These Days …

We’re settling in at the new place. It’s still a mess. One room is still filled with the stuff that didn’t get sorted before the move. We do plan and do need to sort it soon if only because we don’t want to move it again.

I’ve transferred from the West Seattle station to the Burien station. I haven’t started my new route yet but I did stop in at the station to get a glimpse of where I would be delivering. It turns out that I will be delivering my own mail. Cool.

Basic Roleplaying Gallery

This month’s gallery is of the illustrations I did for Chaosium’s 2nd Edition of Basic Roleplaying, published in 2008. I loved this job. The editor, Lynn Willis, gave me free reign on the illustrations. As I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters, if you’re reading this in your email, you’re not getting all the images. Please come to Skookworks.com to see the full set.

Cold Dead Fingers

A few years ago Sarah and I were asked to contribute a story to an anti gun violence comics anthology. The book was intended to raise money to help combat gun violence and was successfully funded via Kickstarter. Sarah wrote it. I drew. Other someones were supposed to letter and color it.

For a variety of reasons, the book never saw print. The publishers donated all the pledged money to the causes the book was created to support. I showed some of the process of putting this story together in one of my past newsletters. Using Clip Studio Paint I’ve lettered (but, obviously, did not color) the story and it’s being present here for the first time.

Nine Panels – Some Guys

Practicing full body drawings – guy edition. I’m sure all of these guys have stories but you’ll have to talk to them to find them. These are just snapshots.

The Surrilana Depths 

Over the years I’ve posted about The Surrilana Depths, my imagined graphic novel adaptation/reimagination of the old pulp novel Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin. Last month I started drawing the thing. It’s likely to take me years to finish it. All the more reason to start now. 

I’m writing/drawing this a little at a time and kinda/sorta making it up as I go along. I mean, I know the story. I know who does what, when and how. But this is the first time I haven’t written out a complete script and done complete thumbnails before getting started drawing pages. We’ll see how it goes. I’m hoping to start posting finished pages in 2026.

If you miss my daily posts, I’m making them over at my accounts on substack, blue sky and tumblr. I’m posting older images from the archives on my computer. It’s the same image on each platform so you can pick the one you prefer. If you want the images to come to your email then subscribing to my substack is the way to go.

Substack

Blue Sky

Tumblr

Thank you for reading! See you on May 15th!

These Days …

We are all moved in to our new apartment. We are not unpacked. That will take time. We still have a lot of boxes of stuff that just got moved because we didn’t have time to sort it.

I’m in the process of trying to transfer from my old station to the post office here in Burien. I want a shorter commute. I put in a bid last week. It’s the first time I’ve bid on a route since I became a career employee back in 2014 and that was more a formality. I didn’t have to go through the bid system and I was only up against other new career carriers. This time I’m presumably competing with all the carriers who might want the route. The winner will be determined by seniority. Chances are I will get it.

Kaiju Gallery (Part Two)

Here’s the rest of the images I did for the Kaijuphile site back in the day. Once again, if you’re reading this post in your email, you’ll need to come to Skookworks.com to see all the monsters.

Sacrifice

Nick Brownlow wrote this story and I illustrated it for the Vietnam Special of The Black Seal a few years back. Sixtystone Press continues to put out nifty Call of Cthulhu related RPG stuff but The Black Seal is on hiatus. I’m really pleased with this one.

Gallery – Super Ladies

Octobriana. Fantomah. The Pink Suit. Rag Alice. Mama Heap. April Fool. Zsa Zsa. The Swift. Helen Vaughan. Don’t mess with them.

That’s it for this month! Take care of yourself. Punch a Nazi. Burn a Tesla. Impeach the President. Whatever makes you happy.

See you on April 15th!

Hmmm. I’ve now seen this morning’s newsletter on both my phone and my desktop. For some reason the system decided to reserve most of the images in the gallery for the Skookworks website. Sorry about that. If you’d like to see all the colorful pictures, please click on this link.

If you’re already reading this on the website – Hi!

Greetings and salutations to all you fine folks! We’ve arrived at the 15th day of the 2025th year of our Lord. And what a wonderful year it looks like it will be …

These Days …

We’re starting out our year by moving. The place we’ve lived for the last fifteen years is wonderful but, in order to afford it, for the last ten years we’ve had housemates. We’ve been mostly lucky there. We’ve basically gotten along with all of them and have no nightmare housemate stories. However, the process of finding a new housemate is always stressful and, with our current fellow moving out, we’ve decided to relocate to a place we can afford without needing to share it with a stranger in exchange for cash.

At this writing, we’ve still looking at places. By the time you’re reading this we should have settled on one. I’ve scheduled the first week of February off from work so I can pack and move stuff. Slowly. The idea of moving everything in a single day gives me the shivers.

Thinking (Silently) Out Loud

I’ve written before about my contempt for generative AI – the programs that produce writing and illustrations based on prompts. I understand the appeal. Humans are animals and, generally, animals prefer to spend the least amount of effort to fulfill their desires. Basically, we’re lazy. That’s a survival skill. The amount of work that most humans have do to survive in the modern world isn’t healthy. But that’s a different rant.

Besides being “trained” on work stolen from humans, besides eating up enormous amounts of power and water and other resources, generative AI makes humans stupider and lazier and more incompetent than we already are. Making art is sloppy and time consuming and weird. The results rarely live up to what is in my mind. By “art” I mean painting, drawing, writing, singing, dancing, cooking, speaking – anything that requires a creative effort. Making art requires work. And practice. It’s a skill.

I understand the appeal of generative AI. You have an idea, you write a prompt and – BOOM! – your idea is given form. Form that is shinier and more detailed than something you could have produced on your own. In a few minutes. Why spend years learning a skill when a machine can create a thing instantly?

Survival. The more skills you have, the better your chances of surviving. For me, making cartoons and illustrations is a mental health practice. So is cooking. And walking. The folks who are jamming AI into everything aren’t doing it to make life better and easier for the rest of us. They’re doing it to eliminate the need to pay humans for their skills.

I make my survival paycheck by delivering mail. Large parts of the mail sorting process have been given to machines. We get trays of letters already sorted in delivery order. We get parcels sorted into hampers based on the routes that will deliver them. And there’s always some piece of mail, some parcel, that’s out of order and requires human intervention to get it to the correct address and recipient. I’ve had the same route for ten years now. I know the names of most of the customers on my route so, when I get a letter with a name I recognize but an address that’s off, I can make sure it gets where it needs to. Same with parcels. Upper management would love to make it so anyone could deliver any route, anytime. Upper management has either never delivered mail or has made themselves forget what it was like.

I understand the desire to just have something done for you. Life is exhausting enough without having to learn new skills. But learning requires thinking and thinking is a skill I always want to have.

Postcards For Practice

I’ve been practicing digital coloring for years. The images in this gallery were done over a decade ago. I drew a series of illustrations in ink on blank postcards. I mailed the original illustrations to friends and colored scans of the illustrations in Photoshop.

This Month’s Comic –
OCD
Story by David Mann

This is the first of two stories that I’ve illustrated for David. I will post the next one next month. David writes stuff all of the internet. The best place to start reading his stuff is probably his newsletter.

Nine Panel Sketch

Practice, practice, practice.

That’s it for this month. I’ll be back on February 15th.

Have fun, practice your skills, learn some new ones and, what the heck, go talk to real people in the real world.

Cheers!

To everyone who has been visiting Skookworks in 2024 – Thank you! I had a great time creating the daily illustrations and I feel like I’ve mastered Clip Studio Paint enough to get back to drawing comics. My first story will be a second Mighty Nizz piece. You’ll be able to read that at MightyNizz.com. I’ll provide links when it is up.

Because I’ll be focusing on comics (and commission work of various types) I’ll be posting here once a month instead of once a day. Right now I’m planning to post on the 15th of each month. Subscribers will get those posts as an email newsletter. Each issue will feature my ramblings, a gallery of images from the archives and … a short comic story. Some of those stories have been posted at Skookworks in past years. Some of them have been posted elsewhere. Some have never been posted before.

While my frequency of posting here will go down, I’m posting daily on a couple of other platforms –
Substack (https://substack.com/@davidleeingersoll)
Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/skook.bsky.social)

These are single images from years past. No particular theme. Just what I find on my computer that day. It’s the same image to both platforms.

What else? I guess we have to see. Stay tuned!