Tag Archives: Lovecraft Kids

Skook Words (and Pictures) #43

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Hmmm. There’s something familiar about today.

Could it be … Friday?

These Days …

I’ve been on vacation since last Friday. It’s been a good week to be on vacation here in the Pacific Northwest – we’re getting lots of rain. Since my plans were to finish the physical art for the next Mighty Nizz story and sort my old comics, staying indoors was not a problem.

Unfortunately I have the attention span of … one of my cats. If that.

I sorted the magazines that have been sitting unboxed on shelves. Now all the various series are stacked together rather than mixed in. I open the long boxes of comics that had been sitting, sealed up, since my brother shipped them from California twenty years ago. (I’ve been saying I had eighteen long boxes for so long I’d never bothered to actually count the boxes. There are only twelve boxes. I have no idea where the “eighteen boxes” number came from.) I got as far as doing a quick skim through each box before putting the lids back on and setting them aside again. I saw comics I’d forgotten that I had. I saw comics that have never been collected and probably never will be. I’m not nostalgic. Not for comics as they were when I was collecting them. I don’t buy monthly comics anymore. I buy graphic novels and series collections. I like books with spines. Those old comic magazines (one comic writer calls them pamphlets, another calls them flimsies) don’t sit on bookshelves. They’re not durable. But the art and story should be preserved. I have four days until I have to go back to delivering mail. I could actually sort the boxes in that time, if I’m willing to be quick and ruthless.

Yeah. Maybe.

As for working on Mighty Nizz art …

See “Red Storm Elegy” later in this newsletter.

Innsmouth Independence Day

Today I’m showing off my illustrations for the July 4th occurring adventure in The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection, written by Oscar Rios, published by Golden Goblin Press.
At a good old fashion New England Seafood Boil, on a beach in Innsmouth, the cousins gather to celebrate the 4th of July.  However, young Alice has a plan and needs her cousins’ help. She asks them to help her break into her great grandmother’s abandoned mansion to look for the family’s genealogy records.  She wants proof that her ancestors worked as privateers for the Continental Navy, so she can apply for membership in the prestigious Daughters of the American Revolution.  However, for some reason her family has forbidden her from exploring the family’s history. The cousins soon stumble onto dark secrets and are faced with difficult choices in the shadows of the decaying seaside town.

Red Storm Elegy

About ten years ago I was commissioned to illustrate a graphic novel. A friend of mine had decided that he finally wanted to make a go at a career writing comics. The best way to show a comics publisher that you know how to write a comic is get an artist to illustrate one of your scripts. So he commissioned a few artists to illustrate a few of his scripts. For me he’d come up with a fun gimmick idea – a “sci-fi samurai western” in which all the dialogue was in emojis.

I drew about a hundred pages of the story. The hundred is approximate. The writer wrote and I illustrated a number of revisions, including a couple of different endings. He had someone color the first 28 pages. We tossed the emoji gimmick. Eventually he decided that the story wasn’t anything he knew how to finish. He gave me the rights to use the art to create a story of my own, if I could think of one.

I put the physical art in a drawer. I kept scans of the art on my hard drive. Occasionally I’d open the files, look at the art and try to think of a story that I could tell with the art as it was, without having to draw anything new. I always came up blank.The plot of the story was more something the writer had come up with than something I would have thought of on my own.

Last week, after I’d been practicing with my Wacom tablet in Clip Studio Paint, I opened the files again. I thought, “Maybe I can do something with these. I’ll probably have to do some editing and maybe draw a new page or two but …” While I delivered mail, my brain tossed around ideas, thought of ways to reorder the art, considered new motivations and relationships between the characters. By Saturday I had a vague idea how I might use the existing art to tell a story that worked for my sensibilities.

First I wrote out a basic outline of the plot, using as much of the existing art as I could. Then I renamed all the files and put them in a new folder. Having a new name made it easily to consider the art as something new and malleable. Then I reordered the art to match the basic plot I had worked out. I created blank pages to fill in the places in the plot where I figured I’d need new art. I ended up with this –

Counting the blank place holder pages told me that, if I kept to the outline I’d written, I’d probably have to draw 31 new pages. I say “probably” because some of the existing pages would need a little redrawing and I could see how some of the pages could be rearranged.

Thirty and one pages. Plus God only knows how much correction and redrawing and editing and …

And so I looked at the Google Sheets document I’d created when I was trying to figure out where to place my original art based on my new plot. And I started writing dialogue. I didn’t worry about whether the dialogue matched the outline as long as it drove the story forward.

I’m thirty pages in and I’ve shaved four pages off my outline. Which means I’ve got some drawn pages that will need to be rearranged and some art that might not get used at all. And I’m okay with that. I’m not going to do that editing or draw any new pages until I finish the script and do at least one rewrite.

My working title is Red Storm Elegy.

This is Dove, my protagonist.


She’s not someone you want to piss off. A few someones have done that. They’re going to be very sorry.
I’ll be posting updates on my progress as I go.

Along with any progress on anything else that catches my attention.

I hope your week has gone well. I hope that your world has some happy places in it.

I hope the next seven days give you what you need.

See you next Friday!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #42

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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!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #41

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‘Tis Friday and thou art reading mine newsletter anon. Blessed be.

These Days …

I’m noticing that I’m liking Autumn. I’m not crazy about the extra darkness (and I will really complain when Daylight Savings kicks in) but I am enjoying the cooler-but-not-yet-cold weather and the extra colors that the fall leaves are providing. Plus the Halloween decorations that have sprouted up everywhere. Halloween is the best holiday. It’s not religious, it offends fundamentalists and it celebrates imaginary scaries. The only way it could be better would be if I got a paid day off.

The only medical appointment this week was for Kemo, our older cat. He’s been overgrooming the base of his tail, enough so there’s no hair and some of the skin is raw. The vet thinks he may have allergies to something in his cat food. She gave him a steroid shot, an antibiotic shot and recommended some high end cat food. She also fitted him with a cone-of-shame. We’re keeping him isolated in our bedroom in order to speed up the healing.

Work at the Post Office was only really eventful on Wednesday. Someone forgot to unlock the station’s gates for the sorting clerks Tuesday night/Wednesday morning so they couldn’t get in to throw parcels and divide up the palettes of flats (magazines/catalogs/random printed things). The clerks called around, no one answered, so they went home. When I came to work the loading dock was filled with pallets and bins of unsorted parcels. For the next three hours the supervisors and a tag-team of carriers got everything distributed. It was almost fun.

I had yesterday off. The vet appointment was in the morning. I alternated between chores and doing art. We got word from the publishers that they’re starting to build the Kickstarter page for Billi 99. We might have something to look at next week.

The Lovecraft Kids’ BFFs

For the Tails of Valor Kickstarter, Golden Goblin Press offered a reward tier by which backers could have their cat drawn into the book as a player character. For The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection Kickstarter they offered backers the chance to have themselves (or someone of their choice) drawn into the book as a best friend of one of the Morgan Family cousins.Then the poor folks got their portraits drawn by me. The characters were adolescents so the backers were asked to send a photo of themselves at the approximate age as their character. Three folks were able to provide those. Two folks didn’t have any age appropriate photos so I had to subtract a few years from the photos they did provide and then guess. One person wanted to give new life to a passed loved one. They had a photo of their chosen one as a very young boy and a few of him as an adult so I had to conjure of version of him somewhere in between.

Digital Sketches

I’m having a blast practicing Clip Studio Paint with my Wacom tablet. Remember the movie The Karate Kid? Daniel, the protagonist goes to Miyagi, an old man, and asks him to teach him karate. Miyagi agrees. And then he has Daniel paint his house and wash his car. Wax on. Wax off. Daniel does this for a while, expecting Miyagi to start teaching him soon. When days go by and Miyagi keeps having him do chores, Daniel gets upset at the old man. Miyagi strikes out. Daniel blocks him with one of the moves he’s learned from waxing the car. Miyagi demonstrates that every chore he’d been having Daniel do was teaching him a karate skill.

I’ve been working with Photoshop for a couple of decades now – mostly to color my work but also to make corrections and adjustments. CSP has a different interface than Photoshop. Some short cuts are the same but mostly I’m having to find the locations of various features (that I’m sure are there) on a regular basis. I won’t dive into the weeds as to what exactly I’ve done with Photoshop – suffice to say, every skill I’ve developed using that program is translating smoothly to CSP. Even when I have to DDG (DuckDuckGo) for the location of a feature.

These are this week’s pencil sketches.


And these are the digital finishes.

I’ve now started sketching right in CSP, no physical pencils first. I’ll show off some of the results next week.

I hope that the eventfulness of your week has been pleasant. I hope the coming week is pleasanter. Say “hi” to all the ghosts and goblins that cross your view.

See you in seven!