Moved

Well, I realize I should put here, in case someone comes across it, where you can find me now!
blog of art: Inky Phalangies (inkyphalangies.blogspot.com)
web comic: The Jerks (the-jerks.com)
comic publlications: Flying Dodo Publications (flyingdodopublications.com)
deviantart: lunavalse (lunavalse.deviantart.com)

Enjoy!

Mermaid

This weekend I drew a mermaid on 6x6 bristol board. I used just a regular ball point pen, though, because it was too freakin' hot to use the dip pen. I haven't even inked the pencils for Arthur and Georgie I did last Tuesday because it has been too hot out. The ink goops up almost as fast as I can get the pen to the page. Hopefully this Saturday morning or Sunday morning, I will be able to. But I have to get my hair dyed for my High School Reunion in a couple weeks.

I was inspired by the Girls Drawing Girls blog, whose theme last week was mermaids so I saw a bajillion mermaid drawings and had to do this one to get it out of my brain. For some reason I am tending to draw people with great big heads and tiny little necks...

Also, this weekend we got to have "lunch" with my Aunt Bonnie who lives in New York. I haven't seen her in two years about, so that was nice. We went to the Greenbean and Yum. I got a Peach Granola Muffin that was divine and Bonnie got a Vanilla Lavender Italian Soda. Pretty good. I would have preferred more vanilla less lavender. Then we ran home and got the dogs and represented the Boyle's at my Aunt Carol's party because none of the rest of my immediate family could go. Jerks. :) Actually, Isaac might have gone after we left, since we had to leave early because we have a headlight out. Fortunately, we were going to bring the car in for a tune up today anyways so we just had them fix that at the same time.

Playing catchup

Whoops. I forgot to post in a while. Maybe next time I will post about the plants. There is a new one...

Well, I have been up to a lot. Let's start with Harry Potter Crafts. I participated in the last swap, which was potions themed. Here is the very practical swap I received. From left to right, there is glittering body spray that smells like pear, brown sugar hand sanitizer, and baking soda based cleanser. And I think a small hand-knit sock.

I sent my recipient a potions recipe box.

This was pretty fun to make. I got the box at Good will and sanded and painted it. I am pretty pleased. I think if I make another, though, it will be even better.

I also sent her these potions. The sleeping Draught broke, but I sent it without the liquid. I put the correct number of drops of food coloring in each bottle so she only had to add the water to get these colors.

Haha. Funny stuff, right? Anyways, here is a scarf I wove. This one was tricky because the yarn I used was shlubby.Crystal Palace Yarns Waikiki in Kiwi/Mango. I am a bit smitten with it. It is nice and soft.

I also knit these socks from the Rockin'Sock Club in just under a week and a half. Pretty awesome, right?

They are pretty comfy. My next project is the Lilac Leaf Shawl. I have one end done and I am almost at the same point on the other end. I just need to have it done by October 15 for the Nordic Knitting Conference, which makes me giddy every time I think about it.

Also, I bought this funny magnet I drew for The Jerks Store. We will get pictures posted when it arrives and let you know how the quality is. $7 is a good price for a test though. Better than just buying a bag. Since Abe has a job now and I can never tell when the dishes are clean or dirty, we got this so I don't have to call him at work and ask.

Finally, I drew this the other day and I am pleased. I think it was inspired by looking at drawings of Regina Spektor on Deviant Art.

Check it out

Check out my desktop. I can't stop laughing.

A short post

Just a quick post to link to this which is one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while. The guy that did it took WWII photos and found the places they were taken then took pictures today and overlaid the WWII photos so you can see both times at once. Some of them are really powerful.

--Abe

Good news

So, after much deliberation and consideration, I went back to the metro and asked if I could work there. My friends Kim and Jeff were amazing and not only got me rehired but did it quickly too. I'll be on the schedule that starts this Friday!

The pay isn't fabulous but it's not much lower than nintendo and the work environment and management are about 10 billion billion billion times better. So I am very pleased and Angela is really happy as well.

I went in on Sunday to fill out some paperwork and I spent like 3 hours there chatting with old friends and new people too. It was really fun.

I have some pictures to post that we took at the blowing sands gallery this weekend. We dropped in there with Anita and Jim. They both seemed to enjoy the show. Jim became our official first customer of The Jerks too! He bought one of the collections of the first twelve comics that I made for the gallery. You can see the cover, and order one if you want, here.

Anyway, I can't find the cable to get the pictures off my phone at the moment so I'll edit this post and add them tonight or tomorrow after I find that darn thing.

--Abe

Two birds on a wire

I didn't get a chance to post earlier because I had to go to the dentist for a cleaning today. My teeth hurt. Anyways, this Friday I actually did some digital painting. Very fun. Here it is, a short comic inspired by the song Two Birds on a Wire by Regina Spektor on the CD Far. This may be made into a print at some point once we figure out how. Sound good?

Here's a link to a better one.

I also have the plain black and white version up there.

An Isaac'ed weekend

Here's a head kerchief thing I knit with three different yarns from the Phat Fiber box I bought a long time ago. I tried buying one this time but kept getting errors from Etsy so I think I am done with that little experiment. :(

My brother came over this weekend. We had a good time. He arrived before I got home from work, so Abe met him downtown, where they had coffee. Then they came home and played Team Fortress together. When I got home, we went to the Phinneywood Farmer's Market. Isaac bought Strawberry wine, Tayberry wine, and Blackberry wine and let us have the remainders of the strawberry and tayberry. Unfortunately, I didn't like either, but Abe did. So he can have those and I will drink beer. That night Isaac and I played some Lego Batman and it was awesome. I can't wait for him to come down and play with me again. Abe played through it once with me and that was apparently enough for him.

On Saturday, we didn't wake up until 10. Whoops. We went to Patty's Eggnest across the street for breakfast. I had swedish pancakes with strawberries instead of lingonberries. They were pretty good. Then we rushed over to the Sidewalk sale at Acorn Street where I think we (Isaac and I) spent 2 hours or so looking at the yarn. I found this great french one that looked like fur, but I wanted to make a whole purse with it and it was $8 for 17 yards. That was way too expensive. So I bought some other stuff.

The Waikiki from Crystal Palace will some day be woven into an AWESOME scarf. I think it will be awesome. It is the Kiwis/Mangos colorway and I just love it.

The Baby Alpaca Grande from Plymouth Yarns will be fingerless gloves. They were supposed to come with a free pattern, but I didn't get it because I forgot to ask. Though perhaps it is inside the band? Anyways, I can undoubtedly find a pattern on Ravelry, my love. It is so soft, you can barely tell you are touching it. I will make the fingerless gloves and see how it wears. I might get two more skeins to make a pair of the best slipper socks ever.

Finally, there is the Noro Sukko. I think I will be making the Swallowtail shawl out of that. It is a simple shawl pattern and it appears others have done that with success and it looks nice. The colors of the yarn are black, green and brown, as far as I can tell, but I bet there are surprise colors inside too. There always are.

Then we went to the Cartoonists North West meeting where Milt Prigee gave a talk/answered questions. It was fun. He does editorial cartoons, which Abe is more into than I am. Then we dropped Isaac off at the train station to get back home to his GIRLFRIEND. :) Good for him.

Anyways, the other thing I bought at Acorn Street was a skein of Noro to make a tea cozy. And make a tea cosy I did. (I think I just heard one of the dogs fart...) So here it is in all its glory. This is a nice pattern. I am not kidding. I think the whole thing can be knit up in 4 hours (small version). If I hadn't been distracted by how much I love the first X-Men movie, I think I could have knit the whole thing Saturday night, but as it is, I sat there just holding the knitting for a fair chunk of time. So I finished it Sunday morning while I drank tea.

This week on the Ten Ton Studios Sketch Challenge, the theme was Nocturno, an Argentinian graphic novel, by Salvador Sanz. Lovely, but I can't find it in English. Anyways, here is what I drew. It is also up on the Forum.

Last week, I also started the Lilac Leaf Shawl so I will have a Nancy Bush Estonian Lace Shawl to where when I go to the Nordic Knitting Conference in October! (I am taking Icelandic Lace on Saturday and Estonian Cuffs on Sunday.) I started with the other end so that I can knit the middle until I run out of yarn or finish the pattern, whichever comes first. My skein of yarn is about 50 yards smaller than the one called for so I wasn't sure I would have enough.

One of my friends, Celina, put a link to I Write Like on her blog. So I though I would give it a shot. Here are my results. I tried a bunch of things because that is how I am.

When I put in writing from the blog, which is a bit stream of consciousness: Vladimir Nabokov. Abe was impressed.

A story I wrote in high school (which I may end up turning into a graphic novel - 'Cigar Smoke' if I ever talk about it again): Jack London.

Office Cowboy is apparently written like Stephen King. (Haha. There is a joke in that sentence if you know of Stephen King's writing style well enough.)

The water lady story is like Harry Harrison, who I have no idea who that is.

At this point I stared to think it is just completely random.

Vergamon is apparently written like Dan Brown.

A paper for a TC class my last year of college: Agatha Christie.

Hmph.

I will have pictures of my plants in my next post, maybe.

I hate titles

So, I found this article on the naked capitalism blog and I think that everyone should read it.

It blows my mind that the sheriffs office just goes and sets up an auction for whatever house the banks tell them to without checking to see if the bank that makes the request is even the issuer of the mortgage for the house, or that the name on the notice even matches the name of the owner in the county records.

The Jerks comic is coming along quite well. I'm really pleased with it. Angela's art is just getting better and better. And my stories, which began with poop and vomit jokes, are actually moving toward less potty humor which you'll see in a few weeks.

I re-started playing WoW last week after Angela and I spent an hour being nostalgic about it. My favorite feature of the game now is the random dungeon finder. It usually doesn't take more than about 15 minutes and most of the groups have been excellent; friendly people, competent playing, willing to work with the strengths and weaknesses of the group members. It's also really nice that I can play for an hour or two and actually *DO* something in that time. EQ2 has gotten to the point where it takes hours and hours to get anything done and I always logout feeling like I wasted my time.

Wow, I got distracted by webcomics there, stopped mid-sentence and just came back after like 45 minutes.

--Abe

Here is some yarn for you...

First, check it out - I made Abe a toy. I started this, no kidding, in July of 2005 and finished it in July 2010. Go Ravelry for keeping that information for me. I am crazy, yes.

Two weekends ago, we had a good ol' time. Saturday we went to my mom's and met my brother's new girlfriend, who seems nice. My mom and I spent most of the day washing 10 lbs of wool in her yard. That was a lot of work. Then I brought it home and I have been washing it even more. Boil it on the stove and dry it in the oven. I am done, and it only took 4 days to wash all 10 lbs! Now I have to card it and then I have to spin it. And probably dye some of it. I spun up a test of the 10 lbs of shetland(?) that I had already washed and it is a creamy lemony color. The one I am currently washing is quite white. And filthy. Lots of poop and bugs and grains (their food) and even pieces of hoof.

I also found this car on one of the blogs I read. Holy Cow. I would consider driving that, but not in the rain...

Maybe this is what we need to have a less jerky comic.

Uh...

More recently, since it seems I haven't posted in a while, we have The Jerks up at the Blowing Sands Gallery in Ballard. Our stuff should be up until about Aug 11. There are free stickers and some small comic books for sale. We hung out on Saturday night and hula hooped a bit. I don't know if we will sell anything, but a couple of the people there liked our stuff. The president (Mary Beth) of Cartoonists Northwest thought they were cute and liked the humor. So there are other people out there that like poop humor.

At one point, we also had a pinata, which was pretty funny. It was a mermaid that Mary Beth'd had for a while and put fresh candy in. We didn't have a place to hang it so they tried just tossing it in the air, but that didn't work. Then a lady with a cane let people use her cane to whack at it like a baseball. Eventually, no kidding, little Tootsie Rolls started coming out her butt. I was nearly doubled over with laughter. Good times.

I also started working on a Positions Swap for the Harry Potter Crafts group. I am pretty excited. I think the items are going to be great, when they are done. I hope they ship ok!

I've been doing the Tour de Fleece (spinning every day that the Tour de France is running). I was supposed to start on Saturday when I went to Mom's, but I got distracted by washing all the wool. But Sunday and Monday I spun up a couple skeins. One is teeny tiny. 2-ply lace yarn. The other is the fourth of five skeins of Monkey Farts Corridale from Spunky Eclectic which I really like. I somehow messed it up, but whatever. Hopefully the next one will go better.

Day 3:

Day 4 (from knittyandcolor in the Dragonskin colorway which I got in a Phat Fiber Box):

Day 5:

Day 6:

Day 7 (the same knittyandcolor but all spun up and plied; I also washed some of the Monkey Farts to make sure the color wouldn't leech too much, and it didn't!):

Day 8 (wool mill ends and carbonized fiber - I spun this while watching the very weird movie Krull):

Day 9 (from Xtreme Spinning in the Princess Bride colorway from the Phat Fiber box):

I forgot to take a picture of my spinning on day to. But I was just plying the singles from Day 9 and didn't even finish. I drew Arthur and Georgie stuff until about 9, so I didn't have much time. The backgrounds are getting more and more detailed, so I am needing more time.

After the long weekend

We had a lot of fun over the long 4th of July weekend. It started when Angela got off work 2 hours early on Friday! We went to the farmers market and got some sausage which I later turned in to our favorite sausage stuff. Then on Saturday we went to Bellingham to celebrate with Anita and Jim and Isaac and his new girl friend who's name I can't quite remember at the moment. She was nice though.

On Friday we stopped at Fred Meyer to get something or other and the up escalator was broken. I totally mis-stepped the first few steps and sort of lurched like a broken robot. This cause Angela to start laughing and flailing about so much that she tripped and fell UP the stairs. Her knee landed right on the front edge of one of the escalator steps and it gave her a wicked bruise.

Then on Saturday my left leg got devoured by mosquitoes and now it looks like I have leprosy or something.

Then Angela spent the rest of the weekend washing raw wool and drying it in our oven while I played EQ2. It was a fantastic weekend.

Jeez, I almost forgot to mention that I created a store at cafepress for the-jerks.com yesterday and I made a few items; two shirts, a magnet, a button, a bag, and a few others. There's a link in the top nav bar of http://the-jerks.com or you can go there directly at http://www.cafepress.com/the_jerks

--Abe

Happy friday

So http://the-jerks.com/ now has eight comics posted. I'm really excited about how it's coming along. Angela's made great strides on the art in the last few weeks so we've got comics that look even better than the ones that are up now. So keep checking back there's some good stuff coming in the next few weeks.

We checked out the collected Iron Man comics volume one from the library last weekend and I read a few chapters of it this week. Wow. It's not even veiled, it's straight up cold war propaganda. The movies are actually way tamer in this regard. The writing is also *terrible* like it was written in five minutes with no editing on the back of a napkin or something. The art is pretty good though. It's my favorite part by far.

I submitted a short story to the Aeon Award competition this week. First prize is 1000 euros so wish me luck!

--Abe

Snow and Rain

When I was reading blogs, I found this website, the cartoonist studio. Here is my favorite studio, I think: Tom Batiuk, who does Crankshaft. It was fun to look at all the studios. My studio is currently the couch. I have a drawing board that fits on my lap, a TV Table that I set up to put my ink and water and nibs on. And all the drawing stuff that will fit, like the nibs and pens, inks and erasers, go into a fishing tackle box next to the couch. I also have a full spectrum light that I can set on it side behind the drawing board if I need to trace something, like this drawing! I did it on the "brown" paper, Yupo, which I call brown because it is made of polypropylene. It is fun to work on though. I used a water brush and watercolor pencils to make this. I like the trees and snow, but I don't know how well the girl turned out.

I also draw this, though I drew this in my spare time at work. It is on the cardboard from the back of a pad of paper that I had finished. I like it a lot. It was rather inspired by Edward Gorey. I didn't have a reference of his, but it turned out ok.

Here is this week's Ten Ton Studio Sketch Challenge . The first one is pretty dang funny. I would like to draw something, but I can't think of anything.

I started working on this cropped cardigan for summer (I say cardigan because I will be adding sleeves). I had about 800 yards of cotton and didn't know what to do with it, so I looked up the gauge, weight, yardage, and fiber on Ravelry and found 4 patterns that I liked to choose from. How sweet is that. I also found this top that I plan to make using two different colors of yarn. I might even use two different weights. I might have to modify the pattern a bit, but the top part could be a bit lacy. And this tank top, which is cute and simple and super easy to modify, I bet. And this little Hexacomb Cardigan that I want to make with robin's egg blue for the main part and a nice sunny yellow for the hems. If you look at it on Ravelry, there are some great color combos, so I might do another combo other than blue and yellow.

I have also wanted to start another Harry Potter kick lately. I have a bunch in my queue, so I will probably just finish up some of those, but I might start up on the Harry Potter Craft group again. This month is a challenge to create a transfigured object. Not sure what I will do yet. If anything. And I might join the Hogwarts Sock Kit Swap, round 11. I have at least 2 pairs of started Ravenclaw socks that I should finish. One is my own pattern. Another is from the Harry Potter knitting book, which is an okay book, but not great.

I was working on other socks, Ravenswirl and Ada Lovelace, both Rockin' Sock Club kits. But both ended up being too tight to fit over my heel, so I need to rip both out and work a bigger size or something. I am not sure what to do. More increases at the gusset on the Ada Lovelace? I think I will just make the L instead of the medium. Sigh. I had only finished the ankle on the Ravenswirl and the leg part wouldn't fit over my heel. Maybe I have a giant instep?

FridayFridayFriday

Not a lot to talk about today.

I've been working on a short story to submit to the Aeon Award competition. Angela is going to give it one last proof reading this weekend and then I'll pay my fee and send it in.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and experimenting with the mechanics of how I tell the story in my writing. I've primarily written in a first person present tense style over the years but I am experimenting with a third person non-omniscient present tense these days. No one but me has read any of this yet though. Not even Angela although she will, in all likelihood, be the first.

I've been spending a lot of time in the battle grounds in EQ2 lately as well. So far I really prefer my Wizard to the other classes I have. Unfortunately my slots are all full or I'd probably make either a pally or shadowknight specifically for the BGs.

The BGs at level 90 are really brutal. There are *a lot* of people that can one shot Denaso. I was going to link you to Denasos info page on eq2 players but their search is busted atm so you don;t get to see her nerd sheet. I need to get her some more lvl 90 PvP gear and that one shotting should stop. Hopefully. I'm also going to play Eunika, my berzerker, in some BGs as well.

Anyway, off to post on the arachknits etsy shop.

--Abe

I wove

What a fun weekend. On Saturday, our house was all clean, which was a nice change of pace, Abe... Anyways, we had a nice relaxed morning with tea and stuff. Then we went to the Cartoonist NW meeting. The information was OK, about SEO, but I don't know if we will use it. We'll see. Perhaps we will start a couple of twitter accounts since people seem to like those so much. But at the meeting, we talked to the president of the group and decided we would really join and include some of our work in the art show they are having in July in Ballard. More details to follow. We even talked to some of the people in the group instead of just running out of the room. I we showed someone who is working on a new syndicated comic (or getting ready to submit it?) our Bus Stop story. He seemed to like it. I couldn't really tell. His comic was funny. Shrub - keep an eye out for it.

The mom and Jim came over for dinner. They spent the afternoon with one of Jim's professors. Turns out that professor is the dad of one of the ladies I sort of work with. So that was funny. We had a really good time. We were supposed to get a picture of mom's scarf I wove for her for mother's day, but we didn't get a chance. She sent me this "bad" picture. (haha - better than the ones I take.) She didn't want me to post it, but I have to post something. It is just too exciting.

We had some steak and corn and pink mashed potatoes. Cute. And some beer. We tried a white seasonal ale from Pike Brewery, but I don't think anyone particularly cared for it. Then we all moved on to Smithwick's, which has taken its place as my favorite. The dogs behaved OK. Mom was sitting in a chair and Nisa leapt into her lap, but mom seemed to think it was funny. She also got to try on her nearly finished Girl Friday sweater and we bought some buttons for it that should be delivered soon. I hope by the end of the week. I only have 1.5 inches of 1x1 rib left to knit and a couple ends to weave in. Then I can finish blocking it and sew on the buttons. I finally did the thing where you wrap the wet knitting all up in a towel and step on it, then block it. Wow does that make a difference. I will never look back. That is a forever thing for me now. This way it can block over night instead of waiting 3 days to a week for the dratted thing to dry. Thanks, Yarn Harlot!

Before they left, we showed them Super Rub-A-Dub, which they simply did not appreciate, and the demo of Fairy Tale Fights where you play Little Red Riding Hood in a white room and massacre other fairy tale characters. Very funny. That demo cracks me up. It is nothing like the game, so I am wary of buying the game, but we'll see.

In The Jerks news, I am now able to do the two pencils for each week's comics in one evening. If I don't wait to long to get started. I think the upcoming ones are just getting better. At least in regards to my drawing if not in hilarity. And next time I post, I will have an actual non The Jerks drawing to post. I just have to Photoshop it together since the stupid scanner is an inch too small to scan the whole thing.

Update: I posted an image at the Ten Ton Studio sketch challenge. Go check it out. :) It's not super amazing, but it has a lot of background and I really need to work on backgrounds.

Abe's my etsy fiend.

So Abe is posting needles on Etsy for me because I can't be bothered. I am so busy doing other things that I don't have the 30 to 45 minutes or so it takes to do the photo shoot and all the data entry. Buh. Today he posted these funny spades needles.

We got our second comment on the comic, but it seems to have been spam. :'( After next week, I am not sure if I will continue to post comic updates on my Facebook page because I don't think anyone cares. We'll see. Maybe I can annoy them all into looking. It is weird to send the notice out to people who I haven't seen since high school, but whatever. I hear about their nights out drinking or their days out running.

I started posting The Jerks comics to DeviantArt. Though I will just post the previous week's comics there on Tuesday instead of the same day.

The porkchop dinner didn't turn out as well the second night light it does with the Cream of Mushroom soup. Oh well. It was still good. Surprise surprise, the french cook book food doesn't lend itself well to the microwave.

This weekend, I watched Delgo. I liked it more than Abe. It was a nice-to-look-at movie, for sure. Not the best, but interesting enough. It was just a plain classic story, but it was also a Family PG movie, so I didn't expect much. Actually, the concept art they showed throughout the credits was far more amazing than the art in the movie. I wish the movie had been done in the style of the concept art, which was gorgeous. From the concept art, it looks like there could have been more interesting detail in the movie, too, but for a Family movie, they have to keep it short. Weird voice cast, though. Freddie Prince Jr, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Eric Idol, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, many other weird ones.

I got an email from Amazon today about a book that comes out June 29, Knitting MochiMochi by Anna Hrachovec. Wow. I must admit I am excited for that book. Cute Cute stuff. On Ravelry, she has a bunch of cute patterns, like bats whose wings close shut with a button so you can hang them from the ceiling, baby alligators, pigeons that can actually perch on things, a resistor and a capacitor, "dust bunnies," a bath tub with bubbles, a toilet paper roll, and so much more. She also did woodins ("a tiny apparition that lives in fallen trees and is characterized by its asymmetrical ears and leaf tail"), which is a cute pattern from Knitty.

Monday madness

So on Friday night we went to the Phinney farmers market and got some locally grown organic pork chops among other things. On Saturday the pork was thawed but it was too hot to cook. On Sunday I spent most of the day cooking. First I made some bread. Nothing fancy, just the fast white bread recipe from the joy of cooking. I used the SAF Red Instant Yeast that I ordered from King Arthur Flour last week. The bread was awesome, like always, but the yeast made it rise almost double what the old Fleischmann's yeast I used to use did.

Check it out:

Then, for dinner I fried the pork chops:

Made some white sauce with fried mushrooms and onions:

Put it all on rice and served it with some fresh corn:

It was an awesome meal :-)

I caught Nisa being a real jerk on Sunday too. The litter box is in the bathroom for two reasons, first to keep the dogs from trapping the cat in there and second to keep them from eating the kitty-roca. Nisa still finds ways to be a jerk though.

No way to know for sure how long that'd been going on when I caught her but it's entirely possible that the cat had been stuck in the bathroom for a half hour or more.

New comic posted at http://the-jerks.com/ tomorrow morning! Be sure to look for it.

--Abe

Friday!

So, we voted Nisa the jerks of the week because she ate some huge turd on our walk and Angela had to dig it out of her mouth. It was gross. Then, she climbed up on the table and ate all of the cats food. So I pushed the chairs in as far as they would go and later I caught her pushing one of the chairs out!

We've posted two comics on http://the-jerks.com/ this week. Our schedule is Tuesdays and Thursdays. It look like we had about 3K hits since Tuesday morning which is pretty good. Hopefully that will get a lot bigger over the next six months or so.

I've been busy all day and I have a lot to do still so this one is short.

--Abe

The Jerks is a live web comic!

Woot. So the comic is up: the-jerks.com. Every Tuesday, Thursday, barring Abe forgetting. We have about a month of backlog. I haven't really worked on much else, drawing wise. I do have these sketches I did during breaks at work.

Abe has been looking over the views on the-jerks.com and they are coming from all over the world. But mostly between 9 and 5 on the server time. Weird, right?

We did go see Iron Man 2 last weekend. That was actually a really fun movie and I have no idea why it got such bad reviews. I thought it was really fun and completely in the same vein as the first one. It was so loud though. Almost too loud for me to hear, but not quite, if you know what I mean. I am so glad we saw it in theaters. Maybe the bad reviews were from "traditionalist" Iron Man fans, but I know nothing about Iron Man except these movies. Abe and I were talking about it and we can't think of any good way to follow all the "canon" from the comics. They are going to draw in people with no knowledge of background so everything is new. If they just tried to take an existing comic and make that into a movie, it wouldn't translate well because the comics tend to assume a basic amount of knowledge (usually it seems to me). I like the approach they have taken where they make a story based on existing pieces of story. It is a new story based on old story. That way it is new to the newbies and the old fans. Old fans get to see live action pieces of the story they love but in new context. I could just be talking out my butt, but I like how they are doing them.

I have been watching Ten Ton Studios sketch challenge and their challenge this week is what a superhero of supervillain of your choice would look like from a different era. There are already some really good ones. I might do the drawing, but I don't know if I will enter. Can you say lazy? Scanning sucks. I dream of one day owning a scanner large enough to scan in one shot a 9x12 piece of paper. Ooh. That is about an inch or half an inch larger in width and length than my current one. Annoying, right? I have no idea what superhero I would draw or what era to move them too. Abe had a good idea that I will try though. If I can get it done in time, maybe I will post it. I only have to give it away if the winner likes mine enough and that is a bit of an honor.

I know I had an epiphany about the Water Lady story, but I haven't been able to bring myself to draw any character sketches yet. I really need to get on that. In my defense, I have been working on The Jerks and trying to focus on that. Though I guess sometimes I get distracted by drawing a picture for the circus story, which doesn't even have a story line yet.

This past Friday, I got my May Rockin' Sock Club kit in the mail. I am doing the Ada Lovelace sock. It came with a nice green Spirits yarn, which means it is barely colored at all, but I think it is lovely. The pattern is sort of steam-punk according to the description from the designer. It has a mix of lace and cables, which I just love. In fact, that is used on my spats. I think I should make some of those spats and sell them on Etsy. And some of my gloves. Today, I will get Abe to start posting items on Etsy. I have a fair number of items ready to post, but they need pictures and stuff and Abe can post them. Anyways, back to the new sock kit, I started Friday night and am currently working on the heel flap of the first sock. So I am about a quarter done. This cuff looks kind of short, but complicated, so it is hard to gauge. I am working on this instead of my mom's sweater. Bad Angela. But my plan is to work complete the first sock, complete the second sleeve of mom's cardigan, complete the second sock, and then complete the right front of mom's cardigan. Then I will basically be done with both. But not really, because then on the sweater, I have to block it, sew it, and knit the button band stuff. Which shouldn't take too long. And I can't finish that until mom gets me the buttons so I know how big, where, and how many button holes to make.

Monday

So, the new website for our comics is a terribly kept secret :-)

I've finally got it all working and set up the way we want it so we are going to post the first comic there tomorrow. We'll be posting comics there on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This blog will continue to be our personal blog. We haven't decided on the posting schedule for this blog yet but we'll let you now as soon as we figure it out.

I made some kick ass oatmeal, maple syrup and bacon bread yesterday. It makes the best damn sandwiches :-)

I'm watching the Ken Burns WW II documentary, The War, while I work on the site. It's pretty fantastic.

--Abe