Tag Archives: process gif

Skook Words (and Pictures) #26

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This week, today, we’ll start with the pictures. It’s a process GIF. I like making process GIFs. I like watching process GIFs.

You’re welcome.

These Days …

Sometime early on Monday morning, my friend Rae died. I got the news as a text from her brother at 7:49 am PST. I’d been at work for a little less than an hour.

The news was expected, even, sadly, honestly, a little welcome. She’d been fighting pancreatic cancer. She’d been in hospice since early April. The last week she’d been mostly unconscious due to pain relievers. I’m told she hadn’t eaten or drank anything for that week.

The text was brief, ending with three words: “no more pain”.

Pain had robbed her of so many things. Her enjoyment of food. She loved to eat. She loved trying new flavors, new cuisines. The last few months she could barely stand to eat and had no guarantee that anything that went down wouldn’t come back up.

Pain made walking impossible without help. Pain made her unable to use her clever hands – hands that had mastered pottery, beading, jewelry making and so much else. No more pain was good news. No more Rae? Painful news.

I finished sorting my route. I loaded my truck. I did my job. Throughout the day I texted the news to the people I knew that I didn’t think her brother knew. I set my grief aside.

Tuesday was the Fourth of July. A postal holiday. Sarah is still in Mississippi helping a friend deal with family medical problems so I had the house to myself. That would have been a perfect opportunity to let myself feel grief. I did chores. I wrote a little more of my memorial of Rae. A friend had invited me to hang out with her family if I was up to it. I didn’t really feel up to it but hanging around the house by myself wasn’t doing me any favors. I went and had a great time.

Wednesday I was back at work. We were down 21 routes so I carried extra. It was a long day. Rae’s obituary was published in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. You can read it here.

Thursday was a short work day. That is, I only worked the designated 8.5 hours. At this point my grief is set well back. I know it’s there but it will take an effort to get to it. The issues that Sarah is dealing with take precedence. I can have an effect there if only by listening to her talk about what she’s managing. Rae’s obituary didn’t mention a memorial service. I’m not in position to go if there was one.

So here I am this Friday morning. There’s a draft of memorial for Rae waiting for me. Writing it is a reminder that I don’t have a great memory. Maybe that’s biological. Maybe I’ve just never practiced remembering things enough to have good memory muscles. There’s so much I’ve forgotten. In talking with friends these last few weeks there’s a lot that I don’t think I knew. She was always in motion. She made friends wherever she went. I don’t know most of them. That obituary is the facts with a limited word count. It’s a glimpse of the person I knew. I want to read a good memorial of her. I want the memory of her to be available. I want someone else to do the work. I can’t wait for that to happen.

Grief is love that no longer has a place to go. I read that idea recently and it fits.

Thank you for reading my ramblings this week. I hope you are well and that the summer heat is bearable where you are. See you in seven.

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #25

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Some Fridays arrive heavily. Today is one of those.

I’d already set up part of this newsletter, the parts with the art and my comments about it, earlier in the week so I’ll lead with that.

A Quiet Seaside Town

If you’re read H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” or have played enough Call of Cthulhu then you get the joke. Explaining it won’t make it funny.


The colors evolved quite a bit as I worked on this design. I originally went with representative colors but that didn’t come across as either funny or creepy enough.

I put a green layer over the image but that didn’t improve anything.

I finally decided that simpler was better and a monochrome in conjunction with the color of the text worked best.

This design is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Process GIF

I like making GIFs. I like posting GIFs. If you thought I was done sharing sharing those sketches – sorry. I made GIFs for all of them. Here’s the first one. Another will be post each week until I run out.

These Days …

So.

Yeah.

A dear friend of mine will be gone soon. She’s been in hospice since April. Sarah used to talk to her every day. I talked to her as often as I could. I texted her every night. She hasn’t responded in a week. I’m not grieving yet but when she goes I know it’s going to hit. I can’t talk to her anymore. I’m told she’s mostly unconscious. Strong pain medications to handle strong pain. I’m writing down my memories of her and what she means to me. If I write something coherent, I will share it here. I know that many of y’all knew her.

Be good to those you love. We’re all just passing through.

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 WiP #104

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Merry Merry!

Christmas Eve is tomorrow. I’ll be out in the cold and rain (we got snow earlier in the week but none is predicted for this weekend) delivering mail. And presents! Even if the boxes in my truck clearly cat litter and dog food I’m going to assume that they are gifts for someone.

Postal carriers get Christmas Day off. We’ll open presents in the morning and then I’ll be helping Sarah cook and clean in preparation for guests.

Monday I’ll be back at work. I’m expecting the 26th to be as busy as any day before Christmas. I expect we’ll be continuing to start at 6 am until the New Year.

I’ve been getting up at my usual time to write. It’s a habit I want to maintain. I’ve gotten less actual writing done than I’d like but something is better than nothing.

I’ve gotten even less artwork done. The cat has decided that I need to play with him after work and he’s happy to walk on my drawing table until I do so. It’s hard to ink and shoo away a demanding feline at the same time.

I’m making plans for 2023. I’ll write about those next week. If my brain lets me.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF harkens back to a simpler holiday – Halloween. Or perhaps just the general fall season. Whatever the case, these ladies know how to get around.

This design is available on:
A mug in my Zazzle store.
All sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

That’s it for this week. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope yours is as merry and joyous as you need it to be. If you just have the day off, celebrate something!

Thank you for reading. See you in seven!

Skook WiP #102

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Greetings from the Pacific Northwest!

I’ve been feeling kinda brain dead the last few mornings. I get up, pour myself a mug of coffee and stagger down the hall to my studio. I sit at my computer and stare at the screen for a bit. Spending November writing on Daughter of Spiders was great for building the habit of writing each day. Writing instead of scrolling my social media feeds. A bunch of bad writing at least feels like I’ve made an effort. Social media scrolling can be fun and I enjoy snarking with folks but I rarely feel like I’ve accomplished anything.

I’ve gotten a bit stalled on the actual story of Daughter so I’ve been spending some time writing background i.e. world building. How much of it will end up in the story? I’ll know when I write more of the story I guess.

This morning I’m writing to y’all.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features a meeting on the road, travelers exchanging stories and giving directions.

This design can be found:
On a mug in my Zazzle store
On a variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store

Mighty Nizz

The last page of the first Mighty Nizz comic posted on Wednesday. Below is what the art looked like when I scanned it into Photoshop. Go here to see what the final art looks like.

I’m currently inking the next Nizz story. It’s eighteen pages. I work on art in the evenings after work and as I have time on the days that the post office isn’t using my body to shlep around mail. I’m expecting to be able to post the first page on February 1st. I prefer to have the whole story finished before I show off any of it.

Thank you for reading. The nights are getting longer. Stay warm. Have some hot chocolate. Or eggnog. Toast to the good days and laugh at the bad.

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #101

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Welcome back!

These Days

It’s dark. Dark when I’m writing this. Dark when I go to work at USPS. Getting dark again when I finish my deliveries. We even had some dustings of snow. I suspect that it’s winter.

It’s the 2nd of December. I kinda sorta participated in National Novel Writing Month in November by expanding Daughter of Spiders. When I first thought of adding to Daughter  I’d planned to just be making the original 2013 posts a bit longer and more detailed. They were all very short – hints at stories rather than stories themselves. Once I started writing? I found myself turning those short memoir excerpts into complete chapters. No, I didn’t write 50,000 words. I didn’t expect to. I haven’t added up what I did write. I’d rather not know just yet. I did find that, if I continue expanding each post in the same way, I’ll probably write at least 400,00 words. That likely means that my intention of posting a new version of Daughter, complete with new illustrations, in 2025 is probably optimistic.

In order to make time to write I took myself off all my social media. I’m only on a few platforms – Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. Staying off Twitter was easy. I haven’t posted anything myself in years. I get links to tweets emailed to me by Twitter in hopes of getting me to come to the site. Last month I just deleted the emails without opening them. Tumblr and Facebook took a little more effort to ignore. I see a lot of artwork that I like and am inspired by on Tumblr. I like wishing people happy birthday and snarking on folks’ posts on Facebook. I used to wake up by drinking coffee and scrolling my feeds. In November I drank coffee and wrote. By the time I had to make breakfast and get in my uniform I … had feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment from … well … accomplishing something. Having accomplished something at day’s beginning makes spending 9+ hours delivering marketing and propaganda (and parcels) a lot easier. So, while I’m not committing to a strict fast of social media, I am going to maintain the habit of just writing in the mornings.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features Medusa tending to some of her permanent guests. I like Medusa. She’s a sympathetic monster, one of many of the victims of the Greek gods.

This design can be found –
On a mug in my Zazzle store
On a variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store

Mighty Nizz

Below is the scan of the physical art for the 9th page of the first Mighty Nizz comic. The final version of the page can be read at the site.

I’ve finished the pencils for the next Mighty Nizz story. Inking, shading and coloring will take a while but they are in progress. I prefer to have a whole story finished before posting the first page. That’s likely to be sometime in January or February. I’ll keep you updated.

‘Tis the Season

Christmas is coming up. If you know someone that you think would like my illustrations on schtuff, now is the time to order that schtuff. Heck, if you’d like a present for yourself, go for it! The sooner the better. Give the folks at Zazzle or Redbubble time to make it and send it.

I’ll see you next week.

Take care. Take flight!

Skook WiP #98

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It’s 11/11/22. It’s the 11th day of the 11th month. The war to end all wars ended today back in 1918.

Yeah. No comment.

I’m off social media and putting my best efforts into updating Daughter of Spiders as my project for NaNoWriMo. Any internet use has to be for historical research for the story. No current news. No gossip. No reviews of old b-movies.

Mugshots

This month’s process GIF features a girl and her dragon. Or perhaps a dragon and her girl. Or maybe the tragic death of a lollypop. It’s all a matter of perspective.

It’s available as:
A mug in my Zazzle store
A lot of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The latest page of the first Mighty Nizz story is up. The scan of the original art is below. The final colored version can be seen at MightyNizz.com.

Versus

Back in October I was commissioned to do a portrait of someone, a friend of a friend. The initial suggestion was to portray the fellow taking out a giant bug.
The commissioner also thought it might be fun to portray his friend as Katsuki Bakugo (a character from the anime My Hero Academia) fighting Meruem (a character from the anime Hunter x Hunter).
My client gave me the choice of depicting either scenario. I sent him sketches for both and asked him to choose his favorite. He went with the anime version.
I worked up pencils for the portrait. I’m not familiar with either of the animes from which these characters originate so I had to do some research to get their details right. I think I did fairly well.

Once I got approval on the pencils I moved on to inks and then spot blacks and shading.
Below is the final version. I had to be a little more careful with this project than with illustrations that are intended for print. I can fix errors on those pieces digitally. The physical art for this one went to the client so it had to be as clean and mistake free as possible.
That’s it for this week.

Take care. Take charge. Take flight.

See you next Friday!

Skook WiP #97

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How are you doing? Are you getting enough to eat? Getting enough rest? Did you vote?

It’s the fourth day of November. That means I’m four days into expanding Briar Rose Taylor’s memoirs. I’m not expecting to get the 50,000 words written necessary to turn Daughter of Spiders into a novel. I’m using National Novel Writing Month as a prompt to get work done now that otherwise I’d do … someday. I’m putting in at least an hour first thing in the morning before breakfast, chores and then doing time at USPS. In the evenings I’m having dinner, hanging out with Sarah and illustrating the next Mighty Nizz story. I’m taking a break from social media. I’m writing the bulk of all of November’s newsletters in October and doing quick additions and edits before they actually post.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features a space station with infinite living space. Infinite corridors anyway. For infinite running from infinitely hungry aliens.

This design is available on:
A mug at my Zazzle store
All kinds of schtuff at my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The latest page of the first Mighty Nizz story is live at MightyNizz.com. A scan of the physical art is below. The final, color version of this page can be seen at the website.

A New Mouse

Part of the advantage of print on demand is that I can change the designs if I think of ways to improve them and I’m not stuck with a bunch of stock I don’t want to sell. I recently started wearing a t-shirt with the image below emblazoned on it. At the end of the first day I thought of a way to improve the design.
Below is the new version. It’s available on all sorts of stuff in my Redbubble store. Both the original (because it looks better on some products than the update) and the new version are available in my Zazzle store.
Have a great week!

See you in seven!

Skook WiP #95

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Yesterday was Thursday. That means today is …
Newsletter Day!

These Days …

Last week we went to Mississippi. I’m supposed to schedule my vacations at the beginning of each year. That week wasn’t scheduled. We had friends who decided to get married after all my vacation time had been nailed down. All the slots last week were already taken. Fortunately I was able to get one of the other carriers to give up her vacation time so I could use it.

Monday and Friday were both spent traveling. Monday involved getting to the airport. Going through security. Waiting around. Sitting on a cramped plane. Trekking across the next airport from our arrival gate to our next departure gate. More sitting on another, smaller cramped plane. Getting a rental car. Getting to the hotel. Friday was basically the reverse. The folks who work at the airport and on the planes were generally kind, friendly and helpful. The people who run the airline industry and profit from it are horrible monsters who deserve nothing but contempt. I’d rant more but I’ve already given them two days of my life.

Our time in Mississippi, Tuesday to Thursday, was quite pleasant. We’ve known the bride for decades, me since high school, Sarah since the beginning of this century. We met the groom on Tuesday and, thankfully, liked him and enjoyed his company quite a lot. We’ve been considering moving to Mississippi when I retire (living in Seattle gets more cost prohibitive every year) so we were also doing a little exploring when we weren’t hanging out with our friends.

The wedding on Wednesday evening was small. I performed the ceremony. The bride and groom wrote their own vows. They’d intended to have it outdoors in their backyard (they have five acres) but, after days of sunshine, a storm had rolled in, so we did it in their living room.

Thursday Sarah and I did some more exploring in the morning and hung out with our friends in the afternoon. We talked. We cooked. We listened to old records. We ate. It was very good.

This week has been one of my scheduled vacations. As is traditional, we haven’t gone anywhere. We just hang out, I do some art and spread out the chores that I would normally be trying to stuff into my evenings and single days off.

Process Writing

David Mann has written a process post about the comic I illustrated. Follow the link to read all about it.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a trio of faces. Mugs for mugs. Or whatever.
Available on:
A mug in my Zazzle store
A variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The third page of the first Mighty Nizz comic is live at her website. Below is the scan of the original art. Follow the link to see the page in color.

Sketches

I do a lot of sketches. Most of them are a patchwork of faces and partial figures and random things. This week I’ve been doing some sketches with the idea of depicting full figures in relation to each other. I liked the way these turned out so I’m sharing them here.
NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. I usually forget about it until I see someone posting about it early in November. Life is too busy for me to play catch up so, at that point, I figure it’s too late for me to participate. “Maybe next year,” I tell myself.

This year, on October 15th, Facebook tossed one of those historic “Maybe next year” posts into my reminders feed. That’s an early enough notice for me to think about whether I could join in with any success. NaNoWriMo considers a novel to be about 50,000 words. 50,000 words divided by 30 days is about 1700 words a day. A double spaced manuscript is about 250-300 words a page so I’d need to average about five and a half pages a day.

Given the other things I am responsible for and want to accomplish, I don’t think I could succeed at writing a novel.

Except.

I can use NaNoWriMo as a prompt to make progress on updating one of my earlier projects.

Daughter of Spiders is an illustration/writing project that I posted here daily in 2013. Back in (I think) 2010 I’d had the idea that it would be fun to do a portrait of every version of the Frankenstein Monster. I thought it would give me subject matter to post here. Then I thought of adding portraits of monsters/creatures that were take offs of the Monster, mostly from B-movies. And then I thought it would be fun to do portraits of other monsters from B-movies. And, for me, every picture tells a story, I started thinking of a story that would connect all those portraits. And that led me to invent some characters and scenarios and an overarching mythology to tie things together. It became something very large, featuring illustrations of beings inspired by pulp fiction, horror movies, fairy tales and … stuff.

Originally I planned to start posting in 2011. As the project got more complicated I pushed the start date to 2012. I finally started posting on January 1st, 2013. Each illustration was accompanied by a short “excerpt” from Briar Rose Taylor’s memoirs.

Every once in a while I’ve thought about expanding those excerpts and doing new illustrations. This last Wednesday I read through the whole project. For a moment I thought about trying to put out a new version starting in 2023 – ten years since the first version was posted! Cool!

Dumb. 2023 is set aside for the Mighty Nizz.

But I did decide that I will do a revision and expansion. At the moment I’m thinking I could be ready to post the new version in 2024 but I’ll be okay if I can’t do it until 2025.

Skookworks.com is already a massive website. Rather than create 365 new posts I’ll be pulling the original posts, expanding them and reposting them with new illustrations in 2024 (or 2025). If you’ve never read the original series you have until November 1st to do so. Start here. Click on “next” at the top right of the post to go to the next installment.

And that’s it for this week.

May the next seven days treat you well!

Skook WiP #94

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Greetings from Sunday past!

We’re going to Mississippi for a wedding. Of course, by the time you read this we’ll be on our way back from that wedding. No doubt our housemate will have taken advantage of our absence to throw wild parties and not do the dishes for days at a time.

Given that I haven’t lived this week yet I don’t have much to write about so I’ll keep it short.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a few young dudes hanging out and doing young dude stuff.

This design can be found on
A mug in my Zazzle store.
All sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The second page of the first Mighty Nizz story should be available to read at the Mighty Nizz website. If not I’ll fix that tomorrow.

Below is what that page looked like when I scanned it into my computer. For the colored version, follow the link above.
I hope your week was a good one! Thank you for reading.

See you in seven!