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!