Skook WiP #74

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Greetings and salutations! Welcome to the seventy-fourth edition of the Skook Works-in-Progress newsletter.

I hope your week has been a good one. There is a tendency to emphasize the scary and dangerous when we as humans communicate. There’s some value in that (warning signs should have attention paid to them) but it can make us feel anxious and despondant. Hopefully you’ve been getting some uplifting and friendly inputs as well.

These Days …

This week my left eye has started providing me with clearer and more colorful input. On Tuesday I finally had my first cataract surgery. The hardest part of the process was not drinking coffee first thing in the morning. It was the first time in years that I haven’t had caffeine kickstarting my brain and leveling my mood. No fun. The actual surgery went smoothly – at least from my perspective. I was awake but drugged so that I really don’t have a clear memory of the process.

I’m off work this week to let the eye heal. I’m not supposed to do any heavy lifting or much bending over and I do a lot of that as a mail carrier. I wore an eyeshield over the left eye after the operation until the follow up doctor’s appointment on Wednesday so I wasn’t seeing much change in my eyesight. I’ve had the shield off since the appointment and … things are different. In my left eye. Colors are brighter. I can see things more clearly in the near range. Things are still blurry in the distance and, unfortunately, my glasses don’t improve things. I’m going to need a new prescription.

I’ll have to wait on that until the end of June. Surgery on my right eye is scheduled for June 24th. Until then my brain is going to be toggling between two differently abled eyes and trying to send me useful information. It’s going to be interesting.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features cute monsters. All monsters are cute but not all monsters are cute to humans.

As usual, this design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Sketching Ahead

Below are the base sketches for the last eleven upcoming mugshots. Many of these are already finished and available in my stores. I’ll be posting the process GIFs of each in future newsletters.

That’s it for this issue.

Thank you for reading. May the next few days be good to you. May you spend time with friends and laugh enough to make the world bright.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #73

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Good morning! Good afternoon! Good evening! Good whatevertimeyouhappentoread this!

Welcome to the seventy-third issue of the Skook Works-in-Progress Newsletter.

These Days …

It looks like we’ve got a new housemate. He’ll mostly be using the rooms as a place to sleep during the week. He has a house and wife out of state. He’ll fly in at the beginning of the week and fly out at the end. He’s seen photos of the room. We did a zoom call with him last Sunday and liked him. I used my phone to give him a walk through of our place. We’re going to try to meet and have him see the place in person next week.

I’ll be looking at him with one eye. My cataract surgery is scheduled for Tuesday. No cookies for me!

Mugshots

Happy Monsters! This week’s process gif is of a gaggle of dancing goons.

This design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Coming Attractions

The best way to stay on schedule is to be ahead of schedule. I’m working as far ahead on designs as I can. I show a single process gif and provide links to my stores here on weekly basis but I’m trying to have all the Mugshot designs finished by the end of June. Below are preliminary design sketches. If you’ve spent much time looking at my stores you’ll notice finished versions of a lot of these images. This is how they all start. Graphite lines over non-photo blue sketches.

Thank you for letting me into your in-box. I hope your weekend is as restful or as lively as you need it to be.

See you next Friday!

Skook WiP #72

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Good Morning! Good Afternoon! Good Evening! (Have I covered all the possibilities?)

It’s Friday the 13th! Aren’t we lucky?

These Days …

Oh bleah. My cataract surgery has been delayed again. My fault. My sister came by to pick me up and take me to surgery. She brought cookies that she baked in her new oven. I ate two bites before I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to eat for at least 7 hours prior to surgery. We went to the surgery center. We waited. I was called in an hour late. They asked if I had anything to eat in the 7 hours. I told the truth. I got rescheduled until the 24th. We came home and had the lasagna that I had made for dinner. We had cookies and ice cream for dessert.

We helped our housemate move at the beginning of the month and we’ve been rearranging the apartment to make it available and welcoming for another, as yet unfound, housemate. This dovetails well with my book reduction project. We’re working to get all of our stuff into specific rooms and I’m working to get my book collection consolidated to three large bookshelves.

In addition to the book collection I’ve got a comic collection. I reduced it once when my mother came up from Californina to live with us in her later years. My brother kindly shipped up the boxes of Chosen Comics. I need to go through those boxes and decide what to continue to horde.

That’s actually kind of easy. There are places where I might rehome the comics I’m not keeping. More problematic – what do I do with Misspent Youths? When Brave New Words shut down the publisher sent me all the copies of the comic that he had in storage. Issue #1 had sold out so the stacks consist of issues #2-5. I don’t need to sell them. I’d be happy to give them away to anyone who wanted them but the audience is kind of limited. It’s not a book for kids. It’s black and white, the art is crude and some of it is (purposely) offensive. I could recycle them. But …

That’s a decision to put off for another day. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of teddy bears. Happy multicolored teddy bears who want to hug and squeeze you!

These folks are, as usual, available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Also

This second design happened mostly by accident. I needed to go into work early one day – not for work but because I’d needed to do something else earlier in the neighborhood. I wanted to do something more useful than scrolling on my phone so I sat in the breakroom and sketched out the pattern above. After work that afternoon I scanned it into Photoshop and turned it into the design below.

I like the results. It fits nicely on schtuff that my illustrations usually don’t.

TGIF, happy Saturday and a good rest of the week.

Cheers!

Skook WiP #71

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Greetings and salutations! It’s wonderful to see you here again. And wonderful to be seen.

These Days …

Speaking of seeing, I’d planned to have my first cataract surgery on Tuesday. I scheduled a week off from work for recovery. We put in a lot of work last week moving our previous housemate to her new apartment and rearranging our apartment to be available for a new housemate so that I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything physical this week. I had the date for the surgery but not the time. I was tol that the surgery center would call me with the time. At first I wasn’t told when they might call so I called a couple of times in previous weeks to get that time. I was told I needed to wait. They are short staffed and the surgery calender hadn’t been worked out for May yet. I was told that someone would call me two business days before the appointment.

Two business days was April 29th. Halfway through the day I got tired of waiting and called them. I was told by the doctor’s office that they would send a message to the surgery center to have someone call me. And no one did.

On Monday morning Sarah tried calling but couldn’t get through. I called during work breaks and got shuffled around but finally spoke to the surgery center. My name wasn’t on their list of patient scheduled for Tuesday. I called the doctor’s office, again, and was sent to the scheduler She checked. Yup. I hadn’t actually been scheduled.

The scheduler was apologetic. I sighed and got new dates from her. I think she was surprised that I didn’t rage at her. I didn’t see the point. Yelling at her wouldn’t have gotten me an appointment.

One of my frustrations here is that I don’t have a way to check their surgery schedule and no one I talked to checked for me. They made the assumption that I was scheduled and the surgery center would call me when they had a time. I sent the doctor’s office an email expressing my frustration with this situation and got another apology from the scheduler along with assurances that she would personally call me when my surgery time was determined.

Hopefully that will happen.

In the meantime this is my Long Week, the six day work week that occurs every six weeks because of our rotating days off. So I’m tired.

Mugshots

This weeks process gif is of a bookshelf of Cthulhu Mythos tomes. I think of this as the metal version of the books. I suspect that the books, if they actually existed would be more sedate looking. But what would be the fun in that?

As usual, this design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Here’s Licking at You!

I get a lot of ideas for designs while I am delivering mail. Most of them fade away after a few minutes. This one stuck with me until I had a chance to draw it.

This one is only on schtuff in my Redbubble store. It didn’t fit well on a mug.

That’s it for this week. I hope you are well and living your best life.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #69 – Cold Dead Fingers

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Friday, April 22nd. We’re four months into 2022. Welcome to the latest newsletter.

Some slight rain is predicted here in the Seattle area. It usually doesn’t pour when it rains. It tends to come down in a heavy mist or a light sprinkle. My route has enough apartment buildings and mounted sections that, even when it does down in buckets, I have occasional respites from the deluge. If you have to be out today, hopefully you’ll stay dry.

This week will be a detour from my usual format.

Shots Fired was “A Comics Anthology Helping the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Community Justice Reform Coalition to End Gun Violence in the US”. It was kickstarted and funded back in early 2019. Neither Sarah nor I were invited to contribute when the book was first being put together. We don’t feel any slight about that. Neither of us has been visibly active in the comics industry in decades.

After the book was funded some of the folks who had originally offered to contribute started dropping out and the then editor went looking for replacements. In October of 2019 a mutual friend suggested us to him and we agreed to put together a four page story. Sarah wrote it. I drew it. The editor told us that he would find someone else to color and letter it.

I am kind of gun rights neutral. I’m pro responsibility – both for individuals and from society. Guns are tools. They can be used for good or for evil or just for target practice. Too many idiots want freedom from responsibility – in just about everything. I believe that the forces of greed and irresponsibility should be balanced by organizations that are not motivated by profit. Contributing to this book was a small attempt to balance an unbalanced system.

In mid-February of this year the organizer of the book wrote all the contributors to let us know that the book would not be published. Too many problems had happened in the world, behind the scenes and in his life for him to make it happen. He was offering backers refunds or to contibute their funds directly to the charities the book was intended to benefit. He asked the contributors if they would be willing to have our stories shared with the backers of the book. Sarah and I said yes.

At this point, everyone who backed the book should have seen the story. We have no plans to try to publish elsewhere. So I’m sharing it with y’all. Sort of. As far as I can tell, no one colored or lettered the story. I don’t have it in me to take on either of those tasks so you’re getting the story up to the final black and white inks. Since this is my works-in-progress newsletter I’m sharing the process of creating the story as much as I’m sharing the story – script, thumbnails, rough pencils, inks. Hopefully it’s still readable this way.

Cold, Dead Fingers

Shots Fired anthology

Script: Sarah Byam

Art: David Lee Ingersoll

Colors:

Letters:

 

PAGE 1

 

Panels 1, 2, and 3 fall in a row across the top of the page.

 

Panel 1: Close up of a phone in hand, dial is ringing 911. 

 

1 CAPTION: I know what you are thinking, why didn’t she call for help?

 

2 PHONE (elec): 911, what’s your emergency?

 

Panel 2: Close up of a woman’s lips speaking into the phone

 

3 CAPTION: She called churches, friends, dshs, even the police.

 

4 MOTHER: Please help.

 

5 CAPTION: Help did not arrive.

 

Panel 3: Close up of a fist making contact with her face. Tooth flying if possible.

 

6 CAPTION: Laws favor abused women…

 

7 CAPTION: …but enforcement is not…consistent.

 

Panel 4: Large panel which takes up approximately ¾ of the page, artist decides. A man holding a shotgun on his wife, who has a black eye and bruises, his son age 5 and his daughter age 7, points, indicating they are to climb the stairs to the second level of the house. The mother is shielding the kids as they make their way upstairs. The man is tall and lanky, with a beer pudge. The mother is small and frail. Empty beer and vodka bottles on the floor around the father. 

 

8 FATHER: Don’t you get it, woman? 

 

9 FATHER: You are my skinny-ass cow!

 

10 FATHER: Go! Up–the lot of you, before you are just so much dead meat. 

 

11 MOTHER (whisper): Quick, like a bunny, Ryan, Adrienne.

 

12 MOTHER: Quick, quick.

 

13 TITLE & CREDITS::

Cold Dead Fingers

Credits: Writer Sarah Byam

Art: David Lee Ingersoll

Letters: David Lee Ingersoll


PAGE 2

Panel 1:  The mother and son standing by the bathroom, son in the classic “I gotta pee” stance.

 

Caption: The upstairs bathroom didn’t work By day one it was stenchy. 

 

Panel 2: The daughter coming out of the bathroom. Shoulders hunched over.

 

Caption: Abusers know that shame will keep you down.

 

Dialogue – Daughter: Crap Crap Crap! Son of a grass fed bull!

 

Panel 3 / 4 / 5 ?

 

I want to show the mother trying to soothe the children, the boy is crying.  The girl is sitting with crossed arms, then we circle to a close up of the little girl’s fist. 

 

Caption: My mother’s ashamed, my brother is terrified.

 

Caption: I ‘m tired of shame. 

 

Caption: When he wasn’t drunk –

 

Caption: He called me his good  little girl.

 

Caption: Ha, Nature or Nurture? 



 

PAGE 3

 

Panel 1: The daughter closes the bedroom door on her sleeping mother and brother.

 

Caption: I knew I was going to kill him. 

 

Panel 2: The daughter sneaking downstairs. 

 

SFX: sqk sqk (the stairs creek)

 

Panel 3: The daughter pulls on a couple of dishwashing gloves.

 

Caption: He burned all the soft places out of me.

 

Panel 4: The father has passed out, head resting on the barrel end of the gun.

 

Caption:Now I felt just like he acted.

 

Panel 5: The daughter lifts the butt end.

 

Dialogue – Father: Wha?

 

Panel 6: Blood spattered black out.

 

Dialogue – daughter: Nite nite, jackass.



 

PAGE 4

 

Panel 1 , 2 and 3  rub across the top of the page.

 

Panel 1: Daughter’s hands wrapping father’s fingers around the gun.

 

Caption:  No one would suspect me, a little 8 year old girl.

 

Panel 2: Gloves flipped into the kitchen sink. Water and soap flowing on them

 

Dialogue – daughter: Mom, you can come down now.

 

Dialogue – daughter: You’re safe

 

Panel 3: Mother and son, cringing at the edge of the stairs as they come down.

 

Dialogue – Daughter: From him.  

 

Dialogue – Mother: Oh my god, Adrienne,  what have you done?

 

Panel 4: Large image. The daughter is sitting on the porch stairs, with a  smoking cigarette in one hand, holding the phone with the other.

 

Phone: 911, what’s your emergency?

 

Dialogue – daughter: Yes, I’d like to report a gun accident.

 

Caption: I knew now that I could trust guns more than people. 

 

Caption: And my daddy just left me a whole garage full of new toys.

 

Caption: So you can have my guns when you take them from my cold dead fingers.

 

Caption: Until then, I’ve got some bullies I wanna talk to….



Thank you for reading!

See you next week!

Skook WiP #68

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Greetings! Thank you for opening this email (or for coming to the site and reading the post).

I hope life in your corner of the universe has been as relaxing or as exciting as you’ve needed it to be. Today is April 15th. If you live in the USA that means your taxes are due. No doubt you’ve already filed. Maybe you’ve even gotten your refund already. If so, yay! If you had to pay extra, you have my sympathy.

These Days …

If you are (or know) an automechanic in the Seattle area, the post office vehicle maintenace department is hiring. Apparently we currently have only one mechanic to look after all the vehicles in this district. On Tuesday, the oil light in my truck went on. In days past I would have filled out a vehicle repair form and someone would have come out to put oil in the truck. Last Tuesday I went to a gas station, bought a coule of quarts of oil using my route’s credit card and put oil into the truck myself. It wasn’t difficult but it’s not really part of my job description.

The next few months have apparently been designated as maintenance ond repair time for my own personal meat vehicle.

I’ve got a program of physical therapy to strengthen and loosen up my legs to compensate for my injured knee. Nothing like doing a workout after a day of work.

I’ll be having cataract surgery on both eyes. I’ve been told by people who have had cataract surgery that the results are great – like getting new eyes!

I’ve got dental surgeries scheduled for June after I heal from the catacact surgeries.

I am also approved for surgery on my knee if I so choose. The surgery would be to trim the torn miniscus. It might make using the knee more comfortable. I’m still arguing with Workman’s Comp over the initial injury (I didn’t get my doctors to fill out the paperwork to their satisfaction) so I’m waiting for my eventual victory before I consider adding further medical costs to our budget.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is a portrait of some celestial personalities.

The design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and on a variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Stop and Smell

Above is the latest design added to the blank card collection in my Zazzle store.

And I’m out.

See you next week!

Skook WiP #67

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TGIF! or How Did the Week Go By So Fast?

Welcome to the 67th issue of the Skook Works in Progress Newsletter. Thank you for reading. Feel free to share/forward it with anyone who you think would enjoy it.

These Days …

I’ve started another round of physical therapy. The goal isn’t so much to fix my knee (that requires surgery and it’s not a fix so much as an adjustment) as it is to make the rest of my body strong and limber enough to compensate for the weakness of the knee. My body is stiff and tense. This shouldn’t be news to me. I am generally tense. So now I have a bunch of exercises to do make my muscles stretch. Nothing for my mind. It gets to stay tense.

Upcoming – Dentist. Cataract surgeries. More sorting of books and comics. And we’re probably going to be getting a new housemate. The current one is up for an apartment across town. If she gets it we’ll want someone else in the other room.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a floating landscape. The surreal landscapes of Roger Dean were an inspiration when I was young. THis is my take on a similar subject.

This design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

The Sum of His Parts

The fellow below is the first of my designs that has gotten tagged by Redbubble’s fan art partner program. Redbubble has made deals with various media companies to allow folks to make and sell designs based on various IPs – mostly movies and tv shows. I haven’t made any designs for the program. I definitely haven’t submitted any designs for it. And yet something in RB’s submission algorithms decided that it needed to check with one of the “partners” before the design was posted.

It took a few back and forth emails before someone at RB was willing to tell me that the IP in question was Penny Dreadful. I liked Penny Dreadful. It was fun mashup of various Gothic Horror characters. Most of those characters are in the public domain. None of them are cartoon bunnies.

The Penny Dreadful folks rightly told RB that the design didn’t fit their IP and that it was okay that I could sell it.

A few of my other designs have since been held up while a human at RB checked with a human at some media company. It’s been both funny and annoying. I don’t do much fan art. If I did I wouldn’t try to sell it in one of my stores. Part of the reason is this – I like the freedom to do what I want with the images I’ve created.

Complain, complain.

That’s it for me this week.

How are you?

Skook WiP #66

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Days to Come

It feels odd and a little presumptuous to have arrived in April and to already be making plans for January. But if we don’t make plans life will just happen to us. And yes, life will just happen to us whether we make plans or not. Just letting life happen can be fun. I recommend it. Still, I have found that I get a lot of satisfaction from following through on plans. SInce there are some specific projects I’d like to have completed in the next few years, plans are necessary.

This week I sketched out the last of the fifty-two mug designs I plan to feature in this newsletter. I’ll post scans of the sketches in a future issue. Turning those sketches into finished designs will take a few months. That will complete one of my plans, artprojectwise, for 2022. I will then have more than 200 designs in my online stores. That seems like a good stock of images.  I’ll continue to create designs. I’m having fun! But, once I’ve completed these “mugshots” I’ll be refocusing.

I really started thinking about the time I have available once I started thinking about retirement and the necessity of reducing our possessions so we could easily move somewhere more affordable. I figure I’ve got twenty years of productivity left. That’s optimistic. For the next five to ten years I’ll still be delivering mail. I don’t get a lot of creative work done while I’m delivering a route.

You may have noticed four links in the banner of this website –
Oz Squad
Mighty Nizz
Kaiju Weather
The Witch Engines

These are the projects I’ll be focusing on once I finish the mugshots. They are all comics. Mighty Nizz will get the first attention. It’s the most fluid of the projects. THe stories we’ve currently got planned are shorter and working on them will let me gage how much time doing a comic page currently takes.

Kaiju Weather is a graphic novel. If all goes well we might have it completed in five years.

The Witch Engines is a series of graphic novels. I’m sure I’ll do outlines and sketching and writing and other preliminary work on it before we finish Kaiju Weather but I want Kaiju Wather completed before I draw any actual comics pages.

Oz Squad is … Sigh. I’ve made so many announcements about what I would do, was doing, thought I should do, with it over the years that I’m not going to jinx it by making another one. And, as much as I love the project, it’s ultimately Steve Ahlquist’s baby. I maintain the website and do occasional illustrations to make sure that the IP is still active. If Steve finds another collaborator or licenses it to some toy company or television production company or book publishing house or … something … That’s okay.

And maybe I’m jinxing all thses projects by writing about them now. I don’t actually think the universe works that way. “Man plans, God laughs” is a reminder that every plan should include the likelihood of failure. I’m writing about these projects now for my own focus. Small projects get done with a little effort. Large projects get done with a little effort applied continously over a long period of time. And these projects – these big projects are distillations of joy and fascination and wonder. My time (all of time) is limited. We spend a lot of time doing what we have to do for survival. Doing things for the joy and satisfaction of it in addition to doing things for the sake of survival makes surviving worthwhile.

These Days

Delivering mail. Working on art. Doing chores. Spending time with Sarah. Negotiating beauracies. Sorting books and comics.

That’s been my week. I hope your week has been more – I was going to write “interesting” but that’s become associated with a (probably mythical) Chinese curse – entertaining.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is a glimpse of life on Mars. The place is a little dusty but a lot of folks call it home.

This design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store.
It’s available on a lot of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Highly Unlikely

Above is the latest addition to my collection of greeting card designs in my Zazzle store. Illustration on the front. Blank on the inside so it can be used for any occasion.

And that’s it for this week. I hope your plans are going well and that whatever life is happening to you is happening in a gentle way.

See you next Friday!

Skook WiP #65

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Sarah and I usually watch movies and series together while we eat dinner (after work) or as hangout time (on my days off). For those viewings we try to find something that engages us both. When I’m working on art she will watch something that primarily interests her. Since we’re in the same room I end up listening to the show. She was recently rewatching Downton Abby and I caught a bit of dialogue between a couple of the upper class women. They were discussing the suitability of a suitor, a man who worked(!) as a lawyer(!). He said something about having weekends to do things around the estate. One of the women asked the other, “What’s a weekend?”

It’s amazing what can be said about a culture and about a character’s place in the culture with just a few words.

Given that you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a weekend coming up. Hopefully you’ll be able to spend some of it doing things that give you joy and satisfaction.

These Days

Today is the fifth day of my six day Long Week. Mail and, especially, the parcels have/has been lighter than in recent months. Recent years actually. That’s given me time to think about and start cleanin up my route. I’m emptying out the mailboxes that haven’t been collected in weeks and putting VACANT cards in them. Ideally this means that whoever fills in for me on my days off will not deliver any more mail to that box. Sometimes it works. Much of the time mail gets delivered anyway and I have to pull out it the next time I’m working.

I’m also updating names in the cluster box units so a substitute carrier can know which box to deliver to if the address on the letter doesn’t have the unit number. I haven’t done that in far too long.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a Horned King design. At least, that’s what I think it is. You may have your own story about it.

Available on a mug in my Zazzle store.
Available on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

And Also …

I’ve added another design to the collection of blank greeting cards in my Zazzle store. I sometimes wonder if these cards would be more salable if they had words in them and were tied to specific occasions. I like blank greeting cards myself but i can understand how having something already written in a card can make it more appealing to a lot of folks. A few printed words can act as a writing prompt for a more personal message. I’ll have to try that with some of the cards and see if that makes a difference.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading. I hope life in your part of the universe is going well.

See you next week!