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!