Tag Archives: Skook WIP

Skook WiP #74

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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 #72

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Good Morning! Good Afternoon! Good Evening! (Have I covered all the possibilities?)

It’s Friday the 13th! Aren’t we lucky?

These Days …

Oh bleah. My cataract surgery has been delayed again. My fault. My sister came by to pick me up and take me to surgery. She brought cookies that she baked in her new oven. I ate two bites before I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to eat for at least 7 hours prior to surgery. We went to the surgery center. We waited. I was called in an hour late. They asked if I had anything to eat in the 7 hours. I told the truth. I got rescheduled until the 24th. We came home and had the lasagna that I had made for dinner. We had cookies and ice cream for dessert.

We helped our housemate move at the beginning of the month and we’ve been rearranging the apartment to make it available and welcoming for another, as yet unfound, housemate. This dovetails well with my book reduction project. We’re working to get all of our stuff into specific rooms and I’m working to get my book collection consolidated to three large bookshelves.

In addition to the book collection I’ve got a comic collection. I reduced it once when my mother came up from Californina to live with us in her later years. My brother kindly shipped up the boxes of Chosen Comics. I need to go through those boxes and decide what to continue to horde.

That’s actually kind of easy. There are places where I might rehome the comics I’m not keeping. More problematic – what do I do with Misspent Youths? When Brave New Words shut down the publisher sent me all the copies of the comic that he had in storage. Issue #1 had sold out so the stacks consist of issues #2-5. I don’t need to sell them. I’d be happy to give them away to anyone who wanted them but the audience is kind of limited. It’s not a book for kids. It’s black and white, the art is crude and some of it is (purposely) offensive. I could recycle them. But …

That’s a decision to put off for another day. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of teddy bears. Happy multicolored teddy bears who want to hug and squeeze you!

These folks are, as usual, available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Also

This second design happened mostly by accident. I needed to go into work early one day – not for work but because I’d needed to do something else earlier in the neighborhood. I wanted to do something more useful than scrolling on my phone so I sat in the breakroom and sketched out the pattern above. After work that afternoon I scanned it into Photoshop and turned it into the design below.

I like the results. It fits nicely on schtuff that my illustrations usually don’t.

TGIF, happy Saturday and a good rest of the week.

Cheers!

Skook WiP #67

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TGIF! or How Did the Week Go By So Fast?

Welcome to the 67th issue of the Skook Works in Progress Newsletter. Thank you for reading. Feel free to share/forward it with anyone who you think would enjoy it.

These Days …

I’ve started another round of physical therapy. The goal isn’t so much to fix my knee (that requires surgery and it’s not a fix so much as an adjustment) as it is to make the rest of my body strong and limber enough to compensate for the weakness of the knee. My body is stiff and tense. This shouldn’t be news to me. I am generally tense. So now I have a bunch of exercises to do make my muscles stretch. Nothing for my mind. It gets to stay tense.

Upcoming – Dentist. Cataract surgeries. More sorting of books and comics. And we’re probably going to be getting a new housemate. The current one is up for an apartment across town. If she gets it we’ll want someone else in the other room.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a floating landscape. The surreal landscapes of Roger Dean were an inspiration when I was young. THis is my take on a similar subject.

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

The Sum of His Parts

The fellow below is the first of my designs that has gotten tagged by Redbubble’s fan art partner program. Redbubble has made deals with various media companies to allow folks to make and sell designs based on various IPs – mostly movies and tv shows. I haven’t made any designs for the program. I definitely haven’t submitted any designs for it. And yet something in RB’s submission algorithms decided that it needed to check with one of the “partners” before the design was posted.

It took a few back and forth emails before someone at RB was willing to tell me that the IP in question was Penny Dreadful. I liked Penny Dreadful. It was fun mashup of various Gothic Horror characters. Most of those characters are in the public domain. None of them are cartoon bunnies.

The Penny Dreadful folks rightly told RB that the design didn’t fit their IP and that it was okay that I could sell it.

A few of my other designs have since been held up while a human at RB checked with a human at some media company. It’s been both funny and annoying. I don’t do much fan art. If I did I wouldn’t try to sell it in one of my stores. Part of the reason is this – I like the freedom to do what I want with the images I’ve created.

Complain, complain.

That’s it for me this week.

How are you?

Skook WiP #66

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Days to Come

It feels odd and a little presumptuous to have arrived in April and to already be making plans for January. But if we don’t make plans life will just happen to us. And yes, life will just happen to us whether we make plans or not. Just letting life happen can be fun. I recommend it. Still, I have found that I get a lot of satisfaction from following through on plans. SInce there are some specific projects I’d like to have completed in the next few years, plans are necessary.

This week I sketched out the last of the fifty-two mug designs I plan to feature in this newsletter. I’ll post scans of the sketches in a future issue. Turning those sketches into finished designs will take a few months. That will complete one of my plans, artprojectwise, for 2022. I will then have more than 200 designs in my online stores. That seems like a good stock of images.  I’ll continue to create designs. I’m having fun! But, once I’ve completed these “mugshots” I’ll be refocusing.

I really started thinking about the time I have available once I started thinking about retirement and the necessity of reducing our possessions so we could easily move somewhere more affordable. I figure I’ve got twenty years of productivity left. That’s optimistic. For the next five to ten years I’ll still be delivering mail. I don’t get a lot of creative work done while I’m delivering a route.

You may have noticed four links in the banner of this website –
Oz Squad
Mighty Nizz
Kaiju Weather
The Witch Engines

These are the projects I’ll be focusing on once I finish the mugshots. They are all comics. Mighty Nizz will get the first attention. It’s the most fluid of the projects. THe stories we’ve currently got planned are shorter and working on them will let me gage how much time doing a comic page currently takes.

Kaiju Weather is a graphic novel. If all goes well we might have it completed in five years.

The Witch Engines is a series of graphic novels. I’m sure I’ll do outlines and sketching and writing and other preliminary work on it before we finish Kaiju Weather but I want Kaiju Wather completed before I draw any actual comics pages.

Oz Squad is … Sigh. I’ve made so many announcements about what I would do, was doing, thought I should do, with it over the years that I’m not going to jinx it by making another one. And, as much as I love the project, it’s ultimately Steve Ahlquist’s baby. I maintain the website and do occasional illustrations to make sure that the IP is still active. If Steve finds another collaborator or licenses it to some toy company or television production company or book publishing house or … something … That’s okay.

And maybe I’m jinxing all thses projects by writing about them now. I don’t actually think the universe works that way. “Man plans, God laughs” is a reminder that every plan should include the likelihood of failure. I’m writing about these projects now for my own focus. Small projects get done with a little effort. Large projects get done with a little effort applied continously over a long period of time. And these projects – these big projects are distillations of joy and fascination and wonder. My time (all of time) is limited. We spend a lot of time doing what we have to do for survival. Doing things for the joy and satisfaction of it in addition to doing things for the sake of survival makes surviving worthwhile.

These Days

Delivering mail. Working on art. Doing chores. Spending time with Sarah. Negotiating beauracies. Sorting books and comics.

That’s been my week. I hope your week has been more – I was going to write “interesting” but that’s become associated with a (probably mythical) Chinese curse – entertaining.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is a glimpse of life on Mars. The place is a little dusty but a lot of folks call it home.

This design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store.
It’s available on a lot of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Highly Unlikely

Above is the latest addition to my collection of greeting card designs in my Zazzle store. Illustration on the front. Blank on the inside so it can be used for any occasion.

And that’s it for this week. I hope your plans are going well and that whatever life is happening to you is happening in a gentle way.

See you next Friday!

Skook WiP #65

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Sarah and I usually watch movies and series together while we eat dinner (after work) or as hangout time (on my days off). For those viewings we try to find something that engages us both. When I’m working on art she will watch something that primarily interests her. Since we’re in the same room I end up listening to the show. She was recently rewatching Downton Abby and I caught a bit of dialogue between a couple of the upper class women. They were discussing the suitability of a suitor, a man who worked(!) as a lawyer(!). He said something about having weekends to do things around the estate. One of the women asked the other, “What’s a weekend?”

It’s amazing what can be said about a culture and about a character’s place in the culture with just a few words.

Given that you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a weekend coming up. Hopefully you’ll be able to spend some of it doing things that give you joy and satisfaction.

These Days

Today is the fifth day of my six day Long Week. Mail and, especially, the parcels have/has been lighter than in recent months. Recent years actually. That’s given me time to think about and start cleanin up my route. I’m emptying out the mailboxes that haven’t been collected in weeks and putting VACANT cards in them. Ideally this means that whoever fills in for me on my days off will not deliver any more mail to that box. Sometimes it works. Much of the time mail gets delivered anyway and I have to pull out it the next time I’m working.

I’m also updating names in the cluster box units so a substitute carrier can know which box to deliver to if the address on the letter doesn’t have the unit number. I haven’t done that in far too long.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a Horned King design. At least, that’s what I think it is. You may have your own story about it.

Available on a mug in my Zazzle store.
Available on all sorts of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

And Also …

I’ve added another design to the collection of blank greeting cards in my Zazzle store. I sometimes wonder if these cards would be more salable if they had words in them and were tied to specific occasions. I like blank greeting cards myself but i can understand how having something already written in a card can make it more appealing to a lot of folks. A few printed words can act as a writing prompt for a more personal message. I’ll have to try that with some of the cards and see if that makes a difference.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading. I hope life in your part of the universe is going well.

See you next week!

Skook WiP #63

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Huzzah!

You’re back! I’m back! Let’s get started.

These Days …

My postal truck broke down back at the beginning of November. It sat in the station’s parking lot for about a month before vehicle maintenance took it away. I got injured in early December and spent most of the month at home so I didn’t really notice that the truck didn’t come back. Once I was working again I noticed. And noticed. Every day I’d come in to work, check the board to see which routes were being broken up that day and then go looking for the keys to the truck assigned to one of those routes. I’d ask the supervisors if they could check on my vehicle’s status. They’d promise to do so. And maybe they would try. More likely the many other things that would immediately demand their attention would push my request out of their mind.

On Tuesday, mostly as a joke, I filled out a repair ticket for my vehicle. In the box asking for a description of the problem I wrote “Vehicle missing for four months.” Perhaps the incantation created by properly filled out paperwork had an effect because I got a call from the supervisor later in the day. He’d found my truck. Vehicle maintenance had farmed out replacing the engine to the Pep Boys. And then … forgot about it. The vehicle had been sitting at a Pep Boys somewhere for weeks.

It was sitting in the station parking lot when I finished my route.

Yay!

Except.

On Wednesday, when I went to check the vehicle and make sure all its systems worked, I discovered that the cargo bay was half filled with a huge plastic shipping container. A huge, very heavy, shipping container. Whoever had returned the truck had failed to remove the old engine from the back of the truck. They might not even have noticed it was there.

Fortunately our parcel volumes have been light of late so I was able to get all my deliveries into the truck. Unfortunately, halfway through the day the right front tire started losing air. Standard procedure would be for me to call a supervisor and have another truck brought out to me. That sort of thing usually meant a half an hour wait when we were properly staffed. These days? I just drove the truck back to the station, filled out a new repair ticket, and switched out the mail into one of the currently unused vehicles sitting in the lot. By the time I was done the tire was completely flat.

I had Thursday off.

Today I’ll go into work and maybe I’ll have a vehicle that works with a cargo bay that isn’t being used to store an engine block.

Maybe.

Mugshots

This week’s mug design process GIF is a sort of Balinese demon mask as interpretted by Jack Kirby while channelling Phillipe Druillet. Kinda.

You can find this happy face on a mug in my Zazzle store and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Also

My plan is to do a new mug design a weekfor the year – 52 for 2022. That won’t take up all my time. I’m also doing a variety of more general and more specific designs. The one bellow is one of my Happy Monster blank greeting cards.

It’s currently available only in my Zazzle store.

I hope your week goes well. If you have a weekend, I hope it is as relazing or as exciting as you need it to be. If weekends are not part of your schedule, I hope you find joy in whatever you’re spending your time.

Thank you for letting me visit. See you next week!

Skook WiP #62

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Greetings!

Today is not the Apocalypse. It might feel like it but it’s not. At least, it’s not the one pop culture keeps insisting that it is.

From Wikipedia:
Apocalypse has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.[7] It has been defined by John J Collins as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in that it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”[15] Collins later refined his definition by adding that apocalypse “is intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority.”[15]

The divine sends messages. Whether we get them depends on whether we’re tuned to listen.

These Days ...

Wake up around 3 am. Drink two cups of coffee while internet scrolling/uploading designs/completing designs in Photoshop/doing marketing stuff. Wake up the house. Make and eat breakfast. Get into the uniform. Drive to work. Sort mail. Deliver mail. Have lunch. Go back to delivering mail. Return to the station and sort the undeliverable mail. Shop on the way home. Have dinner while watching something entertaining. Work on art. Get ready for bed. Sleep.

Repeat.

There are variations each day. I work on different designs. We have different meals. On days off I cook or spend more time on art or we run errands together. There are doctor visits and trips to Costco and. lately, trips to sell books at Half Price Books.

The routine could be comforting. It could be boring. It’s both. Of course. Life is rarely just one thing or another.

I think about Apocalypses regularly because our culture seems to be obsessed with them. Mostly it seems to be obsessed with the end of the world version. Pop culture has been feeding us different varieties of doom for decades. At least one of our dominant religions thrives on reminding us that we are in the End Times. The pandemic continues. Russia invades Ukraine. The song says, “No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom”.

But …

People still have children. People still make plans. Start businesses. Go out in the sun. Fall in love. Engage in life as if life will go on. That’s one of the harder things for me pay attention to when I’m feeling/thinking like I’m stuck. Life is not black and white, either/or, good/bad. It’s a mix. It’s a continuum. Once upon a time, realizing this was an epiphany. Now it’s something of which I have to remind myself.

Stories of doom and hubris and failure and survival are valuable. They’re also easy. A story, we are told, requires conflict. It’s not a story unless someone is disagreeing with someone else. Nonsense. I do think we need more stories of cooperation and caring and carrying on. We model ourselves on what we can see. We follow the examples we are shown. Or we resist them. Or, most often, we do a little of both.

What am I talking about?

Mostly I’m reminding myself, again, that life is complicated. The thoughts that my brain feeds my consciousness are only as good as the inputs my brain is getting. If most of what l I’m seeing is tedious doom then most of my thoughts will circle around that doom. Different perspectives are needed. It might be time to see the world as a cat does. Or a bird. Or a tree. Or as another human does. Preferable a human who isn’t stuck in the same spiral I am.

The divine sends messages. “We are complicated. Our lessons are complicated. Be at peace with complication. Remember to dance.”

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features two things everyone loves – pirates and pandas. I’d like to think that I was the first person to think of combining these two flavors but, after I’d finished this design I took a look online and, wow, there are a lot of other versions of the idea. I do like my version the best.

This design is available on mugs in my Zazzle store and all sort of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Colors Out of Space

Below are the second and third illustrations I did as page fillers for Midnight Echo #6. The black and white version is what appeared in the magazine. The color version are new and can found on schtuff in my stores.

That’s it for this week.

May your apocalypse be epiphany.

May you find joy in complexity.

Remember to dance.

Skook WiP #61

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Greetings! Salutations! Hello!

Another Friday. Another collection of words and images delivered to your inbox. Or experienced at my regular website. Either way, thank you taking the time to read.

These Days

I had a lucky confluence of scheduling so I ended up with three days “off” in a row. Sundays are days off for regular carriers, Monday was a federal holiday, and Tuesday was my scheduled day off this week. I put off in quotation marks because it was a busy three days. We’re in the process of planning for retirement and preparing to move to a smaller apartment. I’m not elligible for retirement for a few years and we don’t intend to move this year but we’re getting ourselves as ready as we can for both. And both situations probably mean relocating. Seattle is an expensive city. We love our current apartment and we get along great with our landlord so I’m hoping we can manage to stay here until I do actually retire. A move, however, will come. When it does I want it to be simple. That means having a minimum of stuff to move.

Our stuff is mostly my stuff. Books. Magazines. Comics. Artwork. Right now we’re expecting the art to move with us. The books, magazines, and comics? Some of it will come. Most of it is being sorted for other destinations. I’m starting with the books because they’re already out on shelves and therefore easier to sort. The process of sorting the books involves a lot of detachment on my part. I love books. I’ve loved having a big library. I’ve also been expecting to need to rehome most of the library at some point. I’d rather do it myself than leave it for someone else.I took nine boxes to Half Price Books on Monday and another nine on Tuesday. Nine boxes is their limit for a drop in sale.

I’ve worked at both Half Price Books and Powells Books so I have low expectations about what I will be paid for the books. If I wanted to get the “full value” of a book I’d need to set up an ebay shop and sell it directly to a customer. That’s an investment of time that I’m not willing to put in. With the pandemic and booming online sales there’s a better chance that what I bring to HPB will find another home. When I worked at HPB back in the 20th Century they didn’t have a computerized inventory. The only way to know if a book was in the store was to look on the shelf. The only way to know if a book was in another HPB was call that store. Estimating what to pay for book was as much art as science.

Currently HPB has their entire inventory of all their books in all their stores online and searchable. I have friends who still work for the company so I know a bit about how they do things now. When one of their employees buys books their offer is generated by the computer based on inventory and previous sales. They still have to look up weird one off stuff but there’s a lot less art and guesstimating.

The closest HPB to our place is in Southcenter. When I was accepting the buy offer on Tuesday one of the employees asked if I had worked for the company. I admitted that I had – twenty years ago. He said that they still get mail with my name on. My legacy. Heh.

Besides planning for the future I’m still dealing with health issues. On Tuesday, I had an MRI done on my right knee. I’ve got an appointment this morning with my orthopedist to go over the results, talk about treatment and, hopefully, get paperwork sorted with Workman’s Comp.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is sort of fan art of the Yellow Submarine. The recent release fo the new Beatles documentary reminded me of how much I enjoyed their music in general and that movie in particular. At first I planned to draw a yellow submarine but I decided it would be more fun (and less likely to trigger copyright infringement takedown notices) to design a new suhmarine of a different color.

This design can be found on mugs in my Zazzle shop and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

The Color of Space

The illustration below was originally done for the sixth issue of Midnight Echo, an Australian horror fiction magazine. It was published in 2011. It was a science fiction special. David Conyers, the editor of that issue, had asked me to do three illustrations to be used as placeholders throughtout the magazine. None of the images were attached to any of the selected stories. They seem to have been used to in lieu of commissioning specific illustrations for individual stories.

In my quest to make all of my art available on schtuff I’m coloring all of the Midnight Echo illustration and putting the colorized versions in my shops.

I will post the before and after versions of the other two illustrations in the next couple of weeks.

May today be a good day for you. May the days following be even better.

See you next week!

Skook WiP #60

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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!