Oh, okay.

Happy Valentine’s Day, then.

—————-

Remember, you can always find me on Twitter and Etsy!

So, high on the work of others, I decided to attempt my own (less ambitious) What Are You Like piece:

How about you guys? I’d love to see some of the favorite things of everyone out there. How about this: if you decide to make your own What Are You Like piece, send it over to me and I’ll collect everyone’s together in a future blog post.

Sound good? ‘ight, get to it then!

The hand of Fate can also be beneficial to a business endeavor. When we launched Cardinal Books and Novelties in 1936, we hoped only to ride the wave of sensationalistic pulp publishing that was so popular – and profitable – during that era. And don’t be mistaken, many of our titles sold well, chief among them I Was a Teenage Dope Fiend and Vampire, Manprodder!, Den of the Lesbian Knitters, and Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Murderers. But by 1952, McCarthyism had taken its toll on Cardinal Books and Novelties, and the pro-Communism tone of titles like Capitalist Child-Eaters Want to Eat Your Children and The Communist Manifesto 2: Proletariat Booagloo, nearly put us out of business.

But the hand of Fate had other plans, delivering unto us a letter from the estate of G.K. Chesterton. Obviously mistaking our publishing house for the similarly-named Cardinal Catholic Books and Rosaries, the estate requested the creation of a new series of novels based on Chesterton’s beloved priest-cum-detective, Father Brown. Within a week we stuck a contract with the estate and got to work.

The success of the new Father Brown series led to other religiously-inspired titles – The Manhandling Snakehandler, Zoroastrian Pajama Party, Bring’em Young Brigham Young – all of which kept the coffers of Cardinal Books and Novelties well-stocked. But in 1988, Fate showed its hand again, this time in the form of a Cat Stevens-issued fatwa against Cardinal Books for publishing Boy in the Burqa: My Life as a Muslim Crossdresser. Our publisher went into hiding and Cardinal Books and Novelties shut down.

I suppose one can find a moral here in the words of William Shakespeare, taken from the Cardinal Books edition of Henry VI: “What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide. Now let’s you and me go for a roll in the hay, baby.”

HA! Thought I wasn’t going to have anything to post this week, didn’t you? Well I showed you! I got out… something.

It should be noted that the past couple of watercolor pieces were done using a Yasutomo Waterbrush that has a water reservoir built into the handle so you don’t need to carry water with you when you want to do some watercoloring outside.

Pretty cool device if you ask me. Takes a little while to figure out how to use, but really helpful. For more impressive results with the brush, check out Gabi Campanario’s sketch blog. Gabi’s a Seattle Times illustrator who compelled me to pick up a waterbrush during the last Sketchcrawl I went on.

IN OTHER NEWS! WallBlank, purveyors of finely-crafted stuff for your walls, have opened up their vaults this week in celebration of being around one year and are once again selling MY PRINT along with many other quality pieces of art by quality artists (such as Zach Bulick’s awesome awesome prints). If you missed your opportunity to pick up “La Marioneta” last time it was available, consider this a fortunate second chance – there may not be a third (probably there will be, but look, just buy it now, ‘kay?). By the way, the quality is REALLY high on these things, I was totally impressed to see how my print came out; you will not be disappointed!

Above you’ll find Swelter, the chef of the gothic and rotting Castle Gormenghast from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. He was drawn as a quick study for future illustrations of certain scenes from that book series. I hadn’t been hired to do the illustrations or anything, I just thought the project would be a good exercise for me. I later dropped the idea when a friend said I’d be better off illustrating my own stories, and briefly reconsidered taking it up again when I realized I had no stories to illustrate. And then I got gainfully employed elsewhere. It’s still a project I’d love to work on, if only for the sheer challenge of bringing Peake’s – an illustrator himself – wonderful character descriptions to life:

“His skull was dark and small like a corroded musket bullet and his eyes behind the gleaming of his glasses were the twin miniatures of his head.”

“She appeared rather to inhabit, than to wear her clothes.”

“His face was very lined, as though it had been made of brown paper that had been crunched by some savage hand before being hastily smoothed out and spread over the tissues.”

 “Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected.”

Good stuff, eh? I’ll let you know if I ever get back to the project. In the meantime, enjoy Swelter!