. Swamp Thing

Time passed. My allowance got bigger. I added The Incredible Hulk to my regularly set of regularly purchased comics. I loved monsters and the Hulk was a monster that fought other monsters. There was a book store in town that had a rack of comics. I’d go in regularly and skim the comics. I kept getting hooked by Swamp Thing. He was a monster that was weirder than the Hulk who fought weirder monsters than the Hulk did. But my allowance, while bigger, was still pretty small. It took a lot for me to decide to add another series to my must-buy list. I finally took the plunge with Swamp Thing #24. The series was cancelled with this issue.

3. Tintin

I discovered Tintin when my family stayed with one of my Mom’s old friends. She had at least two Tintin albums sitting on a coffee table. One of them was definitely The Shooting Star. Americans often thought of comics as being just “superhero stories” – despite plenty of examples of comics that featured none. Tintin really showed me that “comics” was a medium for telling all kinds of stories. I don’t remember if, when I read Tintin the first time, I knew that it was not an American comic. I probably did. Mom’s friend had a lot of books about African and Asian mythology. She probably told me that this Tintin was a translation. I don’t remember. I do remember wanting more. The stories were longer than American monthlies and the format was larger.

4. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

I’m not sure how old I was when we discovered Perelandra. Perelandra was a comic book store. It sold new comics and back issues. My mother told Brian, the owner, to let me and my brother buy anything we wanted. She didn’t believe in censoring our reading. She’d gotten us adult library cards when we were, maybe, nine and ten. If we didn’t already, Glenn and I soon had paper routes, earning incomes that far surpassed our previous allowances. More money meant more comics and Perelandra gave us plenty to choose from. One of those choices was The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – sex, drugs, crime, more drugs, hippies, more drugs.  Freak Brothers didn’t make me want to do drugs but it didn’t dissuade me either. There’s a lot Freak Brothers DNA in Misspent Youths.

5. Cerebus the Aardvark

I don’t remember which issue of Cerebus was my first. I know it was before the author, Dave Sim, decided to turn the series into a single, 300 issue, graphic novel. I’d read other self published comics (Elfquest is a prime example) but Cerebus (through Sim’s gung ho editorializing) was the series that inspired me to want to forget about working with regular publishers and publish comics myself.

The Process GIF

That’s it for this week. I hope the summer is treating you well and, if you’re in the parts of the world getting record heat, you’re managing to stay cool.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #26

Posted on by

This week, today, we’ll start with the pictures. It’s a process GIF. I like making process GIFs. I like watching process GIFs.

You’re welcome.

These Days …

Sometime early on Monday morning, my friend Rae died. I got the news as a text from her brother at 7:49 am PST. I’d been at work for a little less than an hour.

The news was expected, even, sadly, honestly, a little welcome. She’d been fighting pancreatic cancer. She’d been in hospice since early April. The last week she’d been mostly unconscious due to pain relievers. I’m told she hadn’t eaten or drank anything for that week.

The text was brief, ending with three words: “no more pain”.

Pain had robbed her of so many things. Her enjoyment of food. She loved to eat. She loved trying new flavors, new cuisines. The last few months she could barely stand to eat and had no guarantee that anything that went down wouldn’t come back up.

Pain made walking impossible without help. Pain made her unable to use her clever hands – hands that had mastered pottery, beading, jewelry making and so much else. No more pain was good news. No more Rae? Painful news.

I finished sorting my route. I loaded my truck. I did my job. Throughout the day I texted the news to the people I knew that I didn’t think her brother knew. I set my grief aside.

Tuesday was the Fourth of July. A postal holiday. Sarah is still in Mississippi helping a friend deal with family medical problems so I had the house to myself. That would have been a perfect opportunity to let myself feel grief. I did chores. I wrote a little more of my memorial of Rae. A friend had invited me to hang out with her family if I was up to it. I didn’t really feel up to it but hanging around the house by myself wasn’t doing me any favors. I went and had a great time.

Wednesday I was back at work. We were down 21 routes so I carried extra. It was a long day. Rae’s obituary was published in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. You can read it here.

Thursday was a short work day. That is, I only worked the designated 8.5 hours. At this point my grief is set well back. I know it’s there but it will take an effort to get to it. The issues that Sarah is dealing with take precedence. I can have an effect there if only by listening to her talk about what she’s managing. Rae’s obituary didn’t mention a memorial service. I’m not in position to go if there was one.

So here I am this Friday morning. There’s a draft of memorial for Rae waiting for me. Writing it is a reminder that I don’t have a great memory. Maybe that’s biological. Maybe I’ve just never practiced remembering things enough to have good memory muscles. There’s so much I’ve forgotten. In talking with friends these last few weeks there’s a lot that I don’t think I knew. She was always in motion. She made friends wherever she went. I don’t know most of them. That obituary is the facts with a limited word count. It’s a glimpse of the person I knew. I want to read a good memorial of her. I want the memory of her to be available. I want someone else to do the work. I can’t wait for that to happen.

Grief is love that no longer has a place to go. I read that idea recently and it fits.

Thank you for reading my ramblings this week. I hope you are well and that the summer heat is bearable where you are. See you in seven.

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #25

Posted on by

Some Fridays arrive heavily. Today is one of those.

I’d already set up part of this newsletter, the parts with the art and my comments about it, earlier in the week so I’ll lead with that.

A Quiet Seaside Town

If you’re read H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” or have played enough Call of Cthulhu then you get the joke. Explaining it won’t make it funny.


The colors evolved quite a bit as I worked on this design. I originally went with representative colors but that didn’t come across as either funny or creepy enough.

I put a green layer over the image but that didn’t improve anything.

I finally decided that simpler was better and a monochrome in conjunction with the color of the text worked best.

This design is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Process GIF

I like making GIFs. I like posting GIFs. If you thought I was done sharing sharing those sketches – sorry. I made GIFs for all of them. Here’s the first one. Another will be post each week until I run out.

These Days …

So.

Yeah.

A dear friend of mine will be gone soon. She’s been in hospice since April. Sarah used to talk to her every day. I talked to her as often as I could. I texted her every night. She hasn’t responded in a week. I’m not grieving yet but when she goes I know it’s going to hit. I can’t talk to her anymore. I’m told she’s mostly unconscious. Strong pain medications to handle strong pain. I’m writing down my memories of her and what she means to me. If I write something coherent, I will share it here. I know that many of y’all knew her.

Be good to those you love. We’re all just passing through.

Skook Words (and Pictures) #24

Posted on by

Fffffrrriiiddddaaaayyyyy.

(And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.)

These Days …

Sarah has been gone for a week now, helping a friend deal with family medical problems. I am a big fan of routines and this has messed up my routines.

I am also aware that a break in routine in important for recognizing which parts of a routine are valuable and which parts are just things you do because you’ve been doing them.

I’m not complaining. I’m observing.

Having a job means that most of my routines are still intact. I get up at the same time. I make breakfast at the same time. I come home at … whatever time I get done. I go to bed at the same time. What’s different so far are my eating and sleeping habits. I’m only cooking for me. I’m not watching any of our shows. Watching shows was a social occasion. Something we did at during dinner. Sleeping is just me turning out all the lights and collapsing.

The cats still wake me up in the middle of the night in order to be fed. They have their routines as well.

The Process

This is the last set of colors for these sketches. I like the results. I can’t claim that the lighting and shadows are accurate and realistic. I’ll have to try the process on a comic story to see whether I like the results there.


They’re Still Here

When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs. Not that many had been discovered. I could probably name most of them. At the time, dinosaurs were thought to be stupid, cold blooded, slow moving reptiles that lived in swamps and became extinct because … no one was really sure why they became extinct. Probably they were just too dumb to live. The mammals showed up and the big dumb lizards decided to just give up and die.

In the decades since I was kid, dinosaurs have evolved. More and more of them have been discovered. There are too many now for me to name. They got faster. More varied. More adaptive. More social. More … feathery. Less dumb. It became clear that they didn’t die out because the mammals out competed them. It took having an asteroid dropped on the earth to wipe them out. And it still failed. Dinosaurs never really went extinct. Sure, the really big ones are gone. But we’re surrounded by their descendants.

Birds are dinosaurs.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The egg.

From a feathered dinosaur.

This design can be found on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

That’s it for me. I hope the next seven days are kind to you. I hope you share that kindness with others, whether they need it or not.

See you next ffffrrrriiidddaaayyyy.

Skook Words (and Pictures) #23

Posted on by

Friday descends from the heavens like an wine glass pushed off the table by the family cat.

On a good Friday it hits a soft and cushy rug intact.

On a bad Friday it shatters into a thousand pieces and you have to sweep it all up and be careful walking around the table in your bare feet for the next few weeks.

Hello and welcome to the newsletter.

I love my cats but I had to put them in the bedroom and close the door this morning. They wanted attention. I wanted to write. I am a bad human. They will be plotting my demise. They are good cats. Good cats are always plotting someone’s demise.

These Days …

I’ve gotten in more personal art time this week. It’s been quite relaxing. I’ve made a little progress on Mighty Nizz and done a couple of designs for my Redbubble store. I’ll show off the designs (sketches and finals) here in the next few weeks.

My station has hired more carriers so I’ve not been asked to carry as much extra in the last few days. The weather has been varied. One day of rain. Sun and clouds and breezes otherwise.

We’ve been kept busy trying to provide assistance for friends dealing with medical problems in distant places. Mostly it’s been Sarah providing the support while I do my best to support her. Tonight I’ll be putting her on a plane heading southeast so she can help out a couple of those folks in person. I’ll be flying solo for a few weeks.

Well, not exactly solo. There are the cats. And I have friends coming through town. And there’s work. And art. But both our routines will not be routine for a while.

Process

This is the penultimate process post for coloring these sketches. I’m working on streamlining my coloring process. I’m trying to use colors for mood rather than simply coloring things “realistically”. I expect I’ll be working on both these skills until I drop dead.


Out of the Past

I did the illustration below for Worlds of Cthulhu magazine back in 2009. Last week, Adam Crossingham, the former editor, emailed me to ask if he could use the image as the cover for a Miskatonic Repository publication at DriveThruRPG.

I said yes. The current version of the supplement can be purchased here. Since I’m practicing coloring my art I thought I’d take a stab at coloring this image. The result is below. The Miskatonic Repository publications are all PDFs. The great thing about PDFs is that a color version is no more expensive than a black and white one. And you can update a PDF in ways that are impossible with a physical publication. So this will be the new cover for 100 Stat Blocks. I’ll post a link when Adam updates it.
Now I should let the cats out of the bedroom and make some breakfast. It’s going to be a busy day.

Thank you for reading. I hope your day, your week, your current life is giving you an optimal mix of excitement and rest. Remember to touch base with friends. Eat. Hydrate.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #22

Posted on by

Here we are. The latest Friday with the latest newsletter. I hope your week has gone well. I hope it’s been full of more good times than otherwise.

For me, the last week has felt busier. We’re waiting for the publisher to get back to us on Billi 99. Until that happens (and, hopefully, when it does) there’s nothing for me to do on the book. They sent us some examples of the books they’ve published in the past and, damn, they’re nice packages. So, while waiting is hard, the results will be better than what we would have come up with on our own.

Without Billi in the forefront of my brain I’ve got room again to think of my own art projects. That’s where the busier feeling come from. I’m managed to do a little inking on the next Mighty Nizz story. I posted the Nizz designs to which I’ve added words to my Redbubble shop. While I was there I did some searches of some of my other designs to see where they are showing up. It appears that Redbubble’s search function is broken. Every search I did gave me results that had nothing to do with the tag words I was using. That gives me even more incentive to set up my own dedicated shop.

Process

The next step in coloring these sketches was coloring the figures. Since I’m working monochrome my choices were pretty simple. I know, this doesn’t look much different than last week. Sorry about that.
Next week the complicated work begins.

If Company Should Come

I regularly go back through my computer to see if any of my older illustrations can find new life on schtuff. Back in 2011 I contributed a couple of illustrations to the AKLONOMICON, an anthology of Lovecraftian fiction. Apparently there was a bunch of drama between some of the folks putting the book together and only a few copies got printed. I didn’t get a physical contributor’s copy. I did recently get a new PDF of the book’s contents. I think I received one prior to publication but that copy was left behind two computers ago.

I like both the illustrations I did but, of the two, this one for “If Company Should Come” by Edward Morris works best as a stand alone image. It’s an enigma but it has focus.
Add some color …

And now the enigma can be found on shirts and posters and shower curtains and …

I’ve got other, original, designs on the drawing board. More next week.

Between now and then, live a good life. Be kind when you can. Show up. Brush your teeth. Ignore the internet.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #21

Posted on by

‘Tis the Day of Fri. Once again.

Did your week go well?

I certainly hope so. If not, please fill out a complaint form and send it to management. Operators are standing by. Standing by the water cooler that is. They’re nowhere near the phones and they wouldn’t answer if they were. It’s casual Friday. Management is drunk and the operators are halfway there.

(I can’t remember if I’ve ever worked in a place that had a water cooler. Coffee maker, yes. Water cooler … maybe? It’s too early to wrack my memory.)

These Days …

This week started out pretty well. My days off collaborated with the Memorial Day holiday so I ended up with three days off in a row – Sunday through Tuesday.

I did some late birthday celebrating on Sunday. And worked on art. Contracts have not yet been signed with the new publisher for Billi 99 but I’m letting myself work on short projects again. The publisher sent us copies of a few of the books that they’ve done in the past and they are lovely. Waiting for them to get back to us on some details is difficult but they already had projects on their schedule and adding in Billi requires moving things around.

Monday I went to a rally organized by my mail carriers’ union. City carriers are currently working without a contract. Our contract expired on May 20th. We’ll continue to get paid and have all the rights agreed on in the previous contract until the new one takes effect. The rally was to make a public statement that we wanted an end to mandatory overtime and better working conditions. The rally happened in a park in downtown Seattle. I don’t go downtown much. Parking is expensive. It’s full of people. But I went. Numbers matter. Showing up was the least I could do. I joined in chants when expected. I even had a conversation with one of the carriers from my station that I’d never spoke to before. Turns out he’d had two different smash and grabs happen on his route.

Tuesday I worked on art.

On Wednesday I found out that I’d been mandated to work on Tuesday. Apparently five regular carriers, including myself, had been mandated. Management forgot to tell any of us. They put it on the schedule but, as regulars, we already have an expected schedule, so none of us checked the weekly updating one. Ooops. The mail got delivered.

As it got delivered on Wednesday and Thursday. It will get delivered again today. Probably by me. It’s possible that aliens will take me for a joyride between now and clock in time but that’s unlikely. I’m certainly not counting on it.

The Progress

One of the things I worked on during my holiday was coloring this set of sketches. I finished the process on Tuesday. This week I’m posting my base color choices for each set of sketches. I’m coloring this art in monochrome. Ideally each base color suggests an emotion. Ideally. I’ll be posting different stages each week for the next month.

To Sail the Seas Unknown

A couple of years ago I did a couple of supplemental illustrations for Corsairs of Cthulhu, a Call of Cthulhu RPG set in the Golden Age of Piracy. One was a page border –
The other was a general use fill-in illustration. The page border is pretty specific to the book but this crossed swords image seems like it could live on its own on schtuff.

I haven’t added anything to my Redbubble shop in a while so, with time available, I set to work coloring this design.

Voilà!

Available on schtuff!

And that’s it for this week. I need to have some breakfast. And think about delivering mail.

Take care of yourself. Check in on the folks you care about. Make some art. Go for a walk. Pet a cat. Play with a dog. Take a nap.

The world is full of opportunities.

Thank you for reading. See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #20

Posted on by

Welp, it’s Friday. Did it sneak up on you too? Such a tricky day. They ought to put a warning label on it.

I hope your week has gone well. Mine has been … busy. And I’ve been reminded how lucky I am to have my health by a number of folks around me having crashes in theirs.

Smash. Grab.

Last Friday, a little before noon, I returned to my postal truck and had to stare at the cab for a few seconds to register what I was seeing. Someone had smashed the cargo side window and stolen the mail (letters, magazines, small parcels) that were on the delivery tray. I was about halfway through my route at the time so half my mail was ripped off. I wish I could say I was shocked and surprised but West Seattle has been having a run of smash and grabs on mail trucks in the last few months. Unless we’re delivering on a mounted section of our route we’re now required to keep the mail locked up in the back of the truck. This slows down my delivery process.

I had been keeping the mail in the back and had just brought it forward because I was about to begin delivering to series of CBUs (cluster box units). The section I was delivering was a very short walk – less than five minutes from the truck and back. I didn’t see or hear anything. Whoever did it had to have been in a car – you can’t carry that much mail on foot.

Mail theft on this scale is new at our station. In previous years we’d hear about occasional robberies in other parts of the city but, for the most part, thefts were minor, the perpetrators were just stealing from mailboxes. I’m not worried about my safety. I am sad that my customers aren’t getting their mail and, especially their parcels. Mail these days tends to be impersonal bills and marketing. Parcels though, that’s stuff people want and, if it’s medicine, need.

I’m having to drive another truck until the window of my truck gets fixed. This is a pain because there were already five trucks out of commission with broken windows. We’re told that the windows won’t be able to be replaced until July. Bleah.

These Days …

On Sunday, we had friends over to our place for breakfast. Spanakopita. Scrambled eggs. Croissants and fresh fruit. It was kinda sorta a birthday party for me. Just the sort of party I like these days. Small so it’s easy to carry on conversations.

Monday – With a publisher looking at (mostly) taking over the Billi 99 project I’m letting myself give a little attention to other creative endeavors. We don’t yet have a schedule and a definite contract so I’m still keeping my main attention on Billi. I did portraits of the main cast for our Billi99.com site. I’m posting a gallery of those images below. To find out who these characters are, please go to the site.

My actual birthday was on Tuesday. I delivered my route as usual.

Wednesday. Workday.

Thursday – the big news was that an arrest was made of a(n alleged) mail thief. There’s no mention of this year’s smash and grabs in West Seattle so I’m not going to assume that he was the only guy doing this. I’m planning to continue to work out of the back of my truck for the rest of the summer. Once the rain comes back I’ll re-evaluate. Having to sort out of the back takes longer. The cargo sections of our trucks aren’t really set up for carrying trays of mail, trays of flats and a lot of parcels. Yeah, I know that doesn’t make sense.

Friday – today. Yep. More work. More work tomorrow. Then I have Sunday, Monday and Tuesday off. Yay!

The Practice

Last week I posted the raw scans of six pages of sketches that I’ll be coloring as practice. This week I’m posting more cleaned up versions. I’ve removed the blue lines and fixed a few things that didn’t look right to me in the original drawings.


Next week I’ll start coloring.

Thank you!

A big shout out and thank you to Fred Burke and John Bell, my Ko-Fi supporters! You signed on at the beginning of 2023 and, as of next week, you will have stuck around for six months! I really appreciate it. Especially after my original plans got sidetracked by working on Billi. As promised, next week I’ll send you photos of a selection of 8.5×11 sketches and drawings. After you’ve picked your favorite I’ll mail it to you!

Thank you to all y’all who read my ramblings every week. I hope the days are being gentle to you.

See you in seven!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Skook Words (and Pictures) #19

Posted on by

Friday arrives like a flock of migrating geese!
Friday is the dream that you forget upon waking!
Friday is the fifth dwarf, Snow White’s favorite!
Friday is the moment when you see your lost love again!
Friday lurks in the darkness and springs upon the unwary!
Friday is a cat on a windowsill soaking in sunlight!
Friday is … here.
(Unless you’re reading this on some other day of the week. Those days are cool too. Mostly.)

These Days …

The process of getting Billi 99 back in print in a new snazzy edition has reminded me how much I’ve been relying on annual projects to get things done. For the past few years I’ve had some regular thing, a large project planned, that got me to produce some art. One year it was to do a daily half hour sketch. One year it was Daughter of Spiders. One year it was to produce a coffee mug design on a weekly basis. This year I’d planned to create Mighty Nizz comics and write/illustrate The Surrilana Depths. Billi 99 was only vaguely on the table.

When it started to look like there would be a reprint, it looked like it would be a simple thing – a hardcover edition in black and white. My participation was expected to be limited to some touch up on pages that had problems in the original scans. We had a publisher. Someone else had volunteered to do the book design.

And then …

The designer quit.

Sarah has been trying to get a new edition of Billi out for a few years now. With a publisher being ready to print a new edition, I stepped in to do the production work and book design. Then we got more ambitious. We’d previously considered doing a Kickstarter to fund a deluxe hardback printing but neither I nor Sarah had felt like we had the focus to manage it. I had my postal job and Mighty Nizz and Surrilana filling my time. But once I was doing production work we started reconsidering the idea. And once a Kickstarter was an option we figured – why not go full color? Sarah and Tim Sale, the artist, had discussed doing a color version in years previous. Sarah researched costs. She contacted José Villarrubia about coloring the book.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. José has created beautiful colors on a few pages that can be used on the Kickstarter campaign. I’d love to show them but we want to keep them under wraps until closer to launch.

The project has grown. More folks than Sarah and I are working on it. If all goes well someone else, with far more experience, will be stepping in to design the book. Among other things.

That’s a relief. That’s exciting. I wish I could write all about it but negotiations are still happening.

So I should be able to pick up with Mighty Nizz and Surrilana soon. It’s tricky. I don’t shift gears well. I figured I could manage two projects this year, if I was both the boss and the worker bee. Three projects (especially when the third project has deadlines and big time publishers and stuff I’m figuring out how to do on the fly) is more than I could manage and still be pleasant company. Add in concerns and attention to/about friends and family with life threatening medical issues …. Bleah. I haven’t been willing to work on anything but Billi because I haven’t wanted to get too attached to any other project. So instead of spending a few minutes here and there on Nizz and Surrilana I’ve spent my unstructured time surfing the web.

That’s been fun. But not terribly productive.

Billi is still a project that requires my attention. Assuming that negotiations work out, I’ll still need to be involved. It will just require a different sort of attention. I should have the mental energy to focus on Nizz and Surrilana again.

Whew.

In the Meantime

While we’re working out the details on Billi I’m doing a miniproject just for this newsletter. I need practice doing digital coloring. (Yes, I’ve been doing digital coloring for years now. I still need practice.) I did these six pages of sketches. This week I’m posting scans of the physical art. Next week I’ll post the (mostly) cleaned up black and white versions. The week after that I’ll start adding color. Every week I’ll do another stage in the coloring process. Hopefully y’all will find it amusing.

And that’s it for this week. Thank you for being patient with my rambling.

I hope the last seven days have been good to you. I hope the next seven are even better.

See you on May 26th!