Tuesday Night Party Club #44

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Gallery – Terrors from Beyond

Terrors from Beyond, in 2009, was my third interior illustration project with Chaosium. This time I got to do a lot of ull page illustrations. That made for some breathing room in the art.

Story Seed #93
Wake Up New

You go to sleep. You wake up in someone else’s body. The body might have belonged to your next door neighbor or it might have belonged to someone on the other side of the world. You have only your memories not those of your new body’s original owner. So if you were a 30 year male taxi driver in Pittsburgh when you went to sleep, waking up in the body of a sixty year old woman goatherder in Botswana would be quite a shock.

This happens to everyone. You can put off the transfer by staying awake but you can only stay awake so long. Go to sleep, wake up someone new, somewhere else.

At first, civilization is going to grind to a halt. Civilization relies on skilled individuals doing specialized jobs. Communities and cultures rely on people sharing the same languages and customers and general knowledge. At first there would be panic.

But then?

Human beings are adaptable. We can manage change if we put our minds to it. What kind of society could grow from a people who are someone new, somewhere new, every day? Could we develop a common language? Could we manage our complex infrastructure? Are there skills that can be used regardless of the body you find yourself in? How do you prove you’re you? Does it matter?

Recommendation

Storyink Studios is the Etsy shop of Teresa and Jeff Swenson. They are delighful, creative people. They make stickers. Take a look!

Local News

Today is the final day to vote in the USA. Normally election seasons mean that I have to manage a lot of political flyers and advertisements. This season was surprisingly light, at least in my USPS station. No stacks of mailers for either presidential candidate. No stacks from either candidate for the Governor of Washington State. There were mailers for a couple initiatives but even these didn’t seem as overwhelming as mailers have been previously.

And that’s fine. I’m still doing overtime but mostly on my own route. General mail numbers have gotten higher lately. Amazon continues to send us a large volume of parcels. Many of those parcels are oversized boxes that can’t be carried in my satchel and so require me to take the extra time to car hop the parcls directly to the delivery address.

Artwise, I’ve finished both the pirate character illustrations and the cover for the novel. I’ll share the cover when the book is actually in print. The final version is likely to be different that the last version the publisher sent me. My job was to do the illustration. They were handling the type layout and design.

Next up is a portrait of someone’s RPG player character and some concept sketches for another person’s novel. Then a series of character illustrations for an RPG sourcebook set in North American Colonial times.Given that the mail and, especially, the parcels are only going to get heavier from now until January, that project will likely continue sometime into 2021. Does that throw off my plans to just concentrate on producing work for and marketing my online stores? Of course! But adjusting to change is life.

Daylight savings happened on Sunday. My body will be taking a few days to get used to it. I’ve woken up an hour before my alarm both Monday and today.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope that your week goes well and that you are able to celebrate some victories. I get through the days by celebrating the small ones. A sketch finished. A meal made. A bill paid. A swing completed on my route. Big victories are stacks of small ones. Celebrate your small victories.

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #43

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Gallery – Mansions of Madness

The first interior illustrations I did withr Chaosium was for Basic Roleplaying. My gallery of that work can be found here.

My second interior job was in 2007 for an updated edition of Mansions of Madness. I illustrated a scenario featuring of family of inbred weirdoes.Some of these folks were hideous but harmless. Others would happily have you for lunch.

 

Soty Seed #92
Floating

Have you ever had a dream where you remembered that you could float? You start to swim through the air. You never get very high but, as long as you remember you can do it you can move without having to touch the ground. When you forget you can float gravity pulls you gently down.

Imagine that people develop the ability to … not exactly fly but to defy gravity as long as they think about it and make some effort. They can still walk and stand and sit but they can also swim through the air. How would that affect the world? How would that affect the way we interact with each other?

Recommendation

I know that Halloween hasn’t passed yet, much less Thanksgiving, but if you’re the sort that likes to get ahead of things you’re already thinking about Christmas. And if you the sort who likes sending weird Christmas cards take a look at these offered by Studio Wondercabinet. I used to have breakfast with a lively group of folks including Heather and Daniel on a regular basis. They are talented, delightful people and well worth sending your money to.

Local News

The biggest thing that happened last week was me starting to wear my new glasses. My sight has been getting dodgier in the last year. Things were appearing blurrier in both the near space and the distance so I finally got my prescription updated.

I got two sets of glasses, a reader pair and a pair with graduated lenses for general use. I didn’t use either pair at first. I’d gotten used to drawing and working at the computer without them so I kept forgetting about the reader pair. I really only started wearing the reader pair after I started wearing the general pair delivering mail.

About a third of my deliveries are mounted – that is, I drive my truck to a mailbox, pull the mail out of trays on my left and then insert the mail into the box through my right side window. The weather has been gettig grey, more clouds and light rain and, with evening arriving soon, most of the daylight has been dim. It’s hard enough to read the 10 point (sometimes 8 point) fonts on the mail in regular light much less twilight. I was starting to have to hold the mail up to my face before I passed it into the mailbox. Not only did that make delivery slower it felt embarrassing.

Wearing my glasses while doing the mounted part of my route makes a huge difference. I can read the addresses in the trays. I have to drive a little slower because I’m not used to how the glasses make the rest of the world look but that’s fine.

Once I’d started wearing the glasses at work I thought to try them out at home. And now I can see the details in the television shows we watch in the evenings. And I can read the titles of the books in my library from across the room. Walking while wearing them is still a little weird. I don’t wear them while doing the walking parts of my route. They throw off my proprioception.

I hope your week has gone well. Thank you for reading. Take care of yourself and those you care about. Practice floating.

 

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #42

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 243-272

Thirty more of 2019’s half hour daily sketches in one convenient gallery.

Story Seed #91
What Stays Up

A transatlantic flight doesn’t land. The pilots can’t find a signal from the ground. There’s nothing but ocean below them and something has taken over the plane. It stays aloft for hours past when it should have lost fuel. It will respond to some commands but it won’t descend.

There’s only so much food on board. How do the passengers react? How does the crew? Do they work together to figure out a solution? Do they go Lord of the Flies?

Recommendation

Jackie’s Vegetable Kitchen. Jackie put up with me for four years in high school. We haven’t talked much since but we’re connected on Facebook so I’ve gotten to see glimpses of her life. If you’re someone who likes to cook and is interested in vegetarian recipes, Jackie has dozens of dishes worth trying out.

Local News

Last week –

At USPS we delivered local voter pamphlets, then ballots. Every voting session I have ballots for people who have long since moved. Apparently all the noise about voting has had folks be more proactive. I had a lot less undeliverable ballots this time around.

Artwise I’ve been working my way through adding greytones to the character drawings for the pirate book and I’ve been working with an author and his publisher to narrow down cover designs for the author’s novel.

I’ve been feeling scattered mentally and emotionally. Apparently that’s pretty normal these days. It does mean that this newsletter is a short one. I’ve had a lot of thoughts but writing them out coherently hasn’t happened.

Thank you for dropping by. Stay as healthy as you can. Avoid idiots. Thank your friends for making your world a better place. See you next week!

Tiesday Night Party Club #41

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Gallery – Inkober/Drawloween 2016

There are a lot of different drawing challenges on the net. Mermay. Junicorn. Kaijune. I think a couple of the oldest are Inktober and Drawlloween. I think. They may simply be the most famous or the ones I was first aware of. In any case, back in 2016 I posted a drawing a day during October. I used the Drawlloween prompts rather than the Inktober ones. I don’t remember why but I suspect the Drawlloween prompts just seemed more fun. It was fun and I’d enjoy doing it again sometime. This year I’ll just post a gallery of the work I did in 2016. Boo!

Story Seed #60-#90

Every picture tells a story. Or suggests one. There are 31 possibilities up there. Pick an image. Write the story that it illustrates.

Recommendation 

127 Terrifying Creepypasta. In keeping with this week’s early Halloween theme, here’s a list (with links) of 127 creepypasta – short internet based horror stories. Have fun reading!

Local News

I’m been thinking more and more about what projects to handle in 2021. It’s easier for me to manage time and projects when I plan ahead, when I figure out what I want to be doing and set out some goal posts that I want to pass.

Last week I wrote that I was thinking about suspending commissions so that I could spend more time creating art for and marketing my zazzle and redbubble stores. I thought about it a bit and decided that I’ll be spending the first 6 months of 2021 just working on the stores. I may take on commissions again in July. If I do, it will be at a higher rate. I don’t think I’ve raised my rates in 10 years. The new rates will still be less than what I make while working for the post office. (If you want my rates, just ask.)

It always feels odd to write about pricing my illustrations. Art is one of those cultural necessities that seems sullied by putting a price on it. And yet, I live in a determinedly capitalist culture that insists that everything has a price. When I gave people art when I was young they would often say that they would hold on to it until I was rich and famous, implying that they’d make a tidy profit by selling it. Someday. And I’d be happy if they did get a handful of cash for some sketch I did 30 years ago.

I’ve read plenty of stories about paintings that sold for more money than the actual artist who painted them made in their lifetimes. Mostly I’m appalled. The painting isn’t better for having been traded for a higher stack of cash. It wasn’t improved. And the person who did the work didn’t benefit. Yes, there are living artists who sell their work for ridiculous amounts. I don’t begrudge them. I’m just not impressed by rich folks competing for ownership of more things.

I used to think of art as low in value in life. We need to eat. We need to sleep. We need places to live and clothes to wear. When things break we need people who know how to fix them. But art? I figured that we could live without it so getting paid for it or getting rich at it or doing it for anything but fun seemed weird. And by art, I mean all the creative arts – writing, cartooning, singing, acting, poeting, painting, etc, etc, etc.

The thing is, art is culture. Culture is the stories and metaphors and ideas that our brains use to organize and communicate our thoughts. Culture is the software that our brains use to think. No art, no thoughts. American culture is obsessed with money and status. I try to look at my thoughts and attitudes to determine whether those thoughts and attitudes are ones I developed consciously or if I’ve just absorbed them.

I’m heading off on tangents that I can’t really explore without doing a lot more writing than I have time for. And time is what has become more important. I believe that the value of any work of art is reflected in how long it survives after it becomes part of the general culture. Frankenstein. Starry Night. The Road Not Taken. MacBeth. Lola. Superman. Kafkaesque. Lovecraftian. Oz. Peanuts. The art that survives is the art that matters. There are artists who were financially successful in their lifetimes who are forgotten now. There are artists who struggled financially whose work is now known by millions who have never experienced it directly.

I never expected to get rich doing art. It’s always been a way for me to relax. The process of drawing shuts off more annoying parts of my brain. Writing does the same but I need a quiet environment to write. I can draw in a noisy space. At this point I’ve got a job that pays all my bills and, barring the economic collapse of the USA, should continue to do so until I retire.

What I want to do is create some art, some stories, that has(have?) the potential to live on after I’ve stopped. Living that is. The art that has its own life is generally the art that is original. Using comic book artists as examples – consider Jim Steranko and Berni Wrightson. Both brilliant artists. Both illustrated some lovely stories that feature established corporate owned characters. Outside of comics Wrightson’s work is more likely to be remembered because he co-created Swamp Thing with Len Wein and his illustrated Frankenstein presents a definitive version of the story.

It’s not so much that I want to be remembered after I’m gone. Once I’m gone I don’t expect to care. History and culture will save what it deems important. There are images I want to see and stories I want to read that don’t yet exist. No one is commissioning me to create them. People commission me to illustrate their own ideas, not mine. If I want to see those specifici images and tells those specific stories I’m going to have to create them. And that means I’ve got to dedicate some time to creating them.

The Mighty Nizz. Misspent Youths. Kaiju Weather. The Witch Engines.

More next week. perhaps.

Thank you again for dropping by. I appreciate it. Your time is valuable. I hope, in the next week, you’re able to spend some of it doing things that bring you joy. If that’s creating art, yay! If it’s experiencing art, yay! If it’s engaging with the world in other ways, YAY!

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #40

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Gallery – Illustrating Mr. Conyers

Adam Crossingham at Sixtystone Press got me started (and continues to have me) illustrating RPGs. I thank him for that. I’ve had a lot of fun.

David Conyers got me started working for Chaosium. In 2006 he contacted me asking if I’d be interested in doing the cover illustration for Secrets of Kenya, a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook that he had written. David and I had both work published in The Black Seal. I said yes. The resulting cover is still one of my favorite color CoC illustrations.

The following year Conyers asked me to do the cover illustration for his and John Sunseri‘s collection The Spiraling Worm. That was my second job for Chaosium and more work (some of it illustrating more of Mr. Conyers writings)  followed. I thank him for that.

The last job David sent my way, in 2011, was a series of spot illustrations for The Midnight Echo #6, an issue of the magazine of the Australasian Horror Writers Association. I don’t think I ever got a physical copy of the issue. I’d actually forgotten that I’d done the job. I have forgotten having done a lot of illustrations. I tend to focus on what I’m doing next far more than what I’ve already done. Fortunately I rarely delete emails. I found the Midnight Echo pieces while doing a search in my old correspondences.

David is still actively writing. Harrison Peel, his protagonist in The Spiraling Worm, has starred in a series of novels, facing down the horrors of the Mythos and remaining somewhat sane and mostly alive.

During my email archive search I found progress images for Secrets of Kenya that I had sent to David. Here’s a gif of the illustration from inks to final colors.

Story Seed #59
Message in a Bottle

A man is walking on the beach. He sees a sealed bottle being washed back and forth with the tide. He picks it up. There’s a rolled up paper inside. He opens the bottle and takes out the message.

It reads – Thank you for finding this message. Please return it to the bottle and throw the bottle back into the sea. Whatever you do, don’t turn around.

Recommendation

ReplyAll is a podcast kinda sorta about technology. It’s about that, told in interviews and stories and therefore, it’s about the stories of technology and the people who create it and use (and misuse) it. The first ‘cast I listened to was a history of the QAnon conspiracy, how it got started and who is probably continuing it. There are currently 168 episodes to help you lose a few hours.

Local News

Mail volumes may be down but parcel volumes are definitely up. Every morning a supervisor goes around the station and asks each carrrier to estimate when they will be getting back from delivery. There have been days when, based on the count of letters and flats (magazines, catalogs, large envelopes), I would guess I’d be able to deliver my route in undertime. And I’d be wrong. I would have multiple large parcels that, being too large to fit in my satchel, I would have to deliver individually. Or the number of small parcels would be high enough that scanning them during the delivery process would increase my overall delivery time.

We’ve also been short carriers on many days so the rest of us have been having to carry extra even if we’re not on the Overtime Desired List. I’ve been of the ODL for a year now and I’m still doing a lot of overtime. The larger paychecks are handy but I got off the ODL in order to do more art and have more time to hang out with my wife.

Sigh.

I’m currently working my way through a couple of projects. One is a series of character illustrations for a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook set during the 1700s. The other is a cover illustration for a novel by Joshua Samuel Brown. I have previously done a couple of spot illustrations for Formosa Moon, his travelogue/dialogue with Stephanie Huffman, and multiple illustrations for How Not to Avoid Jet Lag, his book of travel stories.

I’ve also been thinking ahead to how to best spend my art time in 2021. I’ve been kept busy the last couple of years doing commissions. That’s been fun. I love adding to new books to my biblography. I’ve started a shop at Zazzle and another one at Redbubble. I’ve had a few sales. The commissioned work pays once. I can include it in my portfolio but most of the pieces don’t have much use outside of the projects for which they were commissioned. The stores have a potential for multiple sales on multiple products. I haven’t had to look for the commissioned work. I have enough folks who like my stuff to keep my schedule full. The stores are going to require a lot of marketing before they start to generate enough income to compensate for the time I spend on them. So far very few people know they exist.

I currently have commissions to fill my time until mid November. Then the Christmas crush will hit at USPS and I won’t be expecting to be able to get much, if any, art done. And then?

Do I continue to accept new assignments? Do I focus on new designs and doing marketing for my stores? Do I continue to try to do both? Decisions, decisions.

I’m happy to hear your opinions.

Thank you for stopping by. Remember to vote. Hug folks if you can (and they like that sort of thing). Be kind to yourself and others. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #39

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 213-242

Here are another thirty of the sketches I posted on a daily basis last year.

Story Seed #58
The Screaming Memes

Mirriam-Websters site defines meme as:

1: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.
Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.— Richard Dawkins

2: an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media
Letitia Chan has figured out how to encode a meme inside a meme. She has figured out how to transmit instructions for thought and behaviorial change within a short video. The videos she creates are seemily simple amusements – kittens chasing butterflies, fat puppies rolling down stairs, baby goats hopping enthusiastically. Watching the video once implants a new behaviour or core belief into the viewer – a smoker quits, a previously sedantary person takes up exercise, a Christian gives up their faith.
Chan is not driven by ideology. She’s just experimenting and amusing herself. She wants to see what ripples she can create in society. She doesn’t intentionally create harmful metamemes. She avoids encoding violent ideas and prejudices.
But any technology, once available, gets used in unintended ways and Metamemetics is too dynamic too go unexploited. Chan’s coding is quickly reverse engineered. Advertisers, governments, con artists and scumbags of all kinds flood the internet with new and dangerous memes. Activists of all stripes fight back with alternative memes. Minds and behaviors change minute by minute.

Recommendation

This is a request. My friend Andy Syversen passed away last week. Folks have come together to support his wife and daughter in many ways including this one  –

A college savings account has been set up in support of Maggie’s future education dreams. We invite you to make a contribution to this account established in memory of Maggie’s wonderful dad, our amazing friend, Andy. Maggie’s full name is Wencke Margaret Syversen, named after Andy’s mom and grandmother.

A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged program that helps families save for future education expenses. There are no fees with the Ugift savings program; your entire gift will go to Maggie’s college savings account.

To make a gift contribution using Ugift:

1. Go to Ugift529.com.
2. Enter Maggie’s Ugift code: R0D-81Y
3. Enter your name and the amount of your gift.
4. Make your gift via electronic funds transfer.

Please share with other friends and family of Andy, Crissy and Maggie.

In gratitude. Dana and Autumn

I’m posting this here as much for myself as for others. I read the original request in our FB messenger group. That’s going to vanish quickly. By posting here I’ll hopefully increase the signal and make the link easier to relocate.

Local News

I’m writing this part of this post this (Tuesday) morning. I’ve had the last 11 days off from USPS. I’ve done a bunch of artwork, got rid of some furniture, rearranged some furniture, scanned and posted a bunch of old photos of friends to Facebook and watched a few more TV shows and movies than usual.

Last night I got confirmation of a book cover commission. This morning I’m reading parts of that book in order to get a sense of what I am illustrating. So I’m reading this morning rather than writing more detailed news.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope you are safe from whatever disaster is occuring in your part of the world. May things get better from here.

Tuesday Night Party Club #38

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Gallery – The Black Seal #2

It was in doing illustrations for the second issue of the Black Seal that I found my basic style. The bulk of the illustration is done on paper. I use a mix of ink and pencil and markers. I then enhance the illustration in Photoshop – add lighting effects, blurs, patterns – things I think will make various elements pop out better. At various times I’ve tried to more digitally and I always come back to putting as much of the illustration on paper as possible.

Story Seed #57

Someone (a man or a woman) wakes in the middle of the night. They’ve heard a noise somewhere in the darkness of their bedroom. They don’t have pets. They live on the tenth floor of a large apartment building. Nervously they reach over and turn on the light.

Sitting in a chair across the room is a very large raccoon. The raccoon has its forepaws up in a gesture of peace.

It says, “I’d like to make a deal.”

Recommendation

I’ve got nothing this week.

Local News
Andy Syversen passed away on Thursday night. I found out that he was ill on Tuesday. A friend emailed me asking if I had heard and knew more than she did. I was at work when I read her email and waited until I got home to do a search of his wife’s Facebook posts to see if I could find out anything else before I contacted her. It turned out that she had posted the news on the 10th, the previous Thursday. By Tuesday he was no longer able to speak.

The last time Andy and I had spoken was at a memorial for another friend back in the spring of 2013. Seven years.

We used to see each other regularly. Back in the day, that is, back when we were in our teens and twenties, we were part of a group of friends who got together and partied. That group still exists, just scattered in the winds of relocattions and responsibilities and jobs and all the vagaries of adulthood. We’ve come together, a little bit, using Facebook in a benevolent way to send each other love and photographs.

Andy and I met in high school in Sebastopol, California. I don’t remember what classes we might have shared. High school was a place to get away from. My memories are of nights in the orchards and at friends’ houses and in open spaces around the Russian River. Drinking. Getting stoned. Talking. Trading insults. Hiking around.

That continued after graduation. After we had jobs and had bills to pay and apartments of our own and some folks started getting married. He started working for UPS as a delivery person. I’m sure I saw Andy at least once a month until I moved up to Seattle back in 1995. He married Crissy Smith and they had a daughter, Maggie.

Andy was a good guy. Steadfast. Smart. Dependable. Kind. Friendly. Fun. Whatever faults he had were enough outshone by his admirable qualities that I don’t remember them.

On Saturday I posted this on Facebook –

“Grief has five stages?
I’ve never gotten past denial. What are the other four like?”

It’s true. Anger? Bargaining? Acceptence? Friends and family members die and I keep going. I get that they are no longer able to talk to me. Or anyone. But knowing them has made me who I am. How can they be gone?

I am a better person for having Andy as a friend. The world is a better place because he was in it. I say that to the world because I didn’t get a chance to say it to him.

Tuesday Night Party Club #37

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #183-212

Thirty more sketches from last year’s daily sketch project.

Story Seed #56
The Telepathy Plague

A virus spreads. It is airborn, carried via respiratory droplets from host to host. Its incubation period is about a month so it has infected millions before the first cases are reported. Symptoms start small. The infected person starts to “hear” thoughts that are foreign, have desires that are new, remember memories of events they’ve never experienced. Only an infected person can “hear” another infected person. As the disease progesses infected people begin to experience more direct contact. One person can feel anothers physical pains, anothers emotional highs and lows, anothers direct thoughts.

How many people would run from infection? How many people would run to it? How many people would seek a cure? How much chaos would result from people being unable to keep secrets, being unable to lie, being able to see each others needs and pains?

Recommendation

Patrick E. MacLean writes fiction and essays. He also podcasts them. Most of the time I like reading more than listening so I appreciate that he has both options available. And both versions are worth experiencing.

Local News

I haven’t added much (if anything) to my Zazzle and Redbubble stores this week. I have plenty of images to use to make products. I’ve been lacking words. Rather, I’ve been lacking the necessary enthusiasm to write sales copy. Every time I post something new I have to write something new. Most mornings I’ve gone to one site or the other, picked an image I wanted to use and then drew a blank on what to say.

On the internet, a picture doesn’t speak for itself. Internet searches are based on words. No words, no search results.

I.m okay with fallow creative times. Drawing a blank with words doesn’t mean I’m drawing nothing at all. I’m currently working my way through sketches for a couple of proposed Call of Cthulhu supplements. Other projects are in the thinking and sketching stages.

Our housemate moved out at the beginning of the month so we’ve been moving things around in the apartment. And once you start moving things you really notice the things you don’t need anymore. I’ve been putting the “don’t need” things onto Craigslist, free to anyone who will come pick them up. Most of that stuff congregated in a side room that we’d left unused so our housemate could use it. She put a couple of things there that didn’t fit in her room and then ignored the space. Over the years stuff we weren’t using ended up there. Of course.

I want to turn the room into a conscious storage space. I’ve got large pieces and flat files and shelves of art that could get moved into that room and open up more space in the studio/library. I’ve also got 11 days off from USPS starting this Friday that I can use to move stuff. Fun, fun, fun!

I hope your week goes well. I hope you get a lot of rain, physically and metaphorically. Large parts of the country need it these days. If your soul is dry and dusty, please seek out some emotional H2O and spiritual fertilizer. The world already has a lot of people burning up and burning out. We need each other. It’s heatlhy to look after others. It’s healthy to accept help.

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #36

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Gallery – The Black Seal #1

I did my first RPG illustration work for The Black Seal back in 2001. AOL has purged all the archives of their inactive accounts so I can’t check the sequence of communications that led me to contribute. I remember being contacted by John Turner first. He’d seen my illustrations on the Delta Green website and asked if I would be interested in submitting illustrations to a new fanzine of modern day Call of Cthulhu (and specifically Delta Green related) adventures in Britain. I emailed back a positive response and was soon working with Adam Crossingham, the editor, doing illustrations for the first issue of The Black Seal. 

The Black Seal was named for an Arthur Machen story “The Novel of the Black Seal” about a hidden civilization secreted in the wilderness in Wales. The magazine’s focus was to be on material about PISCES, the UK’s Mythos fighting equivalent of Delta Green. I provided specific illustrations for a few articles and some random simple spot illustrations to be used as needed. I didn’t know what print quality TBS would have so I mostly did straight black and white work. I did spend a lot of time doing Photoshop effects on the second illustration in this gallery. I was still very inexperienced with the program and was figuring it out as I went along.

 

The Black Seal saw three issues printed between 2002 and 2004. I did illustrations in each issue and provided material for a couple issues that may see print someday. Work on TBS got me started doing Call of Cthulhu related illustrations. I’ll be showing some of that in future newsletters.

Story Seed #55
A Conspiracy of Squirrels

Most animal attack stories focus on large predators. Sharks. Bears. Wolves. Small varmints are primarily represented by rats. But rats hide in dark places. You usually don’t see them during the day. Squirrels? If you live in a town with trees you see them constantly. They’re everywhere.

Spying.
Plotting.
Organizing.

They only look cute until there are hundreds of them out for your blood.

Recommendation

This week I recommend How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctrow. Doctrow is a writer and activist with a focus on the benefits and dangers of modern technologies, particularly the internet. This is his latest book, free to read online.

Local News

I spent more time on my Redbubble store than my Zazzle store this week. Redbubble’s set up makes it easier to position on image on multiple products so it’s made it easier to feel like I’m getting more done. Mostly I’m importing images that I created to show off here at Skookworks in recent years but I’m beginning to create some images just for Zazzle and Redbubble. My favorites have been expansions of some designs I originally did as bandanas for Dagon Industries. The images are on most of the products in my Redbubble store. Since Zazzle’s focus is on individual products I’ve started by putting the design on the square puzzles.

This Cthulhu design is meant to be displayed as a diamond but Zazzle doesn’t offer that option. Just turn your head to the left a bit.

Great Cthulhu Glow Green Jigsaw Puzzle

Great Cthulhu Glow Green Jigsaw Puzzle

by Skookworks

That’s it for this week. I appreciate the visit. I hope that you’ve got people around you who keep you amused and make you feel loved. If you do, thank them! They’ll only get more amusing and loving.

Tuesday Night Party Club #35

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #151-182

Thirty sketches in one convenient gallery. Cheers!

Story Seed #54
A New Spell for Utopia

Magic exists. Stories are spells, wishes in long form. And, as The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs illustrates, the wish one makes is rarely the results one receives. For more than the last fifty years we’ve been telling tales of apocalypse and dystopia. This is most noticeable in our movies and television. Watching a film is a more social activity than reading a book. We all see the same images running at the same speed. Groups can experience the same story all at once.

Most tellers of tales of terrible futures will tell you that their stories are meant as warnings, not predictions. That’s assuming they’ve thought about their premises in any ways other than exciting settings for adventures. The thing about magic is that it’s tricky. Warnings are part of the spell, often the spark that burns up the normal world. Ask Adam and Eve. Ask Orpheus. As Oedipus. As those dumb kids who who went to Crystal Lake. The Gods know that the best way to make something happen is tell human beings not to do something.

So we’ve been casting spells to avoid apocalypse and all we’re doing is calling it up. The Gods are laughing.

We are all magicians because we all tell stories. Some of us have larger audiences but we all shape the world. Imagine putting power into creating a world that we want to live into, a world for our children’s children’s children. It would mean learning to tell different stories in different ways. The vision of a horrible future is not banished just because the story ends on a note of hope. Hope is nice but it’s not a roadmap. Once we’ve lived through the End, how do we live then? Or better, how can we live well, period.

Weave your spells, magicians. What does a good world look like? How do we live in it?

Recommendation
Toren Atkinson’s Post-Apocalyptic Movie Guide

Toren Atkinson has a list of a Post-Apocalyptic movies. It’s not complete. It doesn’t include zombie apocalypse films. But it’s a good overview. He helpfully includes a notice on whether each film ends on a positive note for those who want to enjoy a story set after most of humanity has died without getting too depressed.

Local News

I started last week feeling frustrated and unmoored. I’m writing on this on Tuesday morning feeling simply unmoored.

The day job is a chunk of time that I wade through that leaves me with only a small amount of time to create new art. I’ve got two shops (Zazzle, Redbubble) that I’m having fun working on each morning but they’re online stores. Despite what my spam comments suggest, people don’t end up on websites by accident. You can’t walk past an online store and decide to go in and browse. Either you know it exists or a search engine shows it to you. And in order for a search engine to show you something it has to know the something exists. So I’m trying to figure out how tag my stores in such a way that search engines direct people to them.

Basically I’m learning to write summoning spells.

It was recognizing that I was trying to work magic that helped to change my attitude. Google gives the definition of magic as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

In order to get someone to come to my stores I need to make them search engine friendly. Right? I need to somehow include words and tags that match up with what my potential audience is putting into said search engines. Oz? Cthulhu? Frankenstein? Thousands of results show up. Mighty Nizz? That wild child shows up on the first page. David Ingersoll? Using Bing I don’t appear for a few pages even though I own davidingersoll.com. Using Google my website shows up on the first page but I do occasional searches for myself on Google and Google’s algorithms are designed to give you more of what you’ve searched for in the past.

Search engines and website feeds are more and more designed to give you more of what you’ve already shown interest in. Or to give you more of what has already been designated as popular. The more popular something is designated, the more it is fed to searchers and the more popular it becomes.

I could be discouraged. Oddly, I’m not. I’ve ignored “search engine optimization” for most of the time that I’ve had a website.I didn’t care much about increasing the traffic here. I’ve only got so much time to do individual illustrations. Having more people commissioning me for more illustrations is appealling but only to my ego. Unless I quit the Post Office I don’t have time to take much more work than I’m already taking.

The online stores are different. The work is already done. Each piece can be sold multiple times so the more people who see an image or product the more chances that some of those people will purchase it. So now I have to learn to ” influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

Am I really performing magic?

It’s fun to think of it that way. I’ll be doing research and learning new skills and being boringly practical about everything but “have fun” is a primary motivation for me to do anything. I’m only feeling unmoored because there are so many directions I can look for information and so many new skills to aquire that I’m uncertain where to head first.

And that’s fine. To be unmoored is also to be in motion. Time to choose a direction to point my sails.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that you are a magician. The daily slog is real but it’s also an illusion. Fight it when you can but, when you can, give power to the moments of joy and wonder that present themselves. Share those moments. Magic lasts longer when performed in collaboration.

See you next week!