Tag Archives: process

Skook Words (and Pictures) #24

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Fffffrrriiiddddaaaayyyyy.

(And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.)

These Days …

Sarah has been gone for a week now, helping a friend deal with family medical problems. I am a big fan of routines and this has messed up my routines.

I am also aware that a break in routine in important for recognizing which parts of a routine are valuable and which parts are just things you do because you’ve been doing them.

I’m not complaining. I’m observing.

Having a job means that most of my routines are still intact. I get up at the same time. I make breakfast at the same time. I come home at … whatever time I get done. I go to bed at the same time. What’s different so far are my eating and sleeping habits. I’m only cooking for me. I’m not watching any of our shows. Watching shows was a social occasion. Something we did at during dinner. Sleeping is just me turning out all the lights and collapsing.

The cats still wake me up in the middle of the night in order to be fed. They have their routines as well.

The Process

This is the last set of colors for these sketches. I like the results. I can’t claim that the lighting and shadows are accurate and realistic. I’ll have to try the process on a comic story to see whether I like the results there.


They’re Still Here

When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs. Not that many had been discovered. I could probably name most of them. At the time, dinosaurs were thought to be stupid, cold blooded, slow moving reptiles that lived in swamps and became extinct because … no one was really sure why they became extinct. Probably they were just too dumb to live. The mammals showed up and the big dumb lizards decided to just give up and die.

In the decades since I was kid, dinosaurs have evolved. More and more of them have been discovered. There are too many now for me to name. They got faster. More varied. More adaptive. More social. More … feathery. Less dumb. It became clear that they didn’t die out because the mammals out competed them. It took having an asteroid dropped on the earth to wipe them out. And it still failed. Dinosaurs never really went extinct. Sure, the really big ones are gone. But we’re surrounded by their descendants.

Birds are dinosaurs.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The egg.

From a feathered dinosaur.

This design can be found on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

That’s it for me. I hope the next seven days are kind to you. I hope you share that kindness with others, whether they need it or not.

See you next ffffrrrriiidddaaayyyy.

Skook Words (and Pictures) #23

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Friday descends from the heavens like an wine glass pushed off the table by the family cat.

On a good Friday it hits a soft and cushy rug intact.

On a bad Friday it shatters into a thousand pieces and you have to sweep it all up and be careful walking around the table in your bare feet for the next few weeks.

Hello and welcome to the newsletter.

I love my cats but I had to put them in the bedroom and close the door this morning. They wanted attention. I wanted to write. I am a bad human. They will be plotting my demise. They are good cats. Good cats are always plotting someone’s demise.

These Days …

I’ve gotten in more personal art time this week. It’s been quite relaxing. I’ve made a little progress on Mighty Nizz and done a couple of designs for my Redbubble store. I’ll show off the designs (sketches and finals) here in the next few weeks.

My station has hired more carriers so I’ve not been asked to carry as much extra in the last few days. The weather has been varied. One day of rain. Sun and clouds and breezes otherwise.

We’ve been kept busy trying to provide assistance for friends dealing with medical problems in distant places. Mostly it’s been Sarah providing the support while I do my best to support her. Tonight I’ll be putting her on a plane heading southeast so she can help out a couple of those folks in person. I’ll be flying solo for a few weeks.

Well, not exactly solo. There are the cats. And I have friends coming through town. And there’s work. And art. But both our routines will not be routine for a while.

Process

This is the penultimate process post for coloring these sketches. I’m working on streamlining my coloring process. I’m trying to use colors for mood rather than simply coloring things “realistically”. I expect I’ll be working on both these skills until I drop dead.


Out of the Past

I did the illustration below for Worlds of Cthulhu magazine back in 2009. Last week, Adam Crossingham, the former editor, emailed me to ask if he could use the image as the cover for a Miskatonic Repository publication at DriveThruRPG.

I said yes. The current version of the supplement can be purchased here. Since I’m practicing coloring my art I thought I’d take a stab at coloring this image. The result is below. The Miskatonic Repository publications are all PDFs. The great thing about PDFs is that a color version is no more expensive than a black and white one. And you can update a PDF in ways that are impossible with a physical publication. So this will be the new cover for 100 Stat Blocks. I’ll post a link when Adam updates it.
Now I should let the cats out of the bedroom and make some breakfast. It’s going to be a busy day.

Thank you for reading. I hope your day, your week, your current life is giving you an optimal mix of excitement and rest. Remember to touch base with friends. Eat. Hydrate.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #22

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Here we are. The latest Friday with the latest newsletter. I hope your week has gone well. I hope it’s been full of more good times than otherwise.

For me, the last week has felt busier. We’re waiting for the publisher to get back to us on Billi 99. Until that happens (and, hopefully, when it does) there’s nothing for me to do on the book. They sent us some examples of the books they’ve published in the past and, damn, they’re nice packages. So, while waiting is hard, the results will be better than what we would have come up with on our own.

Without Billi in the forefront of my brain I’ve got room again to think of my own art projects. That’s where the busier feeling come from. I’m managed to do a little inking on the next Mighty Nizz story. I posted the Nizz designs to which I’ve added words to my Redbubble shop. While I was there I did some searches of some of my other designs to see where they are showing up. It appears that Redbubble’s search function is broken. Every search I did gave me results that had nothing to do with the tag words I was using. That gives me even more incentive to set up my own dedicated shop.

Process

The next step in coloring these sketches was coloring the figures. Since I’m working monochrome my choices were pretty simple. I know, this doesn’t look much different than last week. Sorry about that.
Next week the complicated work begins.

If Company Should Come

I regularly go back through my computer to see if any of my older illustrations can find new life on schtuff. Back in 2011 I contributed a couple of illustrations to the AKLONOMICON, an anthology of Lovecraftian fiction. Apparently there was a bunch of drama between some of the folks putting the book together and only a few copies got printed. I didn’t get a physical contributor’s copy. I did recently get a new PDF of the book’s contents. I think I received one prior to publication but that copy was left behind two computers ago.

I like both the illustrations I did but, of the two, this one for “If Company Should Come” by Edward Morris works best as a stand alone image. It’s an enigma but it has focus.
Add some color …

And now the enigma can be found on shirts and posters and shower curtains and …

I’ve got other, original, designs on the drawing board. More next week.

Between now and then, live a good life. Be kind when you can. Show up. Brush your teeth. Ignore the internet.

See you in seven!

Skook Words (and Pictures) #21

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‘Tis the Day of Fri. Once again.

Did your week go well?

I certainly hope so. If not, please fill out a complaint form and send it to management. Operators are standing by. Standing by the water cooler that is. They’re nowhere near the phones and they wouldn’t answer if they were. It’s casual Friday. Management is drunk and the operators are halfway there.

(I can’t remember if I’ve ever worked in a place that had a water cooler. Coffee maker, yes. Water cooler … maybe? It’s too early to wrack my memory.)

These Days …

This week started out pretty well. My days off collaborated with the Memorial Day holiday so I ended up with three days off in a row – Sunday through Tuesday.

I did some late birthday celebrating on Sunday. And worked on art. Contracts have not yet been signed with the new publisher for Billi 99 but I’m letting myself work on short projects again. The publisher sent us copies of a few of the books that they’ve done in the past and they are lovely. Waiting for them to get back to us on some details is difficult but they already had projects on their schedule and adding in Billi requires moving things around.

Monday I went to a rally organized by my mail carriers’ union. City carriers are currently working without a contract. Our contract expired on May 20th. We’ll continue to get paid and have all the rights agreed on in the previous contract until the new one takes effect. The rally was to make a public statement that we wanted an end to mandatory overtime and better working conditions. The rally happened in a park in downtown Seattle. I don’t go downtown much. Parking is expensive. It’s full of people. But I went. Numbers matter. Showing up was the least I could do. I joined in chants when expected. I even had a conversation with one of the carriers from my station that I’d never spoke to before. Turns out he’d had two different smash and grabs happen on his route.

Tuesday I worked on art.

On Wednesday I found out that I’d been mandated to work on Tuesday. Apparently five regular carriers, including myself, had been mandated. Management forgot to tell any of us. They put it on the schedule but, as regulars, we already have an expected schedule, so none of us checked the weekly updating one. Ooops. The mail got delivered.

As it got delivered on Wednesday and Thursday. It will get delivered again today. Probably by me. It’s possible that aliens will take me for a joyride between now and clock in time but that’s unlikely. I’m certainly not counting on it.

The Progress

One of the things I worked on during my holiday was coloring this set of sketches. I finished the process on Tuesday. This week I’m posting my base color choices for each set of sketches. I’m coloring this art in monochrome. Ideally each base color suggests an emotion. Ideally. I’ll be posting different stages each week for the next month.

To Sail the Seas Unknown

A couple of years ago I did a couple of supplemental illustrations for Corsairs of Cthulhu, a Call of Cthulhu RPG set in the Golden Age of Piracy. One was a page border –
The other was a general use fill-in illustration. The page border is pretty specific to the book but this crossed swords image seems like it could live on its own on schtuff.

I haven’t added anything to my Redbubble shop in a while so, with time available, I set to work coloring this design.

Voilà!

Available on schtuff!

And that’s it for this week. I need to have some breakfast. And think about delivering mail.

Take care of yourself. Check in on the folks you care about. Make some art. Go for a walk. Pet a cat. Play with a dog. Take a nap.

The world is full of opportunities.

Thank you for reading. See you in seven!

Making Another Face

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According to Wikipedia: The Face first appeared in the Columbia Comics omnibus title Big Shot Comics #1 (May 1940) and continued until issue #62 (January 1946). The Face is radio announcer Tony Trent, who decides to fight crime after having witnessed a murder committed by gangsters disguised as cops. Having no innate superpowers, he instead uses a frightful mask to scare criminals, not unlike Batman. With issue #63, he no longer wears the mask and fights crime as himself until Big Shot #104, the last issue of the series.

Assuming that The Face appeared in every issue, that means there were at least 62 stories about the character. I find that mystifying. And therefore fascinating. I did an illustration a while back that featured The Face. I took some liberties with the character’s design and made his mask uglier than its original design. I took liberties again with this new version.

Two Hundred Years Young

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Frankenstein or A Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley was published in 1818 – two hundred years ago. I have great affection for Victor’s poor creation. All he wanted was to be loved. All he got was rejection and hatred. Of course he was cranky.

In the novel Shelley mostly skirts over Frankenstein’s process for creating his creature. Here’s a gif of my process of creating this portrait of the poor guy.