Tag Archives: Half Hour Sketch

Skook Words (and Pictures) #51

Posted on by

Hello, hello! You’re looking fabulous, as usual.

This is the last newsletter of 2023 and the last newsletter for a while. You will (huzzah! hooray!) continue to get emails (or see posts). Starting on Monday I will be posting daily. I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions so much as I invent yearly projects. This is my project for 2024. As I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters, I’m working on mastering drawing using Clip Studio Paint and my Wacom tablet. I’m working on the sketches as if I’m doing a daily comic strip – six small sketches from Monday to Saturday with one large sketch on Sunday. I’m restricting myself to a half hour for the smaller sketches and an hour for the larger ones. (With a little wiggle room in these early days as I have to figure out how to do things in CSP that I already knew how to do in Photoshop.)

A new format means it’s time for new website banners. You won’t see these if you only see these newsletters in your email. These will be appearing randomly over at Skookworks.com starting January 1st.

Aside from improving my skill with CSP, I’m experimenting to see if I can increase my audience.

I’ll be simultaneously posting the sketches to my Substack newsletter.

I’ll be posting details of the sketches to my Instagram account that will feed to my Facebook page. (Instagram crops images to 1×1 ratios. The sketches are 2×1 and 2×3. I’m precropping the sketches because Instagram can’t be trusted to make good crops.)

I’ll be posting hi-res downloadable versions of the sketches to supporters of my Ko-Fi account.

Here in the real world I’ll be working on Sunk Cost Elegy, illustrations for a new Oz book and … stuff. And delivering mail. Of course.

I’ll undoubtedly write the occasional essay post but, for the next few months, expect more pictures than words.

Thank you for tuning in so far. Your attention is appreciated.

See you Monday!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #49

Posted on by

Welcome to the next to the next to the last Skook Words newsletter of 2023. Apparently we’re only getting 51 Fridays this year instead of the desired 52. I feel ripped off. To whom do I complain?

These Days …

This is my long week at the Post Office, the one where I work 6 days in a row. Because of the high volumes of parcels the folks on the Overtime Desired List and those of us on the Own Assignment list (we’re willing to work more than 8 hours to finish our route when necessary) are coming in at six AM. We load up our trucks with as many parcels as are available, go deliver them and then come back, sort our route and then deliver everything that’s left.

I actually prefer this set up. Delivering parcels by themselves is easy. All I have to think about is getting the right parcels to the right address as efficiently as possible. Then, when I’m delivering the rest of the parcels and the mail, that goes faster because I don’t have to make extra stops and trips to deliver larger parcels that don’t fit in mailboxes to the customer’s doorsteps. I’d be fine doing this during the rest of year.

Talking to Myself

Scene –
The Cartoonist sits at his desk. He is drawing using his Wacom tablet. To his right, a fat orange cat sits on the desk between the monitor and the printer. The cat doesn’t care about this drawing thing. To his left is a room temperature mug of coffee. The Brand Manager enters. The coffee in his cup is hot and mixed with eggnog. He looks over the Cartoonist’s shoulder at the art on the monitor.

Brand Manager – “That doesn’t look like Sunk Cost Elegy.”

Cartoonist – “It’s not. It’s test art for my 2024 project.”

The Brand Manager groans.

Brand Manager – “You’re shifting gears again? How can I manage your brand if you can’t stay consistent?”

Cartoonist – “Number 1, not my problem. Number 2, it’s going to help get Sunk Cost Elegy, and everything else, done quicker. And less expensively.”

Brand Manager – “Do tell.”

Cartoonist – “You saw the notice from Adobe? That they’re raising the price of the rent for Photoshop?”

Brand Manager – “I remember that, this year, you were going to learn enough Clip Studio Paint that we could stop paying Adobe’s ransom.”

Cartoonist – “I got sidetracked. My fault. But I’ve learned that the best way for me to learn something is to make it a project. Remember 2019? When I did daily half hour sketches and posted them to Skookworks.com?”

Brand Manager – “I remember that some of those sketches took longer than a half hour to finish.”

Cartoonist – “And some of them took less. It evened out.”

Brand Manager – “If you say so.”

Cartoonist – “Yeah. Okay. Stay positive here. Even when I did a sketch in a half an hour I still had to scan it and post it. For my new 2024 project I’m going to do daily half hour sketches directly in CSP. No scanning necessary. I’ll learn the program, post a sketch every day and still have time to work on Sunk Cost Elegy. I did these test images to get a feel for how ambitious I could be in 30 minutes.”

Brand Manager – “Not bad. Did that large one take a half an hour?”

Cartoonist – “That’s my Sunday post. I’m thinking of this like doing a daily comic strip – 6 small images and one large one. I’m giving myself an hour to do the large ones. The small ones will post Monday thru Saturday and the big one will post on Sunday. Since 2024 starts on a Monday it works out perfectly.”

The Brand Manager sips his coffee. He thinks. He smiles.

Brand Manager – “I like it.”

The Cartoonist looks perplexed.

Cartoonist – “You like it? Really?”

Brand Manager – “Oh, yeah! It’s a perfect opportunity to spotlight the Brand!”

The Cartoonist facepalms.

Brand Manager – “Think about it. You’ve got an Instagram account that only gets used when the Mail Carrier decides to post a photo of a sunrise or puppy or something. You’ve got a Ko-Fi account that you’re not posting to. You’ve got a Substack account that has only three subscribers. We can hit all of them!”

The Cartoonist thinks a moment. He drinks some of his coffee.

Cartoonist – “What are you thinking?”

Brand Manager – “I post the same image to Substack and Skookworks every day. Substack has a different audience than Skookworks with different ways of creating subscribers. For Ko-Fi I’ll post a hi-rez version of each image that’s only available to your patrons. Instagram can be set to feed to Facebook. For Instagram … hmm, Instagram wants its images to be square so that means a little more work but I can set up a template that you can plug the images into. Like this – ”

Cartoonist – “Cool. And then what?”

Brand Manager – “You’ve heard me complain that it’s hard to get an audience on the internet because no one can just stumble on your work? This will be a way for people to stumble on your work.”

Cartoonist – “Right. But then what?”

Brand Manager – “We get famous and conquer the world!”

Cartoonist – “Fame and world conquering don’t automatically go together.”

Brand Manager – “Let me worry about that. Don’t you have a lot of drawing to do?”

Merry Merry!

That’s it for this week. I’m looking forward to being very busy until the end of the year. I expect that most of you will be too. I hope that, in your busy-ness, you find some joy and, once in a while, some rest.

Thank you for reading. See you in seven!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Tuesday Night Party Club #49

Posted on by

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.

In 2021 this newsletter will be hosted at tinyletter.com. If you subscribe, each issue will come directly to your email address. I’ll continure to post links to issues here but, if you want cut down on link hopping, please use the form below to sign up –

powered by TinyLetter

See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #47

Posted on by

Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 303-332

This is the penultimate collection of my daily sketches from 2019. 30 images all in one covenient place.

Story Seed #96

Once again, there are thirty images above. They all have stories. The story you find in the illustration will be different than the one someone else tells.

Recommendation

This week I’m recommending David Lasky’s Etsy shop. David is a cartoonist, art teacher and friend. His work is lovely and eclectic. Check it out!

Local News

Rain and cold and darkness have settled over the Pacific Northwest. The holidays loom but we’re staying away from other humans and their icky diseases. The mail and parcel volumes have increased as expected so I’m getting overtime whether I want it or not. Wearing a mask in addition to rain gear leaves me with just a narrow strip with which to observe the world. I feel disconnected and unbalanced. The mask does keep my face warm. That’s an unexpected bonus.

I’m also officially a Guy Who Wears Glasses. As I got used to the new prescription I started wearing them in more and more situations and now I wear them more than I don’t. I go without them in situations where I need to have a mask on because I haven’t yet taken the steps to prevent them fogging but otherwise they’re just part of my wardrobe. The eye doctor recommended cataract surgery. Supposedly that will correct my vision issues so the glasses may not be a permenant accessory. I won’t be taking any steps toward surgery until after the holidays though. Too much to do, not enough time to recover.

I’m continuing to add images to my Zazzle and Redbubble shops. Both shops recently had complete strangers make purchases. That was encouraging. One can’t become a mogul by selling just to ones friends.

I’m currently completing and/or coloriing older illustrations of Little Red aka The Mighty Nizz. The image below is from 2011 or 2012. I’m pretty sure it’s the third time I’d drawn the character. I found it when I was clearing and organizing a stack of art and art supplies this summer. It was mostly still pencils, only the lettering and the bear in the tree had been inked. I wish I’d remembered to scan that version but we’ll have to settle on the completed inks.

From that to this –

I also colored two images from 2015. This –

Became this –

And this –

Became this –

I actually prefer this version to the more detailed one I did later. I’m making both available in my shops. I long ago learned that my taste is not necessarily my audience’s. Unless I hate an image I’m likely to make it available.


In 2021 this newsletter will get a new title – Skook WIP (Works in Progress) and will be hosted at tinyletter.com. If you subscribe, each issue will come directly to your email address. I’ll continure to post links to issues here but, if you want cut down on link hopping, please use the form below to sign up –

powered by TinyLetter

It’s Thanksgiving this week. We’re keeping it small. Just me, my wife, our nephew and his girlfriend. Easy enough since we share the apartment. Others were invited but the C19 resurgence is keeping them home. I’m working the day before Thanksgiving so any cooking I do will happen in the morning on Thursday. Since we’re keeping the menu small I don’t expect to do much. Since I’ll be tired from the day before I really don’t plan to do much.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope that your holiday is warm and relaxing. We’ve been in a slow, stupid apocalypse for months now. Celebrate by doing what makes you happy and keeps you safe. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #45

Posted on by

Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 273-302

Here are 30 more of the half hour/daily sketches that I posted in 2019, now in one convenient gallery.

Story Seed #94
Move the Frame, Change the Rhythm

My wife has said that a story can be anything. It’s all in where you place the frame. It’s the lens through which you view the tale. It’s all in how the story is told. Based on modern adaptations most folks would assume that Beowulf’s story ends with him killing Grendel’s mother. His story is longer than that. And it’s a poem. In old English. Basically a foreign language. So most modern audiences experience the story as translations or adaptations or reimaginings.

And that’s fine. That what humans have been doing with stories for as long as we’ve been telling stories. We rewrite them for new audiences. Or because we wanted a different mood than what we got in the orignal. Or we thought the original ending sucked. Hamlet could be a comedy. Joan of Arc’s story is triumphant if you stop writing it before her betrayal the Burgundian Faction. The Hunchback of Notre Dame could be a musical with a happy ending.

Yeah.

It’s easiest to do this with a story that you didn’t like. One that left you unsatisfied. One of the things I enjoy about a story I didn’t like is thinking about how I would rewrite it to fit my tastes. The public domain is full of stories that don’t work.Pick one up. Figure out what bugs you about it. Once you strart moving the pieces around, once you see it from a different angle, it becomes something new.

Have I said this before? Probably. It’s been that kind of week. I write to remind myself as well as to speak to world.

Recommendation

Matt Howarth was one of my inspirations for comics back in the 90s. He’s still producing work and has a huge back catalog available. Check it out!

Local News

Jeez.

The last couple of weeks have been mind numbing. I’ve spent entirely too much time on Facebook, both on my phone and on my desktop. I voted, what, three weeks ago? And then it was all waiting. Last week was my Long Week (six days working in a row) and the weather got cold and rainy. I’d get up in the morning and scroll news sites and FB. While delivering mail I spent a lot time mentally writing political screeds. Once I got home I just wanted to forget about it all. Too tired. And I had art to finish. And plenty of other people had already posted some damned fine screeds.

On Saturday I got to work and discovered that our start time had been changed from 7:30 back to 7 AM. Apparently that had been announced on Friday and I’d missed it. So I was late but no one minded. I’d showed up. Enough other carriers called in that the rest of us were being mandated to work overtime to cover the missing carriers routes. Bleah. It was another long cold rainy day. I’d be finishing it delivering in the dark.

I was loading up my truck when we heard people setting off fireworks. The election was called for Biden and Harris. Relief. It’s amazing how much easier it is to do your work when you don’t feel a sense of impending doom.

Yes, there’s a lot of work to do. Yes, the vote was much closer than it should have been. Yes, there are far more obstructionists still in Congress than there should be. Biden and Harris are conservatives. I’d prefer some radical progressives. They are far far better than the guy who just lost. The people they appoint will mostly be in their positions to do their jobs rather than line their pocketbooks. For now, that’s enough.

My screeds can wait. There’s art to make.

I hope that you are also feeling a little lighter. Able to laugh a little more. Able to plan for a future. Thank you for dropping by.

Tuesday Night Party Club #42

Posted on by

Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 243-272

Thirty more of 2019’s half hour daily sketches in one convenient gallery.

Story Seed #91
What Stays Up

A transatlantic flight doesn’t land. The pilots can’t find a signal from the ground. There’s nothing but ocean below them and something has taken over the plane. It stays aloft for hours past when it should have lost fuel. It will respond to some commands but it won’t descend.

There’s only so much food on board. How do the passengers react? How does the crew? Do they work together to figure out a solution? Do they go Lord of the Flies?

Recommendation

Jackie’s Vegetable Kitchen. Jackie put up with me for four years in high school. We haven’t talked much since but we’re connected on Facebook so I’ve gotten to see glimpses of her life. If you’re someone who likes to cook and is interested in vegetarian recipes, Jackie has dozens of dishes worth trying out.

Local News

Last week –

At USPS we delivered local voter pamphlets, then ballots. Every voting session I have ballots for people who have long since moved. Apparently all the noise about voting has had folks be more proactive. I had a lot less undeliverable ballots this time around.

Artwise I’ve been working my way through adding greytones to the character drawings for the pirate book and I’ve been working with an author and his publisher to narrow down cover designs for the author’s novel.

I’ve been feeling scattered mentally and emotionally. Apparently that’s pretty normal these days. It does mean that this newsletter is a short one. I’ve had a lot of thoughts but writing them out coherently hasn’t happened.

Thank you for dropping by. Stay as healthy as you can. Avoid idiots. Thank your friends for making your world a better place. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #39

Posted on by

Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 213-242

Here are another thirty of the sketches I posted on a daily basis last year.

Story Seed #58
The Screaming Memes

Mirriam-Websters site defines meme as:

1: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.
Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.— Richard Dawkins

2: an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media
Letitia Chan has figured out how to encode a meme inside a meme. She has figured out how to transmit instructions for thought and behaviorial change within a short video. The videos she creates are seemily simple amusements – kittens chasing butterflies, fat puppies rolling down stairs, baby goats hopping enthusiastically. Watching the video once implants a new behaviour or core belief into the viewer – a smoker quits, a previously sedantary person takes up exercise, a Christian gives up their faith.
Chan is not driven by ideology. She’s just experimenting and amusing herself. She wants to see what ripples she can create in society. She doesn’t intentionally create harmful metamemes. She avoids encoding violent ideas and prejudices.
But any technology, once available, gets used in unintended ways and Metamemetics is too dynamic too go unexploited. Chan’s coding is quickly reverse engineered. Advertisers, governments, con artists and scumbags of all kinds flood the internet with new and dangerous memes. Activists of all stripes fight back with alternative memes. Minds and behaviors change minute by minute.

Recommendation

This is a request. My friend Andy Syversen passed away last week. Folks have come together to support his wife and daughter in many ways including this one  –

A college savings account has been set up in support of Maggie’s future education dreams. We invite you to make a contribution to this account established in memory of Maggie’s wonderful dad, our amazing friend, Andy. Maggie’s full name is Wencke Margaret Syversen, named after Andy’s mom and grandmother.

A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged program that helps families save for future education expenses. There are no fees with the Ugift savings program; your entire gift will go to Maggie’s college savings account.

To make a gift contribution using Ugift:

1. Go to Ugift529.com.
2. Enter Maggie’s Ugift code: R0D-81Y
3. Enter your name and the amount of your gift.
4. Make your gift via electronic funds transfer.

Please share with other friends and family of Andy, Crissy and Maggie.

In gratitude. Dana and Autumn

I’m posting this here as much for myself as for others. I read the original request in our FB messenger group. That’s going to vanish quickly. By posting here I’ll hopefully increase the signal and make the link easier to relocate.

Local News

I’m writing this part of this post this (Tuesday) morning. I’ve had the last 11 days off from USPS. I’ve done a bunch of artwork, got rid of some furniture, rearranged some furniture, scanned and posted a bunch of old photos of friends to Facebook and watched a few more TV shows and movies than usual.

Last night I got confirmation of a book cover commission. This morning I’m reading parts of that book in order to get a sense of what I am illustrating. So I’m reading this morning rather than writing more detailed news.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope you are safe from whatever disaster is occuring in your part of the world. May things get better from here.

Tuesday Night Party Club #37

Posted on by

Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #183-212

Thirty more sketches from last year’s daily sketch project.

Story Seed #56
The Telepathy Plague

A virus spreads. It is airborn, carried via respiratory droplets from host to host. Its incubation period is about a month so it has infected millions before the first cases are reported. Symptoms start small. The infected person starts to “hear” thoughts that are foreign, have desires that are new, remember memories of events they’ve never experienced. Only an infected person can “hear” another infected person. As the disease progesses infected people begin to experience more direct contact. One person can feel anothers physical pains, anothers emotional highs and lows, anothers direct thoughts.

How many people would run from infection? How many people would run to it? How many people would seek a cure? How much chaos would result from people being unable to keep secrets, being unable to lie, being able to see each others needs and pains?

Recommendation

Patrick E. MacLean writes fiction and essays. He also podcasts them. Most of the time I like reading more than listening so I appreciate that he has both options available. And both versions are worth experiencing.

Local News

I haven’t added much (if anything) to my Zazzle and Redbubble stores this week. I have plenty of images to use to make products. I’ve been lacking words. Rather, I’ve been lacking the necessary enthusiasm to write sales copy. Every time I post something new I have to write something new. Most mornings I’ve gone to one site or the other, picked an image I wanted to use and then drew a blank on what to say.

On the internet, a picture doesn’t speak for itself. Internet searches are based on words. No words, no search results.

I.m okay with fallow creative times. Drawing a blank with words doesn’t mean I’m drawing nothing at all. I’m currently working my way through sketches for a couple of proposed Call of Cthulhu supplements. Other projects are in the thinking and sketching stages.

Our housemate moved out at the beginning of the month so we’ve been moving things around in the apartment. And once you start moving things you really notice the things you don’t need anymore. I’ve been putting the “don’t need” things onto Craigslist, free to anyone who will come pick them up. Most of that stuff congregated in a side room that we’d left unused so our housemate could use it. She put a couple of things there that didn’t fit in her room and then ignored the space. Over the years stuff we weren’t using ended up there. Of course.

I want to turn the room into a conscious storage space. I’ve got large pieces and flat files and shelves of art that could get moved into that room and open up more space in the studio/library. I’ve also got 11 days off from USPS starting this Friday that I can use to move stuff. Fun, fun, fun!

I hope your week goes well. I hope you get a lot of rain, physically and metaphorically. Large parts of the country need it these days. If your soul is dry and dusty, please seek out some emotional H2O and spiritual fertilizer. The world already has a lot of people burning up and burning out. We need each other. It’s heatlhy to look after others. It’s healthy to accept help.

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #35

Posted on by

Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #151-182

Thirty sketches in one convenient gallery. Cheers!

Story Seed #54
A New Spell for Utopia

Magic exists. Stories are spells, wishes in long form. And, as The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs illustrates, the wish one makes is rarely the results one receives. For more than the last fifty years we’ve been telling tales of apocalypse and dystopia. This is most noticeable in our movies and television. Watching a film is a more social activity than reading a book. We all see the same images running at the same speed. Groups can experience the same story all at once.

Most tellers of tales of terrible futures will tell you that their stories are meant as warnings, not predictions. That’s assuming they’ve thought about their premises in any ways other than exciting settings for adventures. The thing about magic is that it’s tricky. Warnings are part of the spell, often the spark that burns up the normal world. Ask Adam and Eve. Ask Orpheus. As Oedipus. As those dumb kids who who went to Crystal Lake. The Gods know that the best way to make something happen is tell human beings not to do something.

So we’ve been casting spells to avoid apocalypse and all we’re doing is calling it up. The Gods are laughing.

We are all magicians because we all tell stories. Some of us have larger audiences but we all shape the world. Imagine putting power into creating a world that we want to live into, a world for our children’s children’s children. It would mean learning to tell different stories in different ways. The vision of a horrible future is not banished just because the story ends on a note of hope. Hope is nice but it’s not a roadmap. Once we’ve lived through the End, how do we live then? Or better, how can we live well, period.

Weave your spells, magicians. What does a good world look like? How do we live in it?

Recommendation
Toren Atkinson’s Post-Apocalyptic Movie Guide

Toren Atkinson has a list of a Post-Apocalyptic movies. It’s not complete. It doesn’t include zombie apocalypse films. But it’s a good overview. He helpfully includes a notice on whether each film ends on a positive note for those who want to enjoy a story set after most of humanity has died without getting too depressed.

Local News

I started last week feeling frustrated and unmoored. I’m writing on this on Tuesday morning feeling simply unmoored.

The day job is a chunk of time that I wade through that leaves me with only a small amount of time to create new art. I’ve got two shops (Zazzle, Redbubble) that I’m having fun working on each morning but they’re online stores. Despite what my spam comments suggest, people don’t end up on websites by accident. You can’t walk past an online store and decide to go in and browse. Either you know it exists or a search engine shows it to you. And in order for a search engine to show you something it has to know the something exists. So I’m trying to figure out how tag my stores in such a way that search engines direct people to them.

Basically I’m learning to write summoning spells.

It was recognizing that I was trying to work magic that helped to change my attitude. Google gives the definition of magic as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

In order to get someone to come to my stores I need to make them search engine friendly. Right? I need to somehow include words and tags that match up with what my potential audience is putting into said search engines. Oz? Cthulhu? Frankenstein? Thousands of results show up. Mighty Nizz? That wild child shows up on the first page. David Ingersoll? Using Bing I don’t appear for a few pages even though I own davidingersoll.com. Using Google my website shows up on the first page but I do occasional searches for myself on Google and Google’s algorithms are designed to give you more of what you’ve searched for in the past.

Search engines and website feeds are more and more designed to give you more of what you’ve already shown interest in. Or to give you more of what has already been designated as popular. The more popular something is designated, the more it is fed to searchers and the more popular it becomes.

I could be discouraged. Oddly, I’m not. I’ve ignored “search engine optimization” for most of the time that I’ve had a website.I didn’t care much about increasing the traffic here. I’ve only got so much time to do individual illustrations. Having more people commissioning me for more illustrations is appealling but only to my ego. Unless I quit the Post Office I don’t have time to take much more work than I’m already taking.

The online stores are different. The work is already done. Each piece can be sold multiple times so the more people who see an image or product the more chances that some of those people will purchase it. So now I have to learn to ” influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

Am I really performing magic?

It’s fun to think of it that way. I’ll be doing research and learning new skills and being boringly practical about everything but “have fun” is a primary motivation for me to do anything. I’m only feeling unmoored because there are so many directions I can look for information and so many new skills to aquire that I’m uncertain where to head first.

And that’s fine. To be unmoored is also to be in motion. Time to choose a direction to point my sails.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that you are a magician. The daily slog is real but it’s also an illusion. Fight it when you can but, when you can, give power to the moments of joy and wonder that present themselves. Share those moments. Magic lasts longer when performed in collaboration.

See you next week!

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #33

Posted on by

Gallery: 2019 Daily Sketches 121-150

Another thirty of last year’s Daily Half Hour Sketches, now in one handy gallery.

Story Seed #52
A Stone in the River

Most crime fighters and/or superheroes are reactive. Mostly they take action after a crime has been committed either to bring villains to justice or, on the more antihero side, get revenge for the victims. There are a few stories of characters or organizations that stop crimes before they occur, they catch criminals before they can become criminals, they punish the guilty before they can be guilty of a crime. Usually the organizations manage this by either having members with precognitive abilities or computers with the same abilities. Eunice Stone can’t see the future. She simply knows how to read people. If she spends enough time around someone she’ll be able to predict how that person is likely to react in any situation.

She doesn’t see good or bad people. Eunice sees life as a game. She sees human beings as mostly unaware entities trapped in massive systems, reacting to outside stimuli and stuck in lives that, too often, spiral further out of control. So, as a child, Eunice set out, not to fix the systems – she knew that was too big a task – but to redirect the people who are trapped in them. A suggestion here. A secret favor there. Redirecting an angry man’s attention at someone who deserves his wrath rather than the family he’s been taking it out on. Showing the unrepentant thief better targets than his neighbors.

Eunice becomes a fixer. The smarter and more aware people around her, both criminals and legitimate businesspeople, notice what she does and try to enlist her in improving their situations. And she does. Mostly to the advantage of everyone in a situation. She makes connections. She points out solutions. She goes around her clients selfish desires and finds points them at satisfying ends. Eunice knows that there is always a win win scenario.

And for those who refuse to play her way? Those who can only win by making someone lose? Eunice will take them out of the game.

Recommendation

The Kickstarter for Growing Up / Overnight ends on the 30th. Please support this project! Thank you!

Local News

Life at the Post Office has been tiring. Last week was my Long Week, six days in a row, every day with overtime. There are a lot of carriers on vacation at the moment so a lot of routes need coverage. I volunteer for a desired route at the beginning of my shift in order to avoid being mandated to carry a route I don’t particularly like. This will make for a larger paycheck but currently I’m only noticing a more tired body.

I’ve read the news about the Postmaster General’s sabotage of USPS. I haven’t noticed any unique new problems. Upper management is doing more micromanaging but they do that every few months anyway so, if I hadn’t been hearing about the new PMG, I’d just assume regular management stupidity. Being a letter carrier is a job. I’m past the point of feeling any particular loyalty to a job. Jobs don’t love the people who do them and upper management in most businesses will make decisions that poorly affect the people who have to follow the new directives. If upper management consulted the workers before implementing a new procedure that would be unusual.

So I do my best to put my emotional and creative energy into activities where I can have some fun and some control. This last week Sarah has been good at reminding me to get some drawing in after work, regardless of how tired I am. Just 15 minutes can improve my mood.

In the mornings I generally do computer work. Photoshop. Writing here. I have now have two online stores. One at Zazzle. Another at Redbubble.

The first week that I was putting together my Zazzle store I made a lot of products. Unfortunately they didn’t all become publically available quickly. My first 29 items appeared promptly enough. Then, from Saturday to Thursday, nothing loaded. I looked at the Zazzle forums and checked with customer service and got that slow load times during busy periods could be expected. By Wednesday I was feeling a bit itchy so I decided to check out the other POD sites that I’d seen recommended.

I started setting up a store at Redbubble. I’d only set up a profile but not loaded any art when Zazzle’s public links resolved and the 50 products I’d been waiting on became available. So I continued making stuff at Zazzle. I decided to just make one or two things a day. Partly so that they’d load in a timely fashion and partly so I would spend some time figuring out best marketing practices. And I got a commission to do illustrations for an RPG supplement about pirates.

Redbubble is persistent though. I got emails reminding me to finish setting up my store. So, what the hell, I figured I might as well have two stores, one Zazzler, one Redbubbler. Zazzle had been recommended as a general, less focussed site, Redbubble as an artist focused site. There’s definitely a difference between them.

With Zazzle, you choose a product – a cup, a t-shirt, a puzzle – upload an image and match it to the product. With Redbubble you start by uploading an image and the site helpfully puts it on EVERYTHING. For a few of their products that means you have to do some repositioning to make the image look good. Most of the time the fit is great. Zazzle seems to be the best platform for smaller images, the sort of things that I’ve been putting on cups and mugs. Redbubble seems to be a better platform for larger, more complicated images. So those are good reasons to maintain two stores.

Zazzle provides code that lets me post individual items or collections to this website or other social media sites. That’s cool.

Redbubble lets me put a sample store onto this website. Check it out –

Thank you for dropping by. I hope that your week provides you with more happy moments than otherwise. Look out for each other. See you next week!