Sleepy, but cheerful

I'm kind of amazed ... I've penciled and inked five pages of Midnight Sun in the last day and a half (all day today, and Friday evening, plus doing a bit of penciling after class on Thursday). And they're nice looking pages. I'm very happy with them. Unfortunately I can't scan them because my scanner driver is a fekkin' piece o' crap. It's finally gotten to the point where it's completely unusable -- when I try to preview the scan, it freezes up the computer every single time. Oddly, it worked ... well, not FINE, but reasonably okay, for five years only to suddenly crap out (not all at once, but in fits and starts) over the last month. It might fix it to reinstall the drivers, but I bought it five years ago, and I have no clue where the disk is (if I even still have it).

So I'll go in to work tomorrow and scan the pages. I have very little touch-up to do -- for MS I'm doing the art different YET AGAIN and doing almost everything by hand instead of toning/lettering on the computer; I'm back to cross-hatching and hand-lettering again!

I'm also very happy at how a certain character has turned out on paper, because I've had him in my head for over 10 years, and had a bugger of a time getting him to look right in the preliminary sketches -- but the final inked version is just perfect (slightly young-looking, but I think my mental image of him *is* younger than he was originally supposed to be; there's no reason why I can't age him down a bit). Most of the main MS cast were conceived for a different story while I was in high school; I'm a shameless recycler of old characters!

Tomorrow, while I'm at it, I'll also scan the five inked pages of Kismet: Hunter's Moon that are sitting here ready to go. Next weekend, the plan is to do final touch-ups on the Raven's Children book and color HM pages.

And so...

... the Midnight Sun preview (5 pages) is online. Here it is in all its ... er, glory.

I really love Page 5. That one page probably took me almost as long as the whole rest of it.

There's also some sketches of the characters that I've done over the last couple of years.

Weekend roundup

Tonight I "fixed" the fence around my garden. It can now be dignified with the term "half-assed", whereas before it wasn't even partially assed. At least the garden is no longer in danger of being destroyed by its own fence, which always kind of worried me because of the way it leaned dangerously over the strawberries every time the wind blew. It's also possible to get in and out of it now. I'm still worried that Lucky will try to get to me by jumping through it, because it would most likely fall over. The whole point of the fence is to keep the dogs out of the garden; they love digging in soft dirt.

I also harvested my first two strawberries this weekend. Yummy!

There is a really PO'd sandpiper in the creek tonight. When I went down to fill a watering can for the garden, he/she flew up in my face and hovered about 8 feet from my face, peeping loudly and angrily. I think that it may have lost its mate or otherwise gotten displaced from its nesting area, because it's been peeping shrilly down there all day long, acting agitated. I feel bad for it, but I also wish it would shut up.

I took the dogs for a walk down the other creek, the one next to the driveway, a small swamp stream that splits off from "our" creek about a half-mile upstream. There's an old beaver dam (more of a beaver earthworks -- once upon a time, this thing was the Hoover Dam of beaver dams; it's huge) and a small lake where a family of ducks was disturbed by the dogs. I always thought that ducks mated one-on-one, but in this case there seemed to be about 5 or 6 females (or, in any case, smaller ducks) and a number of babies, and one big aggressive duck that tried to fight off the dogs, which was interesting to watch. The dogs were quite intrigued by the ducks but not interested in engaging in aquatic combat; they would make tentative forays into the water, at which point the big duck would charge, shrieking and splashing like crazy. This went on until I started feeling bad for the ducks and led them off through the woods. Signs of long-ago beaver activity are everywhere around there; most of the bigger trees are nibbled off in the classic tapered beaver-chew. The mosquitoes weren't too bad in the relatively open area by the stream, but once we got into the woods, ouch! They followed me home, too, so while I was working in the garden, they were mobbing my ears. Frikkin' bugs. We live far enough out of town that we are not at all affected by what I assume are aggressive insecticide campaigns in the city limits (where mosquitoes rarely dare to step their little feet). Even in our high & dry yard, when you're outside for a while in the evening, the little vampires come out.

We are now past the solstice, so the days will start getting slowly shorter. At this point, even though the sun technically does set for an hour or two, there is little difference between night and day. Last night at 1 a.m. Orion was working out in the yard; no lights are needed, since it really doesn't get dark.