Tag Archives: Call of Cthulhu

Skook Words (and Pictures) #38

Posted on by

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!

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #46

Posted on by

Gallery – Strange Aeons

Ah, Strange Aeons 2. The project that launched my most read blog post. If I’d had had sense this either would have been my last project with Chaosium or I would have insisted on being paid upfront from then on. If I had had sense …

Chaosium’s assignments were always fun and they gave no significant editorial oversight so I accepted further commissions. And had to deal with further late payments. Silly me.

Strange Aeons 2 was a collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios by different authors set in different time periods in different parts of the world published in 2010. The variety made the project fun. My complaints only occurred after I’d done the work.

Story Seed #95
The Price of Redemption

How does a monster find redemption? I’m not referriing to nonhuman monsters – King Kong, dragons,giant ants, whathaveyou. Forces of nature don’t have sins that need absolving. They can smash a city in one story and save humanity from alien invasion in the next without causing a lot of cognitive dissonance in the audience. Human monsters, villains, shouldn’t get such an easy pass. For people, hurting others is a choice. Choices are conscious decisions.

Fiction, especially the adventure genre, is filled with villains. A good villain makes the story more interesting. With series (novels, comics, television, movies) the hero usually faces a different antagonist each episode with a few “archvillains” making repeat appearances. In horror fiction, the “villain” is often the most interesting part of th story. Whole movie series are built around the villain with the hero rotating out with each new installment. Villains become “anti-heroes”.

A bad guy who becomes popular often has their sharp edges shaved off. They get a tragic back story that explains why they’re driven to do bad things. We might learn that their victims were also bad people – perhaps worse than our popular bad guy. Our bad guy might start acting more decently. The really horrible things they did when they were first introduced aren’t mentioned. Those actions get forgotten. Our bad guy “reforms”.

Except that’s not really reforming. The popular bad guy gets a pass for his bad actions because now he has fans. They themselves don’t address their own past actions. They don’t come to terms with the damage they’ve caused. “I tortured and ate your family? Oops. I don’t do that now. I only kill evil people these days. Get over it.”

There are stories to be told of how a human monster comes to terms with their past and makes restitution to, if not their victims, then to greater society. Stories less about how they are forgiven than about how they become forgiveable.

Recommendation

Yes, I did the cover illustration for this book. Buy it for that reason if you like. I’m recommending the book because it’s well written and very funny. For more info and a chance to pre-order, click here.

Local News

The cold and the wet has returned to the Pacific Northwest. Our station manager managed to get our start time moved back to 7 am from the 7:30 we’d been stuck with for the past few months. Maybe I’m getting a cold. Maybe my body is just complaining.

When I started working at USPS I Ididn’t have time for much other than the job. I did very little art. I put a hold on commissions because I had no idea when I’d be able to finish them. I didn’t post here for a year. As I got used to the job I started working on black and white images to get used to drawing again. Quite a few of those featured the Mighty Nizz aka Little Red.

I’m currently adding color to those illustrations and adding them to my portfolio at Redbubble. They are a bit of an odd size. When I originally did them I was thinking about getting art done not where that art might end up.

This:

Becomes this:

This:

Becomes this:

I’ve got another half dozen in process. I will post them as I finish.

Thank you for dropping by. May you have good books to read, good food to eat and good friends to keep you company – even if you can’t see them in person. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #44

Posted on by

Gallery – Terrors from Beyond

Terrors from Beyond, in 2009, was my third interior illustration project with Chaosium. This time I got to do a lot of ull page illustrations. That made for some breathing room in the art.

Story Seed #93
Wake Up New

You go to sleep. You wake up in someone else’s body. The body might have belonged to your next door neighbor or it might have belonged to someone on the other side of the world. You have only your memories not those of your new body’s original owner. So if you were a 30 year male taxi driver in Pittsburgh when you went to sleep, waking up in the body of a sixty year old woman goatherder in Botswana would be quite a shock.

This happens to everyone. You can put off the transfer by staying awake but you can only stay awake so long. Go to sleep, wake up someone new, somewhere else.

At first, civilization is going to grind to a halt. Civilization relies on skilled individuals doing specialized jobs. Communities and cultures rely on people sharing the same languages and customers and general knowledge. At first there would be panic.

But then?

Human beings are adaptable. We can manage change if we put our minds to it. What kind of society could grow from a people who are someone new, somewhere new, every day? Could we develop a common language? Could we manage our complex infrastructure? Are there skills that can be used regardless of the body you find yourself in? How do you prove you’re you? Does it matter?

Recommendation

Storyink Studios is the Etsy shop of Teresa and Jeff Swenson. They are delighful, creative people. They make stickers. Take a look!

Local News

Today is the final day to vote in the USA. Normally election seasons mean that I have to manage a lot of political flyers and advertisements. This season was surprisingly light, at least in my USPS station. No stacks of mailers for either presidential candidate. No stacks from either candidate for the Governor of Washington State. There were mailers for a couple initiatives but even these didn’t seem as overwhelming as mailers have been previously.

And that’s fine. I’m still doing overtime but mostly on my own route. General mail numbers have gotten higher lately. Amazon continues to send us a large volume of parcels. Many of those parcels are oversized boxes that can’t be carried in my satchel and so require me to take the extra time to car hop the parcls directly to the delivery address.

Artwise, I’ve finished both the pirate character illustrations and the cover for the novel. I’ll share the cover when the book is actually in print. The final version is likely to be different that the last version the publisher sent me. My job was to do the illustration. They were handling the type layout and design.

Next up is a portrait of someone’s RPG player character and some concept sketches for another person’s novel. Then a series of character illustrations for an RPG sourcebook set in North American Colonial times.Given that the mail and, especially, the parcels are only going to get heavier from now until January, that project will likely continue sometime into 2021. Does that throw off my plans to just concentrate on producing work for and marketing my online stores? Of course! But adjusting to change is life.

Daylight savings happened on Sunday. My body will be taking a few days to get used to it. I’ve woken up an hour before my alarm both Monday and today.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope that your week goes well and that you are able to celebrate some victories. I get through the days by celebrating the small ones. A sketch finished. A meal made. A bill paid. A swing completed on my route. Big victories are stacks of small ones. Celebrate your small victories.

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #34

Posted on by

Gallery: Delta Green

Most of my RPG illustration work has been for Call of Cthulhu related projects. That’s the result of intention and good luck and accident.

The Intention part happened in the year 2000. I submitted some illustrations to the Delta Green website. Delta Green was a Call of Cthulhu RPG set in modern times – the late 199os. Most CoC games are set in the 1920s/1930s, the time the original stories were written and set. I discovered Delta Green in 1999 when I working at Half Price Books. I was the buyer when a customer sold us his collection of RPG manuals. In the buy was Delta Green and its sequel Delta Green: Countdown. I bought those books for myself. I loved the ideas behind the setting. It updated the Cthulhu Mythos for the late Twentieth Century in ways that surprised and delighted me. It created a means and a reason for investigators to, well, investigate the horrors from beyond.

I’d wanted to illustrate RPGs but didn’t have much of a portfolio of examples to show. I found the Delta Green site early the next year. I don’t think it had a way to send submissions and I don’t think they were asking for any. What it did have was a way to submit fan art and writing. So I worked up three illustrations (see the follow gallery) and submitted them. They got posted. No one from Delta Green contacted me.

Oh well.

Two years later those illustrations got me work at The Black Seal. But that’s another post.

The original photoshop files of these illustrations are, possibly, residing on an old back up drive. It’s formated for Mac and I currently use a PC so I haven’t tried plugging it in. A lot of the work I did in the first ten years of this century was done on a Mac. The art always started as graphite and ink on paper and then had photoshop magic applied to it. I’ve got the original drawings in big metal flat files but the art that got published looks different.

Earlier this year I realized that I’d sent most of those illustrations to the editors and publishers via email and I’ve never deleted any personal emails. So I’ve tracked down a lot of that older art and will be showing it in future galleries. I found the two black and white illustrations in the above gallery in my emails.

The first three images, however, I couldn’t locate in my gmail archive. AOL has long since deleted all my old emals. At first they didn’t appear to be on the current Delta Green site but, after doing some obsessive google searching and some sort of back door poking around on DG I found them in an archive. Huzzah!

Story Seed #53
The Time Line AntiDefense League

There are a lot of stories that feature some sort of organization whose mission is to defend the “correct” timeline, to make sure that history works itself out the way that it is “supposed to”. Bleah. How about an organization whose mission is to create timelines where history works itself out in the best ways for the most people?

Recommendation

Beeple. This person’s art started showing up in my tumblr feed, shared by other folks I followed. It was weird and creepy so I subscribed to his feed. He posts an image a day, every day.

Also, the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter concludes on the 30th. If you’ve been putting off backing it. please jump in.

Local News

Last week, in one of our stand up meetings at USPS, we were reminded that we, the letter carriers were not supposed to talk to the press. That if a member of the press attempted to engage us in conversation we were to refer him/her to management. Also, while we were in uniform, we were not to engage in political discussions with anyone lest they assume that our views represented those of the USPS. We were also to be careful not to express politcal opinions on social media in such a way as to lead people to believe that our views represented those of the USPS.

Sigh.

To be clear, anything I write here about my job at USPS is just my experience and my opinion. I like to assume that those of you who read these newsletters recognize this but, on the off chance you don’t, I AM NOT A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POST OFFICE. I’m just a guy who works there. In my opinion, the USPS can’t actually have an opinion since it’s an organization. Organizations are not people. The people in charge of organizations may claim that their opinion represents the opinion of the organization but that’s just a fiction.

Anyway.

The most interesting part about the day job right now is that I have a new T6. USPS delivers mail six days a week. Regular carriers work and deliver theri route five days a week. A T6 is the person who delivers the route on the regular carrier’s day off. My last T6 had medical issues that prevented them from delivering my route on a regular basis. My new T6 is healthy and detail oriented. More detail oriented than I am, actually. And that’s good. It means I’m updating labels in mailboxes and doing maintenance on my route that I’d let slide. I keep most of my customer changes in my head. Having another person who has to regularly work my route reminds me that I should communicate customer changes in clear, written methods. It’s only polite.

We’ve also moved our start time from 7 am to 7:30 am. I’m not a fan but I’m adjusting.

I’ve left my alarm at 4 am. I get up. Drink coffee Write. Do computer art or make products in either my Zazzle or my Redbubble stores. I’ve updated my various websites to include a “store” page with links to each. This week I spent most of my store time working on an Oz Squad collection for Zazzle. Oz Squad is Steve Ahlquist’s creature but, as a fan and sometime collaborator, I try to find ways to keep the brand active.

In the evenings, once we’ve finished dinner and our spot of television, I work on physical art. Right now I’m doing pirate sketches. More about that when the project can be talked about publically.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that life has always been insane. Look out for yourself and your friends. That’s where sanity and security dwells.

See you next week!

Cthulhu Weather

Posted on by

The Call of Cthulhu
By H.P. Lovecraft —

“In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

‘That is not dead which can eternal lie,
and with strange aeons even death may die.’ “

LIke Jesus, Cthulhu could return at any time. Unlike Jesus, He isn’t going to care what kind of life you’ve lived. He (and whether or not “he” is male is open to debate) will call out to His fellow Old Ones and they will be awakened and return to rule the world as they once did. So the cultists believe. But human beings have been twisting and misinterpreting the words of seers and prophets ever since there have been seers and prophets. Who knows what Cthulhu will want or what he will do when he arises? Will he be a morning person? Will he be hungry? What do beings who exist beyond space and time like to eat for breakfast?

 

Tails of Valor Cover Process

Posted on by

Last Sunday I posted my basic sketches for the individual images that I planned to have make up the cover for Tails of Valor. Here’s what I did to turn those images into the final cover illustration.

Using Photoshop I collaged the images in a variety of ways to find a balance that looked good. The version below is number seven.
TailsValorCoverRough7 Once I figured out the basic layout I did a rough sketch that combined all the images in a way that (hopefully) worked together aesthetically. Triptych Sketch Final

Next I did detailed pencils of each scene. We (the book’s editor and I) decided to have me do each scene as a separate image and then have book’s cover designer put them all together for the final product. I regularly combined my working images in order to be sure that I was getting a good balance for the final illustration.TailsValor3PanelPencils

Next I “flatted” images for coloring, meaning I separated out specific areas of each image that I wanted to be able to color individually. At this point I wasn’t necessarily choosing the final colors that I planned to use, just something close.
TailsValor3PanelFlatsTest

And then I started adding detailed colors, adjusting colors on specific layers, doing gradients and playing with different brushes. I really don’t have much to say from here on. There was trial. There was error. There was “Hey! That looks good!”

TailsValor3PanelColor2

I hopped back and forth between all the illustrations but, in the beginning, I spent most of my time on the Egypt and Rome sections.

TailsValor3PanelColor3I made my biggest post-pencil changes here by moving the jumping cat in the Rome section up in space. The change doesn’t look like much but it makes the scene livelier.
TailsValor3PanelColor4 And done. Mostly. I’ve made some tiny adjustments to parts of the illustrations since I created the jpeg below but I’m probably the only person who will notice them. TailsValor3PanelColor5

Golden Goblin Press will be kickstarting Tails of Valor in July. I’ll put a post about that when the time comes.

Tails of Valor Cover Sketches

Posted on by

I haven’t had a chance to finish any new illustrations for this site. I’ve been working on a cover for Tails of Valor, a collection of scenarios for the Cathulhu version of the Call of Cthulhu RPG to be published by Golden Goblin Press. There are three scenarios in the book: one set in Ancient Egypt during the time of the Pharaohs, one set in 15th century France during witch hysteria and one set in Rome at the time of Caligula. The editor asked me to create a cover that featured images from all three adventures.

Aaargh.

Multiple image covers are tricky. You’ve got to balance the images and colors so that the results are pleasing rather than just chaotic. I started by sketching an image for each scenario by itself. I figured that once I knew which basic image I would illustrate I could then figure out how to combine them in a way that looked good. EgyptSketch001

The Egypt image.FranceSketch001 The France image. RomeSketch001

The Rome image.

Come back Wednesday for a process post of the cover from pencils to final colors.