These Days –

I deliver a lot of so-called junk mail. There’d be very little mail without it and I wouldn’t have a job so I don’t hate the stuff. What I don’t like is badly managed junk mail. Most of the time I just deliver it and forget about it but this week I felt compelled to contact the sender so they could hopefully improve their return rate. This was my email –

I got a thank you back from the dental office. I don’t enjoy going to the dentist but these folks make the experience as tolerable as possible.

Billi 99

I seem to be making good progress on updating the Billi 99 pages. Some of that has been fun. I’m finding out how to do things in Photoshop that I’d never thought of doing. I’ve learned how to make Actions to streamline the work. I got a lot done on Sunday. That felt great. Sarah got contact information and production guidelines from the publisher. I now have an idea what they expect and people to talk to when I have questions.

As I wrote last week, Tim Sale did the original Billi illustrations on Duoshade art board. Doing comics using Duoshade was popular for a time in the late Eighties and early Nineties. I used it myself when I did Misspent Youths. The fellow who had been the designer for this book had told me that once we figured out the moire issues on the Billi pages we could use the technique to do a nice reprint of Misspent Youths. While I appreciate the thought, it wouldn’t work. Tim used the smallest hatch pattern available. That’s probably why we’re getting the moire pattern. I used a larger hatch pattern for Misspent Youths that doesn’t seem to moire when I reproduce it. But that’s an aside.

Duoshade was designed to be used for illustrations printed on newsprint. Before comic artists rediscovered it during the black and white boom it got a lot of use in newspaper illustrations and comic strips. The board has a hatch patern printed on it that becomes visible when painted with a developer. When it’s printed the result is a graytone, or a couple of graytones, depending on the type of board. The actual illustrations have a brown cast to them. Below is my scan of page 27 of the 4th issue of Billi 99.

This page, when printed, came out with hatching patterns that register as shades of gray for most people.

The moire pattern is barely noticeable on this page. Most people reading the book wouldn’t think twice about it. Our previous designer was much more OCD (that’s a good thing in a designer) and he looked for ways to diminish or, better yet, eliminate it. One solution would be to simply rescan all the original pages. We’ve got a few pages but, unfortunately, the rest of the art is scattered to the far corners of comic book fandom.

Below is my first pass at revising the art. I was inspired by the warm quality of physical Duoshade art. Billi 99 takes place in a sort of retro future and giving the illustrations a sepia tint seemed to work.

Each individual page is being converted. Then I’m going over every page to make sure the borders and gutters are white. There are a few pages with weird artifacts inserted when they were originally scanned that need to be corrected. A few of the pages are much darker than the others. That will need to be corrected for.

I also need to figure out a way to convert the lettering from its current raster state to a vector one and make sure it’s all solid black. Tim did all the lettering himself directly on the page. These days the vast majority of comics are lettered digitally. The publisher who will be putting out Billi wants the lettering their books to be done as vector art on a separate layer from the rest of the illustrations. Frank Cvetkovic extracted the lettering and put it on its own layer. Tim had a font designed of his own lettering (based on his Billi lettering) but it’s … standardized. We could use that to replace his Billi work. But the Billi lettering is a bit more organic and eccentric than what the font provides. We want to preserve that.

Kickstarter?

On Wednesday we went to a meet-up with Oriana Leckert, Kickstarter’s comics advisor. She was in town for Emerald City Comic Con and Rob Salkowitz had arranged a dinner for a few folks before the con. We’ve had a number of people advise us to run a Kickstarter to fund the Billi Special Edition. None of those people have actually run a Kickstarter so we wanted to talk to someone who was more involved in the process.

Oriana was very encouraging. Rob was encouraging. We came away with a lot of ideas for what we could offer to supporters of a Billi Kickstarter. Because we were up late for the meeting and then I worked yesterday we haven’t really had a chance to talk out the pros and cons. We’ll be doing that this weekend. I’ll let y’all know what we decide next week.

I hope your week is a good one with as much rest or excitement as you need. Balance is everything!

See you in seven!

Humans plan. God laughs. So it’s been said.

We’re working on a new collected edition of Billi 99. It looked easy. We’ve got scans of the original art. We had someone who had enthusiastically volunteered to design the book. And then …

Tim Sale’s artwork was done on Duoshade board. The stuff is no longer made. Digital technology killed off the market. The scans were made back in the early nineties. When printed they have a slight moire pattern. The designer was trying to figure out ways to make the moire go away and was having some success.

Then he got sick and dropped out the project with the work undone. I wish him well.

We could go ahead and print from the original scans. The TPB printed in 2002 did that. The moire is mostly only noticeable to folks with a bit of OCD. Still, we’d like this collection to be an improvement on the previous one.

So I’m taking on the job of making the corrections. And, for the moment, designing the book. That’s a lot of work. That means all the other creative projects I was working on are getting pushed back. Billi needs to have priority.

The cover at the top of this newsletter is a mock-up I did for fun last year using a sketch that Tim had done in 2020. I can’t put out a newsletter without some sort of image, can I? The actual cover will feature a different illustration and a different design. We’re aiming to have the book available toward the end of this year. In order for that to happen all the work needs to be done before June.

Fun. Fun. Fun!

I hope your week has gone well and your plans are coming together like clockwork.

See you in seven!

Hunh. I was about to start writing today’s newsletter and I wondered – “Why Friday?”
More specifically, I wondered – “Why are there seven days in the week? It’s not like seven is favorite number. I mean, yeah, in some cultures seven is a magic number and it’s a prime but three and five are generally more popular. Why are there weeks?”

I probably learned the reason that we humans follow our current calendar but, given that I haven’t needed that knowledge lately, I forgot. So I used the internet to look it up and it turns out that the seven day week has been around for over 2000 years. Since Babylon. Seven day for the seven planets that they were able to observe. Other cultures had shorter and longer weeks but, eventually (and in large part because of the spread of the Roman empire that is the basis for Western culture) everybody adopted the seven day week.

The weekend is a modern invention. Thanking God that it’s Friday is definitely a modern sentiment. Given that I work most Saturdays and only have two days off in a row in two out of six weeks “weekend” isn’t really a thing for me. I’m more of a TGIS sort of guy. S being Sunday. That’s the only day that the Post Office doesn’t deliver mail. We do deliver parcels for Amazon. I have enough seniority that I don’t have work Sundays. So TGIS(eniority) and TGF(or)U(nions).

But I digress.

My postal truck, that is, the truck that is assigned to my route, has been out of commission for the past week. I came to work last Thursday and it didn’t start. I’ve had to borrow other routes’ trucks to deliver each day. If you every took a ride in my personal car you’d probably think I’m a slob. I wouldn’t argue with you. I’m not a general slob. I’m a slob in specific places. My car is one of those places. My postal truck is not. I keep my postal truck clean and neat. I can’t say that no other carriers do the same but none of the trucks I borrowed this week were close to clean and neat.

My truck started yesterday morning. I assumed that vehicle maintenance had fixed whatever was wrong with it. I drove it for most of the day yesterday and was surprised at how minimalist I keep it. No rubber bands on the gear shifts. No paperwork and postal forms and trash and pens and gooey keys on the dashboard. No empty water bottles and fast food wrappers under the mail platform. No piles of leaves around the brake and gas pedals.

It died again two swings before the end of my route. I was able to deliver the last of my mail on foot while I waited for a supervisor to come and check out the truck. He wasn’t able to fix it any more than I was so he called a tow truck and gave me a ride back to the station. I have today off so it’s possible that my truck will be fixed in time for me to drive it tomorrow. Possible but unlikely. Last year I was without my truck for over two months. Maintenance subcontracted its repair to the Pep Boys and then forgot about it.

But enough words. Here’s a picture –

And here’s the picture with words.

This will be in the Mighty Nizz store whenever I get that established.

And that’s it for this week. Thank you for reading.

See you in seven!

Friday snuck up on me. One minute it was Sunday and I was making an enormous lasagna for my lunches (and breakfasts and occasional dinners) and then it was today! In between we’ve been working to organize a bunch of different projects and, as is often the case when one is trying to multitask, not seeming to get a lot done.

I’m helping Sarah bring Billi 99 back into print. My role is minor, mostly listening to her and her designer talk about what needs to be done.

The Old Cat is adjusting to having the New Cat in his life and we’re adjusting to having two fur people making demands instead of just one. The New Cat came with some infections and so we’re having to give him nose drops and stuff meds down his throat. He’s no more fond of taking meds than any other cat I’ve ever met. Fortunately, the oral meds are liquid and we can administer them with a syringe.

Having the New Cat is helping keep the Old Cat off my drawing board – somewhat. He’s spending more time running around the house after the New Cat so he’s sleeping more when I’m trying to draw. But he still likes visiting my drawing board more than I’d like. But I am getting more drawing time in and making progress on the next Mighty Nizz comic.

I’m in the process of adding words to a number of my older images/designs. I like designs  that are just images. From what I see, on t-shirts out in the wild, most people like designs that include words. So ….

Below is the design prior to text –

Here is Nizz and Mimi in an expanded image with a garland of words –

The first version is still available in my Redbubble store.
The second version will be available in the Mighty Nizz store when we get it set up. We’re still in process with that.

I hope your week was good one and that your next is even better. If time passes slowly I hope it’s because you’ve got a host of lovely moments to savor! If time is running away from you – catch it in a net and feed it cookies until it’s ready to settle down.

See you in seven!

These Days

We have a new cat. Kemo, our old cat (who isn’t old just the cat that has been living with us) is a social critter and we thought he would benefit from having another feline to hang with. We’re doing the “keep them apart so they get used to the idea that there’s another cat in the house” stuff. Kemo clearly wants to hang out with the new guy. The new guy, currently named Flame but that may change, isn’t ready for that yet. He’s a cuddly guy with me and Sarah, a hissy guy with Kemo.

It’s my selfish hope that Kemo will enjoying hanging with New Guy so much he’ll forget about knocking my pens and pencils off my drawing table and demanding that I play catch with him after work. But it will be a couple of days before we can let them be alone unsupervised.

Thoughts About

“If you build it, they will come.”

I’m guessing y’all know the quote from Field of Dreams. It’s my mantra for creative work. The unspoken part of this mantra is: “If you’ve built nothing, no one has a place to come to”. That’s a more awkward, less inspirational phrase. But you can’t watch a movie that hasn’t been filmed, listen to a song that isn’t being sung, read a novel that hasn’t been written, study a painting that hasn’t been … you get the picture. I know folks who don’t finish their projects or, if they do finish them, don’t make them available because they worry that what they have created isn’t perfect. I know my work isn’t perfect. Perfection doesn’t exist. What one person loves, another will hate.

The tricky part for creative folks is the next thing – “If no one knows it exists, no one will visit.”

Getting attention is a different skill than … I was going to write “creative work” but finding an audience is creative work. It’s work that involves asking for attention. I’m quite comfortable receiving attention. Asking for attention is something more foreign. One of the justifications for being on social media is that you’ll generate interest in your creative work. But the more time you spend on social media the less time you’ll have for creative work.

There are folks who generate interest and support in a project before they start – “If you want it, I’ll build it” types.

I’m … rambling because it’s Friday and it’s newsletter time and lately I’ve been waking up tired and staying kinda brain dead regardless of the amount of coffee I’m drinking. This probably means I need to get more sleep or take naps but …

There should be a new post over at my Ko-Fi account. Writing about writing the Surrilana Depths. I scheduled it to go live the same time as this newsletter.

Process GIF

This week’s process GIF is of The Pile. I did this portrait of him for the All the Works membership tier at Ko-Fi.

Speaking of social media – I’m now on Mastodon. I have no idea how active I will be.

And now I need to get in my uniform and go deliver mail.

Thank you for reading. See you in seven!

Greetings, salutations, hello and how are you?

I hope your world is treating you well. I hope you are treating your world well.

This week’s process GIF is for one of the illustrations I did for my Ko-Fi account. I’m using it as part of the icons for the Pulp and Circuses and the All the Works membership levels. The hammer wielding woman is Briar Rose Taylor – protagonist of Daughter of Spiders. The big guy behind her is Morgo – one of the main characters of The Surrilana Depths.
The Surrilana Depths is my rewrite/revision/reimagining of Morgo the Mighty, a novel serialized in four parts in the Popular Magazine in 1930. I discovered the story back in 2012. It’s an adventure with a combined helping of two of my favorites settings – a Lost World and an Underground Realm. Surrilana is a Lost World in a giant series of caverns under the Himalayas. I found a facsimile reprint of the story, retyped it and serialized the original novel here at Skookworks. I had a collected version available for download but I took that offline when I started streamlining my website. The original posts (and a lot of related posts with various illustrations) are still up if you’d like to read them.

I will make a new PDF of the original novel available to my Pulp and Circuses Ko-Fi subscribers. The current version needs an embarrassing amount of copy editing. I want to fix that first. If you’d like to read a physical reprint of the novel now, there’s a good looking version available here.

I’ll be serializing The Surrilana Depths in 26 episodes, one every two weeks, starting in July. I’m currently planning to include 2 original illustrations with each episode. Surrilana will differ from Morgo. I’m keeping a lot of the florid prose. I’m sticking to the plot as much as possible. I’m changing … I’ll go into what I’m changing in future newsletters.

I’m working on Surrilana in the mornings before I go to deliver mail. I took a break today to say hello to y’all. Now I’m heading back underground.

See you in seven!

TGIF! Rearrange those letters slightly and you get GIFT! Loose the T and you get GIF! Clearly that’s a sign that I need to gift y’all with more GIFs!

So this week we have a process GIF of the Mighty Nizz!

Combine this kid with last week’s logo for:

This illustration/design isn’t available on anything yet.

I know. Not very capitalist of me.

I’m working to get ahead on the Mighty Nizz comic and other sundries. The Post Office continues to expect me to deliver mail. My cat thinks my drawing board is his playground (so many pencils, pens, markers and other tools to bat onto the floor!). Life is a struggle! To keep track of that I’m going old school and putting up to-do lists. These are pages from an 18×24 newsprint sketch pad taped to the wall behind my desk. They’re a much better reminder of where I’m at than anything I could put on my computer or my phone.

For Nizz –
For The Surrilana Depths (aka the Morgo the Mighty reboot/revision/remake – more on that next week) –

For the Newsletters both here and at Ko-Fi –

I’ve made progress on these lists since I photographed them. More lists are undoubtedly needed. Showing off the progress will be a regular part of this newsletter.

My first Ko-Fi newsletter should post simultaneously to this one. Check it out!

Time is short. Y’all are beautiful and talented and I appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings.

I hope your week has been a good one. The days are getting longer. May you have more joy as well.

See you in seven!

Good Morning! Welcome to the second Friday of 2023!

Thank you for your votes on the Skookworks banners. I’ve tallied the votes and the winners are:

My big illustration project this year is the Mighty Nizz comic. I got stalled in inking at the end of last year because of the extra hours I needed to work at USPS. With package volumes back to “normal” levels I’m able to go back to “normal” work hours. Y’know, ten hours or less instead of 12 hours and more. Less time delivering mail means more time writing and doing art. My goal is to have the second Nizz story inked and toned and being colored by the end of the month. Fingers crossed.

I was intending to do all the coloring using Clip Studio Paint but there’s enough of a learning curve that I’ll probably only do the lettering there. I’m moving toward a more digital work process. Partly that’s to make it possible for me to produce work more quickly. Partly that’s to eventually have less physical art to store. We’re expecting to move out of Seattle in a few years and the less we have to move, the easier it will be.

And partly … it’s to make it more difficult to spill ink all over my art. I’ve done it a few times on my own. I’ve moved my grip wrong and dropped my brush on the page. Mostly I’ve been able to clean that up digitally. A few times I’ve needed to print out new bluelines and start over. Most recently the cat knocked over my ink cup and got spatters on my thumbnails and the page I was inking. Fortunately, that time, the ink hit the part of the page that I was going to fill with black anyway.

I’m moving from Photoshop to CSP for two reasons.
Number One – screw Adobe and their rental model. I own my copy of CSP.
Number Two – Photoshop is a massive program and I only use a small part of it. CSP was designed for Japanese manga artists. Mangaka are expected to produce as many (or more) as twenty pages a week. CSP is designed to make that workload easier.

My first finished image done with CSP is the Mighty Nizz logo.

My other big projects are auxiliary to the Mighty Nizz comic – my Ko-Fi page and the Skookworks store.

I’ve set up three support tiers at Ko-Fi.

Nothing but the Nizz
Level One. For folks who are most interested in the Mighty Nizz. Weekly newsletter. Sketches. Process GIFs. And more!

Pulp and Circuses
Level Two. For folks who like pulp fiction and weird illustration. And the Mighty Nizz. This tier includes all the Mighty Nizz content. Regular chapters (with illustrations) of a scifi/fantasy/magic realismish serial. Plus schtuff!

All the Works
Level Three. All the Nizz. All the Pulp. Plus new short comics. Revised classic comix. Downloadable PDFs. Plus schtuff!

The Skookworks store will be similar to my current Zazzle and Redbubble stores but you should be able to make purchases directly from one of my sites – Mighty Nizz stuff from the Mighty Nizz site, Oz Squad stuff from the Oz Squad site and everything else from the Skookworks site. If there’s a design you’d like to see on a specific product please let me know.

Today is the fifth day of my six day USPS work week. I’ll get to rest on Sunday and Monday.

I hope your New Year is treating you well. Look out for yourself. Be as kind as you can. Take joy where you find it. Don’t listen to crazy people on the internet.

See you in seven!

Good morning!

It’s a New Year and I’m making some changes. If you have a moment, I’d like your opinion. I’ll be asking for it wwwaaaayyyy down the page after the images.

Out with the old.

In with the new.

The first set of banners (the old) have been on my website since January 1st, 2020. I posted the second set of banners (the new) to Skookworks.com on Sunday, the 1st of this year. Here’s where I’d like your opinion – I’m going to be streamlining and simplifying the website over next few months. I made 12 banners this year because I made 12 banners in 2020. The banners show up randomly when someone looks at the site. Five banners would be more streamlined than twelve banners. Which five banners are your favorites?
1. Flying Turtles
2. Dragons
3. All Better Now
4. Black Cats and Jack O’Lanterns
5. Yellow Alien
6. Nizz out standing in her field
7. Yellow Brick Road
8. The Face
9. Stardust the Super Wizard
10. Octobriana
11. Fantomah
12. The Heap

Please choose the five banners you like best and reply to this email with the numbers of those banners. (For example 4, 7, 9, 11, 12 or maybe 1, 3,4, 6, 7.) If you’re reading this post on the website you can either post a reply or use the “Contact Me” button at the top right of the page. Thank you!

If you’ve made New Year’s resolutions (or set New Year’s goals) I’d love to hear what they are. For myself, I make New Year’s plans. I give myself annual projects.

For the last couple of years I’ve been posting the Skook Works in Progress newsletter. Every Friday I would post a process GIF of a design I was selling in my Zazzle and Redbubble online stores. For 2022 I’d given myself the specific project of doing 52 designs, one for each week. I’m happy to say that I exceeded that goal. I’ve currently got 230 designs available in Redbubble and more than 300 in Zazzle. (Zazzle doesn’t give me a count.)

This year my main big art project is drawing Mighty Nizz comics. I’m sure I’ll add more designs to my online stores but my focus will be the girl in the wolfskin hoodie. I considered taking a break from writing a newsletter. I’m not expecting to make process GIFs of the Nizz strips so …

So I’m changing the title of the newsletter. Writing to you each week is a habit that I will be maintaining. Once I start posting the finished pages for the next Nizz story I’ll post the scans of the physical pages here. That should start happening on February 1st over at the Mighty Nizz website and here (or in your email if you’re a subscriber) on February 3rd.

Some of my other projects –
I’ve set up a Ko-Fi account. Ko-Fi is a crowdfunding site similar to Patreon. Ko-Fi has options for payment and services that I think will work better for me than Patreon. Please come visit. I’m still figuring things out so any suggestions you have will be welcomed.

I’m working on creating a store here at Skookworks, similar to what I’ve got going at Zazzle and Redbubble but without the noise that is endemic to those platforms.

As I mentioned, I’m streamlining and simplifying Skookworks.com. I started posting a blog at skook.blogspot.com on January 8th, 2003. That eventually grew into this website. I’ve published over 3400 posts. Some years I’ve posted daily. You can find over 2400 images in the posts or in galleries here. I’ve been a packrat most of my life. In the last couple of years I’m been working to become a different sort of rodent, one who can fit all his possessions into a small van. I’m a long way from being that. Skookworks.com doesn’t weigh anything but it’s a huge site. A huge site that, according to my analytics, no one visits deeper than the front pages. I understand. I rarely go deep into the sites I visit.

Over the next few months I’ll be going deep. I’ve already archived the Archives – my older art (portfolios, minicomics, Misspent Youths, Morgo the Mighty). Those pages have only been visited by spambots in recent years. I’ll be deleting most of the old posts. (I’m still a packrat. Anything I delete will get archived somewhere.) If you ever planned to read my ramblings from 2005 or 2010, now is the time to do it.

I hope 2023 looks like a good year for you.

Thank you for reading this newsletter! Remember to send me your banner selections.

See you in seven!