‘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!