I used a pretty neato iPad app called Animation Desk. It doesn’t automatically export animations to .gif format – that requires some minor tweaking in Photoshop – but it’s easy to use and super fun.

I see a lot of dumb animated gifs in my future, because they’re fun.

• he lived in Providence
• he wrote about a guy named Cthulhu
• who lives in R’lyeh and often fhtagns, wherever and whatever that is

And there are a bunch of other dread creatures who possess earth-destroying power, but are usually dumb or fast asleep and that’s why we’re not dead yet. They are all eye-meltingly hideous, and their names are pronounced in the same way you’d hock a loogie.

Anyway, I drew what I imagine a Lovecraft story to be like:

Not sure when the dates are on these.

Babbys, and half a preschooler.

A hipster couch.

I still find inappropriately steampunked objects disproportionately amusing.

I need to practice backgrounds. I hate drawing them, but I love seeing them well-done. I threw a George Booth dog in there before I realized I have no memory of what George Booth dogs actually look like.

A good exercise is to try and draw famous people from memory. These are the money guy and, um, I clearly don’t know.

I got a lovely new pen from Muji a couple months ago and it is the best pen and I love it. This scan doesn’t capture the greatness that is this pen, or the smallness that is Tiny Art Boy. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to draw little tiny things with nice pens on nice paper. Maybe I can make a career out of selling drawings the size of my thumbnail.

I appreciate the wonky trompe-l’oeil effect on this women’s Bad Boy shirt. “Appreciate” meaning “recognize,” not necessarily “like.”

I’m working on a second blog with a different theme which I hope you will like! It should be up and running within the next couple of weeks, if not earlier. I will continue to post here, too.

I’ll be replacing Skerple Friday with some other sort of weekly post. Likely a weekly roundup of scans from my sketchbook. I’ll have an announcement and first post in the next few days.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this recipe for bee salad:

3 cups worker bees (fresh is best, but dried will do in a pinch)
1 cup broccoli florets
1/4 cup diced red pepper
1/4 cup diced onions
1 cup mayonnaise
2 teaspoons ground mustard
1 teaspoon paprika

Combine all ingredients, stir well, and serve chilled.

For Three Bee Salad, use one cup honeybees, one cup bumblebees, and one cup garbanzo bees. If you are using soy bee substitute, reduce mayonnaise to 3/4 cup.

The part I really liked was creating the narrative. In Vengeance Bus, two surly young women buy an old school bus and a megaphone and go around telling off the people who’ve wronged them. Most of the story is the two heroines sniping about things, getting irritated with each other, and being totally unable to navigate a bus through a crowded city.

Julie, the surlier of the two vengeancers, ended up being a lot chunkier than my sketch from a couple months ago. I like creating heavier characters, because I’ve been heavier for most of my life, and I like having characters I can relate to. Not only that, but it’s hard to find female characters who aren’t beautiful. Either they’re eye-candy romantic interests, or they’re chicklit everygirls who are supposed to be just like you, except they’re played by someone like Anne Hathaway, and you’re supposed to either pretend that looking like Anne Hathaway is totally normal, or start thinking that maybe you too look like Anne Hathaway. If I wrote more (or any) fiction, and maybe I should, quite a few of my female protagonists would be thoroughly unremarkable-looking, and not terribly bothered by that fact.

Anyway, my initial vision was to have the sketchbook mostly fleshed out and resembling a graphic novel; that didn’t happen. I knew that was a lofty goal. I do think I should have put a little more care into the drawing. As of right now I’m considering Vengeance But a publicly viewable super-rough draft, and heavily considering working on a more polished version.

You know how everyone on the internet gets fascinated by the same thing at the same time? Yesterday it was that big chart of cat colors. I am a nerd and knew about most of it already, but what I didn’t know is that the piebald spotting gene breaks up the areas of color while the cat is still an embryo. Like continental drift. So I’ve been teasing Bonus Cat about being too fat for his embryo.

(There’s that line from the scanner again. I don’t feel like dealing with it right now, but I’m tired of seeing it.)

I wonder if the time to make fun of Cathy is over. I hope not.

Everyone on the internet who wasn’t interested in cat fur was talking about the supposed thirteenth astrological sign, Snake Guy. I’m surprised at how possessive people are of their signs. You’d think it’d be awesome to be represented by a guy with a snake. He’s got a snake!

It’s not like the stars intend to be in the shape of a snake guy, though. It’s how someone interpreted them long ago, and no one’s challenged it because things-to-look-at technology has advanced to the point where we no longer need to look at stars. For all I know, my sign could really be Baseball Guy.

Now I want to draw Cathy parodies and new zodiac signs, but I have to go to work. Maybe over the weekend?

I know bears are not to be trifled with, but I like to imagine them as benign slow-moving creatures who just want to sniff at your trash.

Why do you run away from bear, Cub Scouts? Bear is friend.