Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 333-364
This the final gallery of the daily sketches I did in 2019. I actually only did 362 sketches. I miscounted a couple of times while I was scanning the original drawing so I thought I had done 364 sketches and I only discovered I was wrong as I was setting up the final posts in December. I filled in sketches 363 and 364 by finishing some much more complex drawings that I’d been putting off completing. Those can be found here and here. Sketch 365, posted on New Year’s Eve, was purposely blank to symbolize a fresh start for a new year.
Story Seed #98
The Rest of the Time
Carl Kolchak was a newpaper reporter who investigated mysteries that always seemed to involve supernatural creatures. No one believed him. So those stories didn’t get published.
Fox Mulder and Dana Scully were FBI agents who investigated mysteries that had seemingly supernatural elements to them. Scully kept offering rational, scientific explanations to the mysteries. Mulder went for weirder rationale. Mulder’s theories were, if not always correct, always closer to the truth than Scully’s. But since “the supernatural” isn’t a legally accepted way to close a case, most of their cases went unsolved.
How the hell did Kolchak or Fox and Mulder keep their jobs? Employers like results.
Consider Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Carnaki was a character invented by William Hope Hodgson. He starred in a series of stories in which he investigated seemingly supernatural mysteries. Sometimes the solution to the mystery was a supernatural one. Sometimes the mystery had a rational explanation.
I’m assuming that Kolchak wrote enough stories about political corruption and ordinary sleaze that newspapers kept giving him checks.
I’ve decided that the X-Files tv series only showed the mysteries that had supernatural resolutions. Nine times out of ten Scully’s rational explanations would prove true and the pair would either catch an ordinary human killer or discover that the death(s) were caused by some sort of weird misadventure. 90% of the time Scully was correct so she quite reasonably stuck to her guns whenever Mulder offered up some “alternate reality” theory. She knew he was sometime right but it was her rationality that let them solve cases and keep their jobs.
Kolchak and Mulder and Scully were interesting, entertaining characters. I started watching their shows because I like weird fiction stories but I kept watching the shows because I liked the characters. Would I have been disappointed if some of the mysteries had had mundane solutions? Sometimes. But I would have kept watching.
The seed here is character. Find a character you want to hang out with. That character will tend to have adventures in a specific genre. But a good character will work in different genres. A good character will be fun to hang out with when they are just hanging out.
Recommendation
Pawprints is a Zazzle store that features the art of Wallace Tripp. I ran across it while researching the site and I think his illustrations are delightful.
Local News
Work, work, work. The volume of parcels continues to increase at USPS. Most days I’ve ended up delivering the last part of my route in the dark. Some days I’ve been drafted to carry part of another route. I make sure to carry that extra mail in the middle of my day. Trying to deliver mail to unfamiliar addresses in the dark is no fun.
And then I’m up at 4 am to try to get some art done or write this newsletter or just get enough coffee into my system to be pleasant company to the folks around me.
As I’ve said, I’ve got two online stores, one at Zazzle, one at Redbubble. Each platform has its own features. With Redbubble I upload an image and the site puts that image on all its available products. I then make adjustments to each placement so the image looks good on each object. With Zazzle I choose a product and then put an image on it. Each store has a different selection of products. Last week I spent time on Zazzle making a pair of Cthulhu shoes. I’m rather proud of the results. Surprisingly there aren’t a lot of Lovecraft oriented shoes available. Yet.
A couple of weeks back I made a danger graphic. I’d been looking at the biohazard symbol and I kept thinking that the pronged triumvirate looked like goat skulls. I thought sure someone else would have had that same thought and created a design already. I did a few image searches and came up blank so I created my own version. It’s proven quite popular on my Tumblr blog. It’s probably one of my most reblogged posts.
I have more art in process. I don’t expect to get much of it done between now and Christmas. It’s that way every year.
Thank you for dropping by! I hope that you are safe and warm and have as much company as you need. Be good to yourself and be better to those who need it.
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See you next week!
