Tag Archives: greeting card

Skook WiP #68

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Greetings! Thank you for opening this email (or for coming to the site and reading the post).

I hope life in your corner of the universe has been as relaxing or as exciting as you’ve needed it to be. Today is April 15th. If you live in the USA that means your taxes are due. No doubt you’ve already filed. Maybe you’ve even gotten your refund already. If so, yay! If you had to pay extra, you have my sympathy.

These Days …

If you are (or know) an automechanic in the Seattle area, the post office vehicle maintenace department is hiring. Apparently we currently have only one mechanic to look after all the vehicles in this district. On Tuesday, the oil light in my truck went on. In days past I would have filled out a vehicle repair form and someone would have come out to put oil in the truck. Last Tuesday I went to a gas station, bought a coule of quarts of oil using my route’s credit card and put oil into the truck myself. It wasn’t difficult but it’s not really part of my job description.

The next few months have apparently been designated as maintenance ond repair time for my own personal meat vehicle.

I’ve got a program of physical therapy to strengthen and loosen up my legs to compensate for my injured knee. Nothing like doing a workout after a day of work.

I’ll be having cataract surgery on both eyes. I’ve been told by people who have had cataract surgery that the results are great – like getting new eyes!

I’ve got dental surgeries scheduled for June after I heal from the catacact surgeries.

I am also approved for surgery on my knee if I so choose. The surgery would be to trim the torn miniscus. It might make using the knee more comfortable. I’m still arguing with Workman’s Comp over the initial injury (I didn’t get my doctors to fill out the paperwork to their satisfaction) so I’m waiting for my eventual victory before I consider adding further medical costs to our budget.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is a portrait of some celestial personalities.

The design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and on a variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Stop and Smell

Above is the latest design added to the blank card collection in my Zazzle store.

And I’m out.

See you next week!

Skook WiP #67

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TGIF! or How Did the Week Go By So Fast?

Welcome to the 67th issue of the Skook Works in Progress Newsletter. Thank you for reading. Feel free to share/forward it with anyone who you think would enjoy it.

These Days …

I’ve started another round of physical therapy. The goal isn’t so much to fix my knee (that requires surgery and it’s not a fix so much as an adjustment) as it is to make the rest of my body strong and limber enough to compensate for the weakness of the knee. My body is stiff and tense. This shouldn’t be news to me. I am generally tense. So now I have a bunch of exercises to do make my muscles stretch. Nothing for my mind. It gets to stay tense.

Upcoming – Dentist. Cataract surgeries. More sorting of books and comics. And we’re probably going to be getting a new housemate. The current one is up for an apartment across town. If she gets it we’ll want someone else in the other room.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a floating landscape. The surreal landscapes of Roger Dean were an inspiration when I was young. THis is my take on a similar subject.

This design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

The Sum of His Parts

The fellow below is the first of my designs that has gotten tagged by Redbubble’s fan art partner program. Redbubble has made deals with various media companies to allow folks to make and sell designs based on various IPs – mostly movies and tv shows. I haven’t made any designs for the program. I definitely haven’t submitted any designs for it. And yet something in RB’s submission algorithms decided that it needed to check with one of the “partners” before the design was posted.

It took a few back and forth emails before someone at RB was willing to tell me that the IP in question was Penny Dreadful. I liked Penny Dreadful. It was fun mashup of various Gothic Horror characters. Most of those characters are in the public domain. None of them are cartoon bunnies.

The Penny Dreadful folks rightly told RB that the design didn’t fit their IP and that it was okay that I could sell it.

A few of my other designs have since been held up while a human at RB checked with a human at some media company. It’s been both funny and annoying. I don’t do much fan art. If I did I wouldn’t try to sell it in one of my stores. Part of the reason is this – I like the freedom to do what I want with the images I’ve created.

Complain, complain.

That’s it for me this week.

How are you?

Skook WiP #66

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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!

Skook WiP #65

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Sarah and I usually watch movies and series together while we eat dinner (after work) or as hangout time (on my days off). For those viewings we try to find something that engages us both. When I’m working on art she will watch something that primarily interests her. Since we’re in the same room I end up listening to the show. She was recently rewatching Downton Abby and I caught a bit of dialogue between a couple of the upper class women. They were discussing the suitability of a suitor, a man who worked(!) as a lawyer(!). He said something about having weekends to do things around the estate. One of the women asked the other, “What’s a weekend?”

It’s amazing what can be said about a culture and about a character’s place in the culture with just a few words.

Given that you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a weekend coming up. Hopefully you’ll be able to spend some of it doing things that give you joy and satisfaction.

These Days

Today is the fifth day of my six day Long Week. Mail and, especially, the parcels have/has been lighter than in recent months. Recent years actually. That’s given me time to think about and start cleanin up my route. I’m emptying out the mailboxes that haven’t been collected in weeks and putting VACANT cards in them. Ideally this means that whoever fills in for me on my days off will not deliver any more mail to that box. Sometimes it works. Much of the time mail gets delivered anyway and I have to pull out it the next time I’m working.

I’m also updating names in the cluster box units so a substitute carrier can know which box to deliver to if the address on the letter doesn’t have the unit number. I haven’t done that in far too long.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a Horned King design. At least, that’s what I think it is. You may have your own story about it.

Available on a mug in my Zazzle store.
Available on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

And Also …

I’ve added another design to the collection of blank greeting cards in my Zazzle store. I sometimes wonder if these cards would be more salable if they had words in them and were tied to specific occasions. I like blank greeting cards myself but i can understand how having something already written in a card can make it more appealing to a lot of folks. A few printed words can act as a writing prompt for a more personal message. I’ll have to try that with some of the cards and see if that makes a difference.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading. I hope life in your part of the universe is going well.

See you next week!

Skook WiP #64

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Good morning! Have you had your coffee yet? Perhaps you prefer tea? Either is good.

Drink up and read on!

These Days

Before I started writing this morning I cleaned 302 spam comments out of my comment queue. Most of them were attempts to get injected onto the Morgo the Mighty page. I glance at every comment before I mark it for deletion. I’m willing to consider the possibility that a comment is actually attempt to communicate rather than just another toxic bot infestation. No luck today.

At the day job I got to drive my truck, that is, the truck assigned to my route all week. After weeks of needing to borrow trucks from other routes and having to hunt for the keys for said trucks because the carriers don’t put the keys in the slots by the timeclock where they belong, it was relaxing to be able to just grab my key and start up a familiar truck. I’m also a little surprised to find out that I’m kind of a neat freak compared to many of my fellow carriers. I don’t leave personal items, rubber bands, trash or much of anything in the truck at the end of the day. While I do consider the vehicle to be “my truck” I want it to be clean and ready if someone else needs to use it.

There’s a layer of grime on the dashboard that came with truck when I took over the route six years ago. I made a cursory attempt to clean it then. I only made a slight dent. I’m now considering applying soap and water to it next week. There’s nothing like having to deal with other folks’ messes to inspire me to make my environment even neater.

At home, I’m sorting books. I work at it until I reach the nine box limit that Half Price Books will accept. I shift books around on the shelves for later consideration. The books I’m currently thinking I’ll be keeping for the long term I move to the set of free standing bookshelves that I expect will accompany us to wherever we go whenever we go. There are stacks of magazines and comics on the top of the built in bookshelves. I’ve begun moving those down to lower shelves.

I have one copy of Misspent Youths #1. I have many copies of issues 2-5. What do I do with them? Many copies of Last Dangerous Christmas. A couple of copies of GLYPH #1. Multiple copies of later issues of both the magazine and the tabloid version. What do I do with them?

Once I’ve gotten the books managed I’ve got comics to sort. Half Price Books sells back issues of comics but I doubt if it’s the best place to take them. HPB has a computerized inventory of their books and they have a computerized set up for making offers on books brought for sale. Comics? Nope. I’ve checked their website. They do offer back issues but finding what they have available is tricky. I know someone who works for the company and he tells me that, while they do buy comics, it’s best to bring them in when there’s a buyer available who knows comics.

Mugshots

Today’s process GIF is of a cat who knows where it’s at. All the its.

This critter can be found on mugs in my Zazzle store and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

The happy fellow above is the latest addition to my collection of greeting card designs in my Zazzle store.

That’s it for this week. Thank you so much reading. I hope you didn’t spill that drink on anything important.

See you next time!

Skook WiP #63

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Huzzah!

You’re back! I’m back! Let’s get started.

These Days …

My postal truck broke down back at the beginning of November. It sat in the station’s parking lot for about a month before vehicle maintenance took it away. I got injured in early December and spent most of the month at home so I didn’t really notice that the truck didn’t come back. Once I was working again I noticed. And noticed. Every day I’d come in to work, check the board to see which routes were being broken up that day and then go looking for the keys to the truck assigned to one of those routes. I’d ask the supervisors if they could check on my vehicle’s status. They’d promise to do so. And maybe they would try. More likely the many other things that would immediately demand their attention would push my request out of their mind.

On Tuesday, mostly as a joke, I filled out a repair ticket for my vehicle. In the box asking for a description of the problem I wrote “Vehicle missing for four months.” Perhaps the incantation created by properly filled out paperwork had an effect because I got a call from the supervisor later in the day. He’d found my truck. Vehicle maintenance had farmed out replacing the engine to the Pep Boys. And then … forgot about it. The vehicle had been sitting at a Pep Boys somewhere for weeks.

It was sitting in the station parking lot when I finished my route.

Yay!

Except.

On Wednesday, when I went to check the vehicle and make sure all its systems worked, I discovered that the cargo bay was half filled with a huge plastic shipping container. A huge, very heavy, shipping container. Whoever had returned the truck had failed to remove the old engine from the back of the truck. They might not even have noticed it was there.

Fortunately our parcel volumes have been light of late so I was able to get all my deliveries into the truck. Unfortunately, halfway through the day the right front tire started losing air. Standard procedure would be for me to call a supervisor and have another truck brought out to me. That sort of thing usually meant a half an hour wait when we were properly staffed. These days? I just drove the truck back to the station, filled out a new repair ticket, and switched out the mail into one of the currently unused vehicles sitting in the lot. By the time I was done the tire was completely flat.

I had Thursday off.

Today I’ll go into work and maybe I’ll have a vehicle that works with a cargo bay that isn’t being used to store an engine block.

Maybe.

Mugshots

This week’s mug design process GIF is a sort of Balinese demon mask as interpretted by Jack Kirby while channelling Phillipe Druillet. Kinda.

You can find this happy face on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Also

My plan is to do a new mug design a weekfor the year – 52 for 2022. That won’t take up all my time. I’m also doing a variety of more general and more specific designs. The one bellow is one of my Happy Monster blank greeting cards.

It’s currently available only in my Zazzle store.

I hope your week goes well. If you have a weekend, I hope it is as relazing or as exciting as you need it to be. If weekends are not part of your schedule, I hope you find joy in whatever you’re spending your time.

Thank you for letting me visit. See you next week!