Tag Archives: working digitally

Skook Words (and Pictures) #40

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Time passes but the moments that matter last forever, even when we forget them.

True or false?

These Days …

Rain. Friends. Doctor visits.

I welcome rain on Sundays and my days off. It’s my hope that the most of it will come down on those days and, when I have to deliver mail, the most I’ll have to deal with is a light drizzle. I’ve been mostly lucky this last week. When it has come down like a heavenly judgement I’ve either been on lunch or I’m working one of the mounted parts of my route so I only have to drive through it not walk. Of course, for my fellow carriers who did have to work during the heavy rains … I’m sorry.

This Sunday we did a bunch of grocery shopping in the morning and in the afternoon had lunch with old friends from out of town who were in town to see a Peter Gabriel concert. We ate at a Cuban restaurant. We’ve never had Cuban food before. No rain. Good conversation. The usual catching up on what we’ve been doing the last few months.

Monday was Columbus Day – Indigenous People’s Day here in the Pacific Northwest. I end up liking this holiday more every year. Not because I have anything good to say about old Mr. “I Got Lost and Started the Genocide of Two Continents”. No, it’s just a holiday that I never remember until shortly before it’s going to occur and therefore I get a day off that I wasn’t expecting. Unexpected days off are always fun. I spent part of it cooking a big pot of something to eat for lunches during the work week.

But then … the day after a holiday tends to be a long one at USPS. There’s a back up of mail and parcels that have to be delivered. In the rain. It was mostly drizzle. When it did come down heavy I was mostly either delivering the mounted (driving) parts of my route or on break. I got finished just as it was getting dark. I’ve started carrying my head lamp in my truck. I didn’t need it Tuesday but I’m sure I will before the end of the month.

Wednesday was my scheduled day off this week. We spent it at doctor’s appointments. We’re not dealing with anything fatal. Just stuff that makes life uncomfortable. Sometimes really uncomfortable. Fortunately we live in the 21st century and have antibiotics and antifungals and a host of other chemicals that can treat our ills.

Thursday was another long day. Voter pamphlets and an ad for membership discounts at a new health club that’s opening up in the location of a former failed health club needed to be delivered to every customer on my route. I deliver to over 850 addresses.

Today I have to get out the Red Plums. Normally the things are supposed to go out on Tuesdays but this week’s high volume of mail on that day had them pushed back to Wednesday and Wednesday’s shortage of carriers meant that the people who delivered my route didn’t carry any of the extras and then on Thursdays I prioritized the voter pamphlets and the health club coverages so … Bleah.

I’ve managed to grab time to work on art most mornings and during my days off. That keeps me sane.

The Lovecraft Kids

The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection written by Oscar Rios (published by Golden Goblin Press) got retitled as The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection. The original title was less unwieldy but the publisher made the change to avoid confusion with (and possibly being sued by the producers of) Lovecraft Country, a popular novel by Matt Ruff that got adapted into an even more popular tv series. I’d argue that Rios’s RPG features more Cthulhu Mythos elements than Ruff’s novel so no change should have been necessary but I understand why Golden Goblin made it anyway. Getting sued is time consuming and expensive.

Eldritch Holiday features six playable adolescent members of the Morgan family – young cousins who live in four of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite cursed townships. George Weedon and Edward Derby live in Arkham, Gordon Brewster and Gerdie Pope live in Dunwich, Donald Sutton in Kingsport and Alice Sanders in Innsmouth. Because the characters are kids (and possibly because Oscar wanted them to survive) the adventures stay away from encounters with the Great Old Ones, mostly featuring run-ins with ghosts, witches, zombies and the Dreamlands.

I did basic portraits of them to get Oscar’s approval.


Then I did the cover illustration so we had something to feature in the Kickstarter –
And then, also for the Kickstarter, I did individual portraits of the kids.

Next week – The Best Friends Forever!

Digital Sketching

Practicing Clip Studio Paint with my Wacom tablet has been a lot of fun. It’s the kind of fun where going I have to remind myself to get up and walk around before I completely screw up my posture. I’m able to make corrections and adjustments that I would have just ignored when working on paper. I’ve had years of working in Photoshop to inform what might be possible with CSP. I’ve also watched quite a few process videos of artists using CSP to further inform me of the program’s capabilities. Going to work delivering the mail is even harder these days. I want to keep making art.

Often times, after I’ve made a series of sketches/illustrations, I will post the results here over the course of weeks. This time I’m just splitting the results in two parts.

Here are the pencils sketches I started with –


And here are the “finished” digital sketches.

I put “finished” in quotes because I’m doing these sketches to learn CSP, to do basic character design for The Surrilana Depths and to practice coloring with a limited palette. I’m resisting adding a lot of fiddly details or, honestly, thinking too much about the composition. I’m learning what I can and moving on. Sometimes that learning means I really don’t like the results. Lucky you, I’m posting everything!

Until next Friday –
Be good to yourself.
Be kind for the fun of it.
Take a nap.

Mmmmm. Nap.

 

Skook Words (and Pictures) #38

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Greeting and salutations!

Welcome back to another edition of the Skookworks newsletter.

I hope you are doing well and that your week has passed pleasantly.

My week has had rain and family medical issues. Neither of these were a surprise. The rain is part of the reason we moved to the Pacific Northwest. It keeps things green. The medical stuff is manageable but it takes time and attention.

Which Team Do You Root For?

Vampires or Werewolves? Vampires vs. Werewolves? Out of the great variety of supernatural creatures in Western mythology the Vampire and the Werewolf seem the most popular. Vampires come out on top, most of the time. There are far more stories/novels/movies/series about vampires than werewolves.

It makes sense. The original vampires were bloodsucking corpses. Currently they are (mostly) sexy immortals.

The original werewolves were humans who transformed into wolves and killed people. They were generally pretty mortal. Sometimes they turned into vampires after they died. Currently werewolves are humans who turn into wolfpeople and then they kill people. Not in sexy ways.

In general, I prefer werewolves over vampires. Most vampires are murderous assholes. They don’t have to be. They know what they are doing  but they do it anyway. Werewolves, on the other hand, are most bloodthirsty beast, lacking the intelligence or human memory to stop them from snacking on whoever happens to be handy. And they look cool.

That said, here’s a sexy vampire lady.


This lovely creature is available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Out of the Aeons

That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die.

In other words, you never know when a project that you thought was dead will come kicking back to life. My first illustrations in the gaming industry were for The Black Seal #1, a magazine focusing on Call of Cthulhu related material that came out Sixtystone Press back in 2003. I did more illustrations for the second and third issues. For the fourth issue I did the cover illustration.

Numbers 2 and 3 came out soon after the first, but number 4 … got lost. For almost 20 years.

This summer it finally found its way out of the crypt.

Have a look –

It’s currently available at DriveThruRPG.com.

Working Digitally

I find that having specific projects helps me to practice my art skills. The Vamp up above is the last of “Big Face” designs I did for my Redbubble store. Those were done to see how much I could improvise in ink. My recent process has been to do rough sketch with a non-photo blue pencil, do a tighter sketch over that in regular pencil, scan that into Photoshop, remove the blue lines, convert the remaining pencils into new non-photo blue lines, print that out, ink it, scan the inked version into Photoshop, drop out the blue lines, clean up the black lines and then color the image digitally either in Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint (sometimes both, depending on the techniques needed).

I’m used to that process and it hadn’t seemed that involved until –

We got this cat, Crunch by name, with the thought that he would give our older cat, Kemo, company and keep him from wanting my attention when I want to draw. Silly us. Whereas Kemo meows (and sometimes claws my leg) when he wants to be noticed, Crunch just flops down wherever I happen to be. This makes inking with a brush and an open container of ink kinda challenging. And not relaxing.

So I figure it’s time to improve my digital skills. My next project starts with these sketches –

These are the first four of about a dozen physical sketches that I’ll be turning into finished illustrations, mostly with Clip Studio. I’ll be inking them digitally. I’m concentrating on Clip Studio because
A) the program is specifically designed for doing comics
B) the program is much less expensive than Photoshop

All of the illustrations are going to be images from The Surrilana Depths. They’re not intended for the finished version. They’re to help me develop the world, the characters and the style I plan to use in the finished version. I’ll start showing the results next week.

I hope you the next seven days are good to you. If the universe insists on giving you nonsense, I hope that you are able to be good to yourself.

Thank you for reading. See you sooner!