Skook WiP #95

Posted on October 21, 2022 by skook

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 #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.

That’s it for this week.

Take care of yourself. Eat right and eat well. Enjoy yourself when you can.

Cheers!

Skook WiP #58

Posted on February 4, 2022 by skook

Good morning! I hope you’re doing well. It’s Friday and this is the newsletter.

These Days

Today is the first day of one of my vacations. I have a lot of complaints about working for the Post Office but the job has its advantages. We get paid days off, both sick days and vacation days. I didn’t use a lot of the vacation days during my first few years at the job so I’ve got a good stash of them. All unused sick days roll over from one year to the next. Vacation days roll over as well but only up to a point. Eventually you start to lose the days you don’t use. This year I’ve scheduled three weeks – this one that starts today, another one in the summer and a third in the fall. I’ll primarily use the time to do art and visit with friends. Given that there’s still a frikkin’ pandemic going on I’ll be doing more art than hanging out.

The longer I work for the PO the more vacation days become available and the more I will take. This is one of the benefits of having a union job. Yay unions!

Mugshots

This week’s process gif is of a couple of happy dragons. These critters are modeled on the Eastern version of a dragon. I like dragons in general but I have an extra fondness for the Chinese version. They’re more likely to share a cup of tea with you than set you aflame.

Dragons come in a variety of colors so I did a second version in red and green.

These designs are available on mugs in my Zazzle shop and lots of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Coming Attractions

I do most of my preliminary sketches on 8 1/2 by 11 cardstock. I scan them into my computer and covert the art to a blueline drawing, blow it up and then print it out on 11×17 bristol board for inking. Last week I ran out of bristol board and the local art supply shop didn’t have any available in my preferred size. I’ve got a new supply headed my way by slow FedEx but until it arrives I’ve been getting new designs sketched up on the cardstock. Here is a sample of them.

I hope your week goes well. Take care of yourself and those whose company you enjoy. Thank you for reading!

Preview Sketches

Posted on February 5, 2017 by skook

Here are some of the sketches I plan to turn into colored illustrations over the next few months. No doubt I will get distracted and work up new sketches before all of these get completed. I’ve also started work on a graphic novel commission that I expect will take up most of the time that isn’t currently filled by my day job. This week I’m just posting these previews and a few other, older illustrations that haven’t made it to this site yet. There may be some weeks where I don’t post. Hopefully not but …

Sketches Found While Looking For Other Things

Posted on November 22, 2015 by skook

Most of the drawings that I’ve posted this month were done in early 2015. Today’s entries are from (I think) 2013. All drawings are practice for the next one but I do some with a specific purpose. I’m not sure for what purpose these were done however. I found them in one of my computer files while looking for other images. I’m guessing that I was trying out a new pen. And, possibly, seeing how much I could improve in the inking process.