Skook Words (and Pictures) #45

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Fridays come and Fridays go but diamonds are forever. And a girl’s best friend.

A man’s best friend is his dog.

No wonder the sexes don’t get along.

That one sex is from Mars (a freezing desert) and the other is from Venus (a burning hellscape) might also be a problem.

Or maybe some folks just think too much about fitting diverse groups of sentient apes into easily defined boxes so they don’t have to think much any more?

Uh…

Anyway. It’s Friday. This is the Newsletter.

Nonsense abounds!

These Days …

It’s dark when I go to work. It’s dark when I go back home.

Yay.

Lovecraft Kids

The final scenario of in the Eldritch New England Holiday Collection was –

Christmas In Kingsport –
Our six protagonists gather once more in the home of their Great Aunt Nora, for what they expect to be a very boring Christmas Eve.  However they are rescued by their beloved older cousin Melba, a carefree flapper and black sheep of the family, who takes them on adventures undreamed of across Kingsport and Beyond the Walls of Sleep.  But what begins as a magical holiday adventure soon turns into a nightmare for the cousins, as they are targeted by demons. They must solve a mystery before Christmas morning, to return peace on earth and good will towards certain members of their family.

Talking to Myself (Part the Next)

Scene: The Studio. The Cartoonist sits in front of his computer. To the left of his keyboard is a cup of room temperature coffee. To the right is a fat, orange cat. It’s asleep on a stack of “important” papers.

The Salesman enters. He’s carrying his own cup of coffee. It’s fresh and hot. He sips.

Salesman – “Are you doing anything useful?”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking.”

Salesman – “So … no?”

The Cartoonist looks at the Salesman. The Cartoonist rolls his eyes.

Cartoonist – “Ha. Ha. What do you want?”

Salesman – “I want you to draw a comic that’s easily marketable but I’ve mostly given up on that ever happening. So, instead, I’d like you to clarify something you said last week.”

Cartoonist – “I don’t remember what I said yesterday. Last week might as well be last century.”

Salesman – ” ‘Punk rock. Zines. Getting the work done and getting it out.’ What did you mean? You didn’t really explain it.”

Cartoonist – “I was trying to articulate the philosophy driving Red Storm Elegy.”

Salesman – “That’s still a terrible title.”

Cartoonist – “Would you prefer Sunk Cost Elegy?”

Salesman – ” …. maybe?”

Cartoonist – “Sunk Cost Elegy it is. Anyway – the philosophy …”

Salesman – “Are you going to want me to write a manifesto? Manifestos are so 20th Century.”

Cartoonist – “No manifesto. Are you planning to listen? If not I can go back to staring at my monitor.”

The Salesmen sips his coffee. He makes the “lips zipped” motion over his mouth.

Cartoonist – “For the last couple of years I’ve been having a hard time doing comics. Which is frustrating because doing comics is pretty much all I’ve really wanted to do since I was a kid. I’ve done a lot of art but it’s primarily been single illustrations because – ”

Salesman – “Because the cats sit on your drawing table and demand your attention?”

Cartoonist – “That’s part of it. When it was just Kemo and Sabé they weren’t on the drawing table as much. After Sabè died, Kemo got on the table more. We got Crunch with the idea that Kemo would pay more attention to him.”

Salesman – “That didn’t work out the way you planned.”

Cartoonist – “No. Crunch and Kemo play but when he’s not playing with Kemo, Crunch likes to be close to me. Like, on my drawing table or my computer or the papers next to my mousepad.”

Salesman – “You could get rid of the cats. Or at least put them in another room when you want to work on art.”

Cartoonist – “Sometimes I have put them in another room but that’s not a solution. We have cats because we like cats. And this isn’t really about the cats. This is about working around distractions. There will always be distractions. So how do I do that?”

Salesman – “I’m assuming you’re going to tell me.”

Cartoonist – “I do all my art digitally. At least, all my comics. I still like working with pencils, paper, ink, markers and paint. I’ll keep doing physical illustrations. Maybe I’ll do enough of them I can start doing art shows. Or something.”

Salesman – “That would be a good thing actually. That I could market.”

Cartoonist – “I will be creating my comics with my Wacom tablet in Clip Studio Paint and, until I master CSP, Photoshop. The big advantage to working this way is instant access. No more having to get out the paper, set out the ink, find the brush or the pen. No more scanning in pencils and converting them to bluelines. No more clean up. I just open the file and start working. In the past I’ve always felt like I needed at least an open half hour or more before it was worth working on art, now I can just take advantage of random five minutes. I don’t have worry about ink drying, either on the page so I don’t screw up an illustration by smearing the ink, or on the brush so I have to wash it.”

Salesman – “Yay. You can work more and faster. Yay. Technology. What does that have to do with punk rock and zines?”

Cartoonist – “It’s … hmmn. I’ve known a lot of creative types who get caught up in making their work perfect. One of them justified it as “bad art is forever” and he didn’t want “bad art” in the world with his name on it. But “bad art” is subjective. Stuff that is considered genius now was panned by critics when it was first produced. Stuff that is considered bad still has fans who love it. I rarely finish anything to perfection. I just get to a point where noodling more will make it worse. The art isn’t perfect; I can see things that could be improved but I don’t know how to improve them without starting from scratch so I call the work done and move on.”

The Salesman sips his coffee. He makes a puzzled face.

Salesman – “It sounds like you’re saying that you’re okay making bad art.”

Cartoonist – “Sort of yes but also no. I’m never going to try to do bad work. I’m saying that I will always make the best art I can and then move on. I will always see ways I could improve but I’m going to leave it up to others to decide on whether it’s bad or good.”

Salesman – “So … punk rock and zines?”

Cartoonist – “Passion and enthusiasm and ephemera. Part of idea behind punk rock was that you didn’t worry about whether you could sing or play your instruments, you just formed a band and played music. Zines were (and are) made by people who just wanted to make a publication. Nowadays there are tools and programs and services that will allow you to make something that looks pretty professional but, back in the day, it was all cutting and pasting and xeroxing for, maybe, a few dozen copies of something.”

Salesman – “You’re not telling me things were better back then?”

Cartoonist – “God no. I’m using punk and DIY creation as a reference. I’m saying that I not let my ignorance stop me. About learning as I go. I’m talking about doing art without concern for perfection or commercial appeal. About finishing a project in order to finish a project.”

Salesman – “The phrase ‘without concern for commercial appeal’ disturbs me. You started this year planning to do Mighty Nizz comics. I get that your flow was interrupted by concern for other people’s health issues and the Billi 99 kickstarter stuff but Nizz is probably the most commercial thing you’re thought of it. It’s simple. I can sell simple. Your other things … they’re a mess. They require explanation. People these days have the attention spans of fruit flies.”

Cartoonist – “My brand is “weird stuff that requires explanation”.

Salesman – “Your brand? Talking about ‘brand’ is my wheelhouse.”

Cartoonist – “So figure out a better way to describe it. Might Nizz is still on the table. So is The Surrilana Depths. And Kaiju Weather. And The Witch Engines. And a bunch of things I’m not going to mention because I already sound too ambitious to myself. Sunk Cost Elegy is the first album.”

Salesman – “First album. That’s what the European cartoonists call their books. I can work with that. Sunk Cost Elegy: a Scifi Samurai Western. By David Lee Ingersoll. Is this going to be a webcomic or a print book?”

Cartoonist – “I’m aiming for print but we’ll see. And it’s more of a Punk Scifi Neon Noir now. And I’m thinking of using a pseudonym. ‘David Lee Ingersoll’ is a mouth full. “Moebius”. “Madonna”. “Prince”. Single name pseudonyms are cool.”

Salesman – “You make the art. Leave the branding to me.”

 

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #44

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Greetings and salutations, Beautiful People!

Halloween has passed, Thanksgiving looms and the distant thunder of Christmas can be heard. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the days grow shorter and water falls from the sky in a variety of formats.

This is the newsletter. I’m guy drinking coffee and drawing stuff. You’re one of the Beautiful People. (Duh. It’s there in the opening sentence.)

Lovecraft Kids

The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection by Oscar Rios, published by Golden Goblin Press featured four scenarios. The Halloween scenario is actually the first in the book as well as being the first one Oscar wrote. An earlier version of it was published as part of Halloween Horror, a collection of Halloween themed scenarios, back in 2005. That collection is out of print and I couldn’t find a link to it while I was writing this. If I’d been smart I’d have featured these illustrations in last week’s newsletter.

Halloween In Dunwich –
A group of six cousins, from across Lovecraft Country, gather at the Dunwich farm of their great grandfather Silas for a family celebration. There will be a day filled with Halloween themed activities and games, followed by a night of feasting and ghost stories. However, as the midnight hour approaches, the children discover that a certain old family ghost story is quite true, as a vengeful spirit from their family’s distant past rises from the grave.  It falls upon our adolescent investigators to save their family and thwart the aims of their sinister foe.     

Talking to Myself

Scene:
The Studio. (Also: The Library.)

The Cartoonist is sitting at his desk. He’s staring at his computer monitor. A fat orange cat sleeps on the actual computer at the right of the monitor. The Salesman enters.

Salesman – “Are you thinking? Or have you fallen asleep with your eyes open?”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking.”

The Salesman waits for the Cartoonist to elaborate. The cat on the computer yawns.

Cartoonist – “Punk rock. Zines. Getting the work done and getting it out.”

Salesman – “Did that make sense in your head? Because it’s not making sense out here.”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking about how to approach Red Storm Elegy. How to do the art. How to craft the story.”

Salesman – “Maybe just leave it alone? Maybe start an Instagram and draw fan art of popular characters that people recognize instead of trying to salvage a decades old project that the writer abandoned? It would be easier for me to sell people on something they recognized.”

Cartoonist – “I’ve got the new story in my head. Mostly. I’ve rearranged the pages and I’ve written dialogue for about a third of it. I’ve done new art.”

The Salesman sighs. He scratches pets the cat a couple of times. The cat shifts its position slightly.

Salesman – “Red Storm Elegy is lousy title.”

Cartoonist – “It’s the working title. I had to come up with a new title for the project so I could start thinking it as a new thing instead of an old thing that I was trying to expand.”

Salesman – “It is an old thing that you’re trying to expand. Are you sure you’re not stuck in a case of Sunk Cost Fallacy? Maybe you think that because you spent a bunch of time drawing a bunch of pages you need to use those pages in something otherwise the time that you spent drawing those pages was a waste?”

Cartoonist – “No.”

Salesman – “No? No to what?”

Cartoonist – “No to being caught in a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Probably. I don’t ever consider a project done until it’s done. Some things just get set aside because other things take priority. I’m working on Red Storm Elegy now because now is the time to work on it.”

Salesman – “Talking to you gives me a headache.”

Cartoonist – “So do something else. Isn’t it Friday morning? Don’t you have a newsletter to write?”

Salesman – “I just finished it.”

Skook Words (and Pictures) #43

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Hmmm. There’s something familiar about today.

Could it be … Friday?

These Days …

I’ve been on vacation since last Friday. It’s been a good week to be on vacation here in the Pacific Northwest – we’re getting lots of rain. Since my plans were to finish the physical art for the next Mighty Nizz story and sort my old comics, staying indoors was not a problem.

Unfortunately I have the attention span of … one of my cats. If that.

I sorted the magazines that have been sitting unboxed on shelves. Now all the various series are stacked together rather than mixed in. I open the long boxes of comics that had been sitting, sealed up, since my brother shipped them from California twenty years ago. (I’ve been saying I had eighteen long boxes for so long I’d never bothered to actually count the boxes. There are only twelve boxes. I have no idea where the “eighteen boxes” number came from.) I got as far as doing a quick skim through each box before putting the lids back on and setting them aside again. I saw comics I’d forgotten that I had. I saw comics that have never been collected and probably never will be. I’m not nostalgic. Not for comics as they were when I was collecting them. I don’t buy monthly comics anymore. I buy graphic novels and series collections. I like books with spines. Those old comic magazines (one comic writer calls them pamphlets, another calls them flimsies) don’t sit on bookshelves. They’re not durable. But the art and story should be preserved. I have four days until I have to go back to delivering mail. I could actually sort the boxes in that time, if I’m willing to be quick and ruthless.

Yeah. Maybe.

As for working on Mighty Nizz art …

See “Red Storm Elegy” later in this newsletter.

Innsmouth Independence Day

Today I’m showing off my illustrations for the July 4th occurring adventure in The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection, written by Oscar Rios, published by Golden Goblin Press.
At a good old fashion New England Seafood Boil, on a beach in Innsmouth, the cousins gather to celebrate the 4th of July.  However, young Alice has a plan and needs her cousins’ help. She asks them to help her break into her great grandmother’s abandoned mansion to look for the family’s genealogy records.  She wants proof that her ancestors worked as privateers for the Continental Navy, so she can apply for membership in the prestigious Daughters of the American Revolution.  However, for some reason her family has forbidden her from exploring the family’s history. The cousins soon stumble onto dark secrets and are faced with difficult choices in the shadows of the decaying seaside town.

Red Storm Elegy

About ten years ago I was commissioned to illustrate a graphic novel. A friend of mine had decided that he finally wanted to make a go at a career writing comics. The best way to show a comics publisher that you know how to write a comic is get an artist to illustrate one of your scripts. So he commissioned a few artists to illustrate a few of his scripts. For me he’d come up with a fun gimmick idea – a “sci-fi samurai western” in which all the dialogue was in emojis.

I drew about a hundred pages of the story. The hundred is approximate. The writer wrote and I illustrated a number of revisions, including a couple of different endings. He had someone color the first 28 pages. We tossed the emoji gimmick. Eventually he decided that the story wasn’t anything he knew how to finish. He gave me the rights to use the art to create a story of my own, if I could think of one.

I put the physical art in a drawer. I kept scans of the art on my hard drive. Occasionally I’d open the files, look at the art and try to think of a story that I could tell with the art as it was, without having to draw anything new. I always came up blank.The plot of the story was more something the writer had come up with than something I would have thought of on my own.

Last week, after I’d been practicing with my Wacom tablet in Clip Studio Paint, I opened the files again. I thought, “Maybe I can do something with these. I’ll probably have to do some editing and maybe draw a new page or two but …” While I delivered mail, my brain tossed around ideas, thought of ways to reorder the art, considered new motivations and relationships between the characters. By Saturday I had a vague idea how I might use the existing art to tell a story that worked for my sensibilities.

First I wrote out a basic outline of the plot, using as much of the existing art as I could. Then I renamed all the files and put them in a new folder. Having a new name made it easily to consider the art as something new and malleable. Then I reordered the art to match the basic plot I had worked out. I created blank pages to fill in the places in the plot where I figured I’d need new art. I ended up with this –

Counting the blank place holder pages told me that, if I kept to the outline I’d written, I’d probably have to draw 31 new pages. I say “probably” because some of the existing pages would need a little redrawing and I could see how some of the pages could be rearranged.

Thirty and one pages. Plus God only knows how much correction and redrawing and editing and …

And so I looked at the Google Sheets document I’d created when I was trying to figure out where to place my original art based on my new plot. And I started writing dialogue. I didn’t worry about whether the dialogue matched the outline as long as it drove the story forward.

I’m thirty pages in and I’ve shaved four pages off my outline. Which means I’ve got some drawn pages that will need to be rearranged and some art that might not get used at all. And I’m okay with that. I’m not going to do that editing or draw any new pages until I finish the script and do at least one rewrite.

My working title is Red Storm Elegy.

This is Dove, my protagonist.


She’s not someone you want to piss off. A few someones have done that. They’re going to be very sorry.
I’ll be posting updates on my progress as I go.

Along with any progress on anything else that catches my attention.

I hope your week has gone well. I hope that your world has some happy places in it.

I hope the next seven days give you what you need.

See you next Friday!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #42

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It is a day like any other day. It has 24 hours like other days. The sun rises. The sun sets.

You spend some time awake. You spend some time asleep.

This newsletter is posted to Skookworks.com and arrives in your email mail box. If you think you have time, you read it. If you feel your time is short, you look at the pictures. Either choice is fine.

If you just delete this email without looking at it you are cursed for eternity. You’ll never know why your coffee is always weak and your car’s gas mileage is pitiful. Your dreams will be haunted by a six foot teddy bear that refuses to be hugged, it just wants a cigarette.

Aren’t you glad you’ve avoided the curse?

These Days …

More accurately, this coming week. The week just gone was pretty much like other weeks but with less medical drama for both people and pets. Kemo the cat got out of his cone-of-shame and we’ve let him out of isolation. It’s the week ahead that I’m thinking about.

Starting today and running until November 6th I’m on vacation. I have two goals –

1. Sort my comics collection. Back in 2003, when we moved my mother up to live with Sarah and me, my brother and I cleared out her house in California. Living nearer, he did most of the work. I went down for quick visit and sorted the stuff I’d left. A big part of that was the comics collection I’d acquired from about 1971 to 1994. I did a quick separation of them into Stuff-I-Don’t-Really-Care-About and Stuff-I-Think-I-Want-To-Read-Again. I gave the first batch to a friend and, a few months later, my brother shipped up the boxes that contained the second batch.

Those boxes have been unopened since their arrival. I have an idea what comics are in them but I don’t know specifically. So this is going to be a bit of an adventure. I have 18 long boxes and multiple stacks of magazine sized publications. My goal is to end up with three or less long boxes of magazines and two or less boxes of magazines. The rest will … magically find some other place to be.

Yeah. I haven’t thought much past sorting the things.

2. Finish the physical art of the second Mighty Nizz story. I have five pages done and thirteen pages in various stages of completion. Once it’s all complete I can format, color and letter it in Clip Studio Paint. This might be the last comic I do physical art for. I like doing physical art. I like ink and paper and brushes and pens. But working digitally is quicker. Not because I draw faster. My actual drawing time is probably the same. It’s more because I can just pick up my tablet and go. I don’t have to set up paper and ink, watch out for the cats, and clean my tools afterward. I can work for five minutes, do something else, work for ten, do something else, work for an hour, rinse, repeat.

Sarah and I will do a few things together. We’ve got a day trip planned for Bremerton. We’ll get out of the house and drive around. There’s the Billi 99 Kickstarter to prep for. And we’ll nap. Napping is a goal these days.

The Lovecraft Kids – Easter in Arkham

The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection (former The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection) featured four adventures, each set and themed for different holiday – Easter, Independence Day (July 4th), Halloween and Christmas. In the book the adventures run Halloween, Christmas, Easter and Independence Day. I’m going to showcase my illustrations for Easter first because … I don’t actually remember if I thought I had a good reason.

What happens? Well …
In the city of Arkham, the cousins gather for an Easter egg hunt on the quad of Miskatonic University. The cousins fall into a mystery when recently departed pets begin returning to their owners, but changed, tainted, and unstable. As tensions mount over reports of a strange new disease affecting the pets of Arkham, drastic measures are proposed to protect public health. The cousins must work fast to get to stop these unholy resurrections as the barriers between life and death blur. Unless successful, every pet in the city is destroyed, and an even larger tragedy will befall witch-haunted Arkham. Arkham’s only hope are our six intrepid cousins. Can they get to the bottom of things before it’s too late?

CSP Practice or Making Mistakes Faster

I’ve spent part of most mornings in the last week practicing drawing in Clip Studio Paint with my Wacom tablet. A big part of the fun is the ability to make quick changes and corrections. It turns out that, when given that ability, I use it a lot.

I didn’t use it much for this first piece. I based it off the photo below. This is a tree stump next to one of the houses on my USPS route. I took its picture because I thought it looked creepy. I like creepy.

Once I’d posted the photo on my Facebook page my imagination started coming up with ideas for drawings based on image. The illustration below is the idea that I thought would be most fun to draw.
Next I did this cheery little fruit bat. A friend of mine had seen my illustration of a Surrilana vulture bat and said she wanted me to draw a bat that she could have as a tattoo. Her favorite bats are fruit bats/flying foxes so …

Then … obviously (I hope!) the drawing below isn’t one of mine.
A few months ago one of my nephews had asked if I would do a better version of that drawing. Someone he knew had paid for that and felt ripped off. Since my nephew couldn’t pay me he didn’t expect me to make it a high priority. It would have been okay if I didn’t do a drawing at all. Last week I decided it would a fun bit of practice and I did the design below.
And then I started really making mistakes.

I’m doing character designs and world building for The Surrilana Depths. I wanted to do an illustration of Morgo (name to be changed) fighting one of Zorimi’s (also to changed) scaled men minions. I sketched out the basics using one of the “brush” brushes in CSP.

I’d rather not bore you with all the steps I went through. That’s what process GIFs are for.

And here’s a finished version that’s not part of a GIF.

Practice, practice, practice.

Updating the Mighty Nizz

And speaking of mistakes and learning – we went out for dinner with new friends on Sunday. Part of the conversation included the comics she and I had done together. The one that’s available online is Mighty Nizz so Sarah tried showing it to our companions on her phone.

That was hard to do. The first page of the comic loads fine, if a bit small. But it’s actually the last page that loads first because I posted it one page a week and, like a blog, the last page loaded is the one that shows when the site opens. You can use the navigation buttons under that page to go to the actual first page but by then you’re having to work at reading the story. The first rule of the internet – don’t make your viewer work to use your site. This rule especially applies to internet accessed by phone.

I don’t use my phone to surf the net much. I use it to text, read emails, check Facebook and Youtube, and, occasionally, make phone calls. When I read webcomics I do it on my desktop computer’s monitor. I keep forgetting that, for an awful lot of people, their phone is their main (or only) computer. So I’ve reformed the first Mighty Nizz comic as a scroll that can be easily read in a single blog post.

The current version is temporary. It can be read easily but it’s not as clean an experience as I’d like. That will get fixed before I start posting the new story. And, yes, there will be a new story.

And that’s it for this week.

Thank you for reading all the way to end.

May you blessed with good sleep, strong coffee and a flying car!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #41

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‘Tis Friday and thou art reading mine newsletter anon. Blessed be.

These Days …

I’m noticing that I’m liking Autumn. I’m not crazy about the extra darkness (and I will really complain when Daylight Savings kicks in) but I am enjoying the cooler-but-not-yet-cold weather and the extra colors that the fall leaves are providing. Plus the Halloween decorations that have sprouted up everywhere. Halloween is the best holiday. It’s not religious, it offends fundamentalists and it celebrates imaginary scaries. The only way it could be better would be if I got a paid day off.

The only medical appointment this week was for Kemo, our older cat. He’s been overgrooming the base of his tail, enough so there’s no hair and some of the skin is raw. The vet thinks he may have allergies to something in his cat food. She gave him a steroid shot, an antibiotic shot and recommended some high end cat food. She also fitted him with a cone-of-shame. We’re keeping him isolated in our bedroom in order to speed up the healing.

Work at the Post Office was only really eventful on Wednesday. Someone forgot to unlock the station’s gates for the sorting clerks Tuesday night/Wednesday morning so they couldn’t get in to throw parcels and divide up the palettes of flats (magazines/catalogs/random printed things). The clerks called around, no one answered, so they went home. When I came to work the loading dock was filled with pallets and bins of unsorted parcels. For the next three hours the supervisors and a tag-team of carriers got everything distributed. It was almost fun.

I had yesterday off. The vet appointment was in the morning. I alternated between chores and doing art. We got word from the publishers that they’re starting to build the Kickstarter page for Billi 99. We might have something to look at next week.

The Lovecraft Kids’ BFFs

For the Tails of Valor Kickstarter, Golden Goblin Press offered a reward tier by which backers could have their cat drawn into the book as a player character. For The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection Kickstarter they offered backers the chance to have themselves (or someone of their choice) drawn into the book as a best friend of one of the Morgan Family cousins.Then the poor folks got their portraits drawn by me. The characters were adolescents so the backers were asked to send a photo of themselves at the approximate age as their character. Three folks were able to provide those. Two folks didn’t have any age appropriate photos so I had to subtract a few years from the photos they did provide and then guess. One person wanted to give new life to a passed loved one. They had a photo of their chosen one as a very young boy and a few of him as an adult so I had to conjure of version of him somewhere in between.

Digital Sketches

I’m having a blast practicing Clip Studio Paint with my Wacom tablet. Remember the movie The Karate Kid? Daniel, the protagonist goes to Miyagi, an old man, and asks him to teach him karate. Miyagi agrees. And then he has Daniel paint his house and wash his car. Wax on. Wax off. Daniel does this for a while, expecting Miyagi to start teaching him soon. When days go by and Miyagi keeps having him do chores, Daniel gets upset at the old man. Miyagi strikes out. Daniel blocks him with one of the moves he’s learned from waxing the car. Miyagi demonstrates that every chore he’d been having Daniel do was teaching him a karate skill.

I’ve been working with Photoshop for a couple of decades now – mostly to color my work but also to make corrections and adjustments. CSP has a different interface than Photoshop. Some short cuts are the same but mostly I’m having to find the locations of various features (that I’m sure are there) on a regular basis. I won’t dive into the weeds as to what exactly I’ve done with Photoshop – suffice to say, every skill I’ve developed using that program is translating smoothly to CSP. Even when I have to DDG (DuckDuckGo) for the location of a feature.

These are this week’s pencil sketches.


And these are the digital finishes.

I’ve now started sketching right in CSP, no physical pencils first. I’ll show off some of the results next week.

I hope that the eventfulness of your week has been pleasant. I hope the coming week is pleasanter. Say “hi” to all the ghosts and goblins that cross your view.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #40

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Time passes but the moments that matter last forever, even when we forget them.

True or false?

These Days …

Rain. Friends. Doctor visits.

I welcome rain on Sundays and my days off. It’s my hope that the most of it will come down on those days and, when I have to deliver mail, the most I’ll have to deal with is a light drizzle. I’ve been mostly lucky this last week. When it has come down like a heavenly judgement I’ve either been on lunch or I’m working one of the mounted parts of my route so I only have to drive through it not walk. Of course, for my fellow carriers who did have to work during the heavy rains … I’m sorry.

This Sunday we did a bunch of grocery shopping in the morning and in the afternoon had lunch with old friends from out of town who were in town to see a Peter Gabriel concert. We ate at a Cuban restaurant. We’ve never had Cuban food before. No rain. Good conversation. The usual catching up on what we’ve been doing the last few months.

Monday was Columbus Day – Indigenous People’s Day here in the Pacific Northwest. I end up liking this holiday more every year. Not because I have anything good to say about old Mr. “I Got Lost and Started the Genocide of Two Continents”. No, it’s just a holiday that I never remember until shortly before it’s going to occur and therefore I get a day off that I wasn’t expecting. Unexpected days off are always fun. I spent part of it cooking a big pot of something to eat for lunches during the work week.

But then … the day after a holiday tends to be a long one at USPS. There’s a back up of mail and parcels that have to be delivered. In the rain. It was mostly drizzle. When it did come down heavy I was mostly either delivering the mounted (driving) parts of my route or on break. I got finished just as it was getting dark. I’ve started carrying my head lamp in my truck. I didn’t need it Tuesday but I’m sure I will before the end of the month.

Wednesday was my scheduled day off this week. We spent it at doctor’s appointments. We’re not dealing with anything fatal. Just stuff that makes life uncomfortable. Sometimes really uncomfortable. Fortunately we live in the 21st century and have antibiotics and antifungals and a host of other chemicals that can treat our ills.

Thursday was another long day. Voter pamphlets and an ad for membership discounts at a new health club that’s opening up in the location of a former failed health club needed to be delivered to every customer on my route. I deliver to over 850 addresses.

Today I have to get out the Red Plums. Normally the things are supposed to go out on Tuesdays but this week’s high volume of mail on that day had them pushed back to Wednesday and Wednesday’s shortage of carriers meant that the people who delivered my route didn’t carry any of the extras and then on Thursdays I prioritized the voter pamphlets and the health club coverages so … Bleah.

I’ve managed to grab time to work on art most mornings and during my days off. That keeps me sane.

The Lovecraft Kids

The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection written by Oscar Rios (published by Golden Goblin Press) got retitled as The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection. The original title was less unwieldy but the publisher made the change to avoid confusion with (and possibly being sued by the producers of) Lovecraft Country, a popular novel by Matt Ruff that got adapted into an even more popular tv series. I’d argue that Rios’s RPG features more Cthulhu Mythos elements than Ruff’s novel so no change should have been necessary but I understand why Golden Goblin made it anyway. Getting sued is time consuming and expensive.

Eldritch Holiday features six playable adolescent members of the Morgan family – young cousins who live in four of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite cursed townships. George Weedon and Edward Derby live in Arkham, Gordon Brewster and Gerdie Pope live in Dunwich, Donald Sutton in Kingsport and Alice Sanders in Innsmouth. Because the characters are kids (and possibly because Oscar wanted them to survive) the adventures stay away from encounters with the Great Old Ones, mostly featuring run-ins with ghosts, witches, zombies and the Dreamlands.

I did basic portraits of them to get Oscar’s approval.


Then I did the cover illustration so we had something to feature in the Kickstarter –
And then, also for the Kickstarter, I did individual portraits of the kids.

Next week – The Best Friends Forever!

Digital Sketching

Practicing Clip Studio Paint with my Wacom tablet has been a lot of fun. It’s the kind of fun where going I have to remind myself to get up and walk around before I completely screw up my posture. I’m able to make corrections and adjustments that I would have just ignored when working on paper. I’ve had years of working in Photoshop to inform what might be possible with CSP. I’ve also watched quite a few process videos of artists using CSP to further inform me of the program’s capabilities. Going to work delivering the mail is even harder these days. I want to keep making art.

Often times, after I’ve made a series of sketches/illustrations, I will post the results here over the course of weeks. This time I’m just splitting the results in two parts.

Here are the pencils sketches I started with –


And here are the “finished” digital sketches.

I put “finished” in quotes because I’m doing these sketches to learn CSP, to do basic character design for The Surrilana Depths and to practice coloring with a limited palette. I’m resisting adding a lot of fiddly details or, honestly, thinking too much about the composition. I’m learning what I can and moving on. Sometimes that learning means I really don’t like the results. Lucky you, I’m posting everything!

Until next Friday –
Be good to yourself.
Be kind for the fun of it.
Take a nap.

Mmmmm. Nap.

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #39

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Welcome back to another edition of the Skookworks Newsletter! I hope the previous seven days have treated you kindly. If they did not, I hope you gave them a stern talking-to so that they improve their performance in the coming days.

As for me –

These Days …

More doctor visits about family medical issues. These were new and different issues than last week. Fortunately, the news was good. Therapeutic rest, along with slow exercise, is the prescription.

Not for me. I’m still delivering mail. We’re still understaffed and overworked. The post office is consistent.

My postal truck broke down on Wednesday. We have specific trucks assigned to each route. It endured through almost my entire shift, including having to deliver part of another route, before giving up the ghost at an unscheduled stop. Normally I’d delivered that particular mail into a mailbox at the side of the road without having to turn off the engine but, that day, I had to deliver the customer’s mail to their front door. Their mailbox had been infested with ants and they were trying to kill off the poor buggers. I delivered the one catalog that I had for them, got back in the truck, turned the key … and … nothing. I’d been having more and more trouble starting the vehicle as the day went on so I wasn’t really surprised.

I delivered the rest of that swing on foot (normally it’s a mounted section of my route), then walked over a street and delivered the last of my mail. I called a supervisor and got a ride back to the station to clock out. My truck was left parked in front of the ant infested mailbox, waiting to be towed back to the station.

Thursday, that is, yesterday, I came to work expecting to have to drive another route’s truck. Surprise, surprise, the vehicle maintenance guy was already there fixing the problem. I got to deliver with my own truck. Yay!

When the biggest excitement of the work week is a temporary broken down truck, I guess it’s not a bad work week.

The Lovecraft Kids

Back in 2019 I did one of my favorite jobs – color illustrations for The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection for Golden Goblin Press. I’m stealing the description of the book from Golden Goblin’s website –

Kids growing up in eldritch corners of New England have rather unique childhoods. Those growing up in Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth, and Dunwich know that shadows hide a darker evil. The six cousins of the Morgan clan are no different. The cousins are aware their hometowns aren’t like other places. They know that ghosts haunt empty fields, that monsters lurk beyond the Wall of Sleep, that horrors lurk below lonely graveyards, and that the darkest secrets are often kept by those trying to protect us. They also know that, whatever happens, they’ll face it together and do whatever it takes to set things right. They’re sure that the light of friendship and family can cast away any shadows.

But what do kids know?

The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection: A Call of Cthulhu® campaign of holiday-themed adventures for adolescent investigators. This combo package includes softcover print and PDF formats.

  • Halloween in Dunwich: A dark night of ghost stories on Great-Grandpa Silas’ farm.
  • Christmas in Kingsport: A magical holiday filled with surprises, adventure, magic, and horror.
  • Easter in Arkham: A week-long holiday in Arkham takes a very dark turn.
  • Innsmouth Independence Day: A long weekend on the beach leads to rebellion and secrets.

ALSO

  • The History of the Morgan Family
  • The Morgan Family Tree
  • An Overview of the Morgan Cousins
  • 24 Pre-Generated Investigators: The Morgan Cousins, Their Best Friends Forever, The Cousins as Adult Investigators, and The Cousins as Pulp Adult Investigators

I showed this process GIF of the cover illustration when the book was first published.

Illustrating the book was a challenge. Every illustration would feature all six of the Morgan cousins, the location where the action of the scene was occurring and usually a few other characters. That meant I had a lot to draw, often in a small space.

I did the above “old tyme” version of the cover image for the fun of it. It ended up being used for the cover of the fiction collection.

Included in the kickstarter for the RPG was a companion book of fiction featuring individual stories for each of the cousins. I did an black and white illustration for each story in the volume.

I will be posting my illustrations from the book here in the newsletter over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Surrilana Sketching

I have an Intuos 5 Wacom tablet. It’s at least ten years old. It got a lot of use. When I replaced my old computer I went for a while without doing much illustration. I was mostly writing and the art that I was doing didn’t need the pressure sensitivity and variation of line that the tablet was good for. When I did try drawing digitally none of the lines varied. I’d been chalking that up to the age of the tablet and been thinking that it might be time to get a new tablet.

Before I did that I decided to do some research. Maybe I’d turned off some settings or made changes that I hadn’t realized? In the process of researching it occurred to me that maybe I needed to update the drivers. And that’s when I figured out that the folks who’d set up my new computer hadn’t installed Wacom tablet drivers on the computer at all. The tablet had been functioning as a second mouse.

Once I actually installed the tablet’s drivers I suddenly had a new tool to play with.

And what’s the best way to learn a tool?

Practice!

And what else did I want to learn?

Mastering Clip Studio Paint!

And what project to I want to make progress on?

The Surrilana Depths!

So I’ve combined practicing using the tablet with learning CSP by sketching concepts from the story.

Below is my pencil sketch.


Then the process GIF.

And the final illustration.

I’m trying to do as much of the finished work as possible in CSP. I’ve fallen back on Photoshop a few times for things that I didn’t want to take the time to figure out in CSP. I’m sure that CSP can do those things but I haven’t figured out where in the program those features are.

Last week I posted the page with the first four sketches that I’m working from. I did another twelve while waiting in a doctor’s office on Saturday.

I’ll be posting finished sketches, sometimes with process GIFs, sometimes not, over the next few weeks. Once I’ve finished this set, I’m going to try doing a set of drawings entirely digitally, from sketch to finished colors.

Practice, practice.

I hope your week goes well and that, whatever projects you’ve got on your plate, you’re enjoying working on them.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #38

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Greeting and salutations!

Welcome back to another edition of the Skookworks newsletter.

I hope you are doing well and that your week has passed pleasantly.

My week has had rain and family medical issues. Neither of these were a surprise. The rain is part of the reason we moved to the Pacific Northwest. It keeps things green. The medical stuff is manageable but it takes time and attention.

Which Team Do You Root For?

Vampires or Werewolves? Vampires vs. Werewolves? Out of the great variety of supernatural creatures in Western mythology the Vampire and the Werewolf seem the most popular. Vampires come out on top, most of the time. There are far more stories/novels/movies/series about vampires than werewolves.

It makes sense. The original vampires were bloodsucking corpses. Currently they are (mostly) sexy immortals.

The original werewolves were humans who transformed into wolves and killed people. They were generally pretty mortal. Sometimes they turned into vampires after they died. Currently werewolves are humans who turn into wolfpeople and then they kill people. Not in sexy ways.

In general, I prefer werewolves over vampires. Most vampires are murderous assholes. They don’t have to be. They know what they are doing  but they do it anyway. Werewolves, on the other hand, are most bloodthirsty beast, lacking the intelligence or human memory to stop them from snacking on whoever happens to be handy. And they look cool.

That said, here’s a sexy vampire lady.


This lovely creature is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Out of the Aeons

That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die.

In other words, you never know when a project that you thought was dead will come kicking back to life. My first illustrations in the gaming industry were for The Black Seal #1, a magazine focusing on Call of Cthulhu related material that came out Sixtystone Press back in 2003. I did more illustrations for the second and third issues. For the fourth issue I did the cover illustration.

Numbers 2 and 3 came out soon after the first, but number 4 … got lost. For almost 20 years.

This summer it finally found its way out of the crypt.

Have a look –

It’s currently available at DriveThruRPG.com.

Working Digitally

I find that having specific projects helps me to practice my art skills. The Vamp up above is the last of “Big Face” designs I did for my Redbubble store. Those were done to see how much I could improvise in ink. My recent process has been to do rough sketch with a non-photo blue pencil, do a tighter sketch over that in regular pencil, scan that into Photoshop, remove the blue lines, convert the remaining pencils into new non-photo blue lines, print that out, ink it, scan the inked version into Photoshop, drop out the blue lines, clean up the black lines and then color the image digitally either in Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint (sometimes both, depending on the techniques needed).

I’m used to that process and it hadn’t seemed that involved until –

We got this cat, Crunch by name, with the thought that he would give our older cat, Kemo, company and keep him from wanting my attention when I want to draw. Silly us. Whereas Kemo meows (and sometimes claws my leg) when he wants to be noticed, Crunch just flops down wherever I happen to be. This makes inking with a brush and an open container of ink kinda challenging. And not relaxing.

So I figure it’s time to improve my digital skills. My next project starts with these sketches –

These are the first four of about a dozen physical sketches that I’ll be turning into finished illustrations, mostly with Clip Studio. I’ll be inking them digitally. I’m concentrating on Clip Studio because
A) the program is specifically designed for doing comics
B) the program is much less expensive than Photoshop

All of the illustrations are going to be images from The Surrilana Depths. They’re not intended for the finished version. They’re to help me develop the world, the characters and the style I plan to use in the finished version. I’ll start showing the results next week.

I hope you the next seven days are good to you. If the universe insists on giving you nonsense, I hope that you are able to be good to yourself.

Thank you for reading. See you sooner!

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #37

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No, you’re not hallucinating. It’s Friday again.

Seven days have staggered by. It only feels like yesterday.

Mother Shub-Niggarath

Cthulhu gets all the spotlights. August Derleth named H.P. Lovecraft’s story cycle “The Cthulhu Mythos” so that helped to put a stamp on things. Cthulhu itself also makes an appearance in one of the stories. That’s more than most of the rest of the Great Old Ones. Nyarlathotep has more in-story visitations but he’s just a guy who could be an indescribable eldritch horror if he wanted but, in the stories, he isn’t. No one is making plushies out of his bad self.

Of the Great Old Ones that aren’t Cthulhu my favorite is Shub-Niggarath. Who wouldn’t love The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young? No one the other GOO have such a distinct soubriquet.

I don’t remember if Lovecraft ever wrote a description of her. Most versions I’ve seen depict her as a sort of swirling cloud with teeth. Not very goatlike.

Being a GOO, I wouldn’t expect her to actually be a goat but, when I set out to do her portrait I thought I should give her some resemblance to the randy critters.
This design is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Ease On Down

My friend Rae Dinsmore passed away on July 3rd of this year. I was able to visit her in Fairbanks, Alaska for a few days at the end of March. I’d initially planned to help her and her family reorganize her mother’s home so that the mother and Rae could better manage it. Between the time I made reservations to fly up there and the time I actually arrived, Rae and her mother had moved into a retirement community and their former home had been sold. So I spent a few days helping Rae sort as many of her boxes of (very well packed) stuff as we could. Many of the boxes hadn’t been opened since her move up to Alaska from Texas a couple of years previous.

I did the black and white illustration above for the back cover of a reprint of the first issue of Steve Ahlquist’s Oz Squad back in 1992. These were my versions of the artist Andrew Murphy’s version’s of Ahlquist’s versions of the original Fabulous Foursome. Among Rae’s possessions we found a thirty year old photocopy of the original art. It was neatly rolled and the only obvious indication of its age was my signature. Rae and I had been a couple when I did the art. She’d kept the photocopy and decorated the walls of some of her apartments with it in the years since. She gave me the copy and I brought it home with me.

I had the idea of coloring it and sending her the new version as a poster. Things got in the way. Work. Other health crises. She went into hospice and passed away.

I’d done a little work on coloring it right after I got home. I started a written tribute to her right after she passed. It exists in bits and pieces on my hard drive. I haven’t been able to make any more progress. My grief gets in the way. But I’m better with images than words. A little at a time I worked on coloring this image. I finally finished it on Monday.

Rae brought color and life into the world. Those colors remain.

May the next seven days pass, for you, in glorious bliss.

Autumn is arriving. Ghost and goblins will soon be abroad.

Cheers!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Skook Words (and Pictures) #36

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Good morning! Or afternoon. Or evening.

Welcome to another edition of this newsletter.

I hope that your week has gone well and that you are in good spirits.

I’ve spent the last few days dealing with family medical issues. It’s nothing immediately life threatening but it is something that needs to be regularly addressed so it doesn’t become life threatening. In any case, I’m running late getting this edition out so I’m keeping it short.

Tails of Terror

Golden Goblin Press publishes both RPG manuals and fiction anthologies. A number of their Kickstarters have been built on putting out a manual and a companion anthology in the same campaign . Play the game. Read some stories. Tails of Valor, the RPG manual for playing cats in a Cthulhu Mythos world, was paired with Tails of Terror, an anthology of short horror stories told from the point of view of cats.

The stories were:
“Brown Jenkin’s Reckoning” by Edward M. Erdelac
“Derpyfoot” by Christine Morgan
“The Cat in the Pall” by Pete Rawlik
“Ghost Story” by Brian M. Sammons
“Palest of Humans” by Don Webb
“Bats in the Belfry” by William Meikle
“Satisfaction Brought Him Back” by Glynn Owen Barrass
“The Bastet Society” by Sam Stone
“The Veil of Dreams” by Stephen Mark Rainey
“The Quest of Pumpkin the Brave” by Oscar Rios
“The Cats of the Rue d’Auseil” by Neil Baker
“The Knowledge of the Lost Master” by Andi Newton
“The Ruins of an Endless City” by Lee Clark Zumpe
“A Glint in the Eyes” by D.A. Madigan
“A Field Guide to Wanderlust” Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
“In the End there is a Drain” by Tim Waggoner

I had the fun of providing a small illustration for each story. The following gallery features all my illustrations. If you want to know which picture goes with which story – you’ll need to get the book. Heh heh.

A Green Man

This week’s process GIF is of a Green Man portrait. I’ve written before of my love for swamp monsters. Green Men weren’t originally swamp monsters but, in modern times, especially in modern comics, they’ve become associated with them. I’ve drawn plenty of swamp monsters. This was my first Green Man.

You can find this fellow on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Thank you for reading. My apologies for the brevity of this week’s newsletter.

I hope that, in your coming week, you have a host of good things happen and plenty of people with whom to share those events.

See you in seven!