Skook WiP #74

Posted on May 27, 2022 by skook

Greetings and salutations! Welcome to the seventy-fourth edition of the Skook Works-in-Progress newsletter.

I hope your week has been a good one. There is a tendency to emphasize the scary and dangerous when we as humans communicate. There’s some value in that (warning signs should have attention paid to them) but it can make us feel anxious and despondant. Hopefully you’ve been getting some uplifting and friendly inputs as well.

These Days …

This week my left eye has started providing me with clearer and more colorful input. On Tuesday I finally had my first cataract surgery. The hardest part of the process was not drinking coffee first thing in the morning. It was the first time in years that I haven’t had caffeine kickstarting my brain and leveling my mood. No fun. The actual surgery went smoothly – at least from my perspective. I was awake but drugged so that I really don’t have a clear memory of the process.

I’m off work this week to let the eye heal. I’m not supposed to do any heavy lifting or much bending over and I do a lot of that as a mail carrier. I wore an eyeshield over the left eye after the operation until the follow up doctor’s appointment on Wednesday so I wasn’t seeing much change in my eyesight. I’ve had the shield off since the appointment and … things are different. In my left eye. Colors are brighter. I can see things more clearly in the near range. Things are still blurry in the distance and, unfortunately, my glasses don’t improve things. I’m going to need a new prescription.

I’ll have to wait on that until the end of June. Surgery on my right eye is scheduled for June 24th. Until then my brain is going to be toggling between two differently abled eyes and trying to send me useful information. It’s going to be interesting.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features cute monsters. All monsters are cute but not all monsters are cute to humans.

As usual, this design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Sketching Ahead

Below are the base sketches for the last eleven upcoming mugshots. Many of these are already finished and available in my stores. I’ll be posting the process GIFs of each in future newsletters.

That’s it for this issue.

Thank you for reading. May the next few days be good to you. May you spend time with friends and laugh enough to make the world bright.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #73

Posted on May 20, 2022 by skook

Good morning! Good afternoon! Good evening! Good whatevertimeyouhappentoread this!

Welcome to the seventy-third issue of the Skook Works-in-Progress Newsletter.

These Days …

It looks like we’ve got a new housemate. He’ll mostly be using the rooms as a place to sleep during the week. He has a house and wife out of state. He’ll fly in at the beginning of the week and fly out at the end. He’s seen photos of the room. We did a zoom call with him last Sunday and liked him. I used my phone to give him a walk through of our place. We’re going to try to meet and have him see the place in person next week.

I’ll be looking at him with one eye. My cataract surgery is scheduled for Tuesday. No cookies for me!

Mugshots

Happy Monsters! This week’s process gif is of a gaggle of dancing goons.

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

Coming Attractions

The best way to stay on schedule is to be ahead of schedule. I’m working as far ahead on designs as I can. I show a single process gif and provide links to my stores here on weekly basis but I’m trying to have all the Mugshot designs finished by the end of June. Below are preliminary design sketches. If you’ve spent much time looking at my stores you’ll notice finished versions of a lot of these images. This is how they all start. Graphite lines over non-photo blue sketches.

Thank you for letting me into your in-box. I hope your weekend is as restful or as lively as you need it to be.

See you next Friday!

Skook WiP #60

Posted on February 18, 2022 by skook

Greetings and salutations! I hope your week has gone well and you’re sliding into today with enthusiasm and good cheer.

These Days

My week has gone … okay.

I’m back working full time – that is, I’m delivering to all the addresses on my route. I’m wearing a knee brace and a back brace and I’m doing exercises at home to strengthen the parts of me that would prefer it if I just stayed home and spent my time drawing. I will be appealing my Workman’s Comp denial but to do that I’ve got to get one or both of my doctors to provide a medical diagnosis and write an essay about how my accident resulted in my injury. Bleah.

Every day starts with me checking the board to see which routes are being broken up for overtime delivery. Those route will have available vehicles. The vehicle assigned to my route has been gone for over two months now. At this point I’m guessing my route won’t have a vehicle until they start rolling out the new models in 2023.

Mail itself has been light, at least compared to that in the Fall and Christmas season. I’ve been delivering to addresses that I barely seen in the last two months. On Tuesday I pulled backed up mail out of a few mailboxes belonging to vacant addresses. The boxes have “Vacant” cards in them but some carriers just deliver mail to them anyway and the cards get buried. So more mail gets put in.

I’m saying hello to customers I haven’t seen since 2021. They’ve all been happy to see me. I’m sure they’re also happy to be getting their mail before sundown. I’ve heard stories of mail being delivered at seven, eight or later.

My knee continues to object to be active but, fortunately, the objection doesn’t get worse as the day goes on. Neither is it worse after a night of sleep. I’m walking my route, not striding.

One of the benefits on being back at the job is that I’m more focussed about my time otherwise. I’m spending less time scrolling the net, more time drawing or wrting.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of an illustration of some werewolves and a badger playing poker. I’m sure it happens all the time.

The design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store.

The design is available on all kinds of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Coming Attractions

I am often working on multiple designs/illustrations/ cartoons simultaneously. I like to be ahead of schedule. I use different tools for different effects so I will move from drawing to drawing using one brush or pen. When I ran out of 11×17 bristol board I concentrated on building up a backlog of concept sketches. These were done on 8,5×11 cardstock. These sketches get converted to bluelines in Photoshop, blown up to fit the larger bristol board and then printed out. Most of the time I will ink directly on the blueline. Sometimes I want a more detailed illustration or I have a lot of corrections. In that case I do a pencil drawing over the blueline, rescan it, make a new blueline and print out that version for inking.

Here are a few of the images I’ve got lined up.