I’m making fake meat and stew this afternoon in preparation for the week ahead. I’m kinda following a recipe, which calls for thyme and sage.
I don’t know which of these spices it is, but I always regret putting it into things: it smells like the lining of an antique suitcase.
Edit: My stew turned out okay. Doesn’t taste like a suitcase!
Here’s the recipe I kinda followed:
http://www.brandnewvegan.com/recipes/soups/vegetable-stew
The “wheat meat” recipe is from a book called Seitan and Beyond.
Here’s an image I drew for the next Coach book that isn’t going to make the cut. (But I’m happy with it and don’t want it to be lost.)
And here’s one where I got caught up in giving the character these overly detailed posters in his room…
…except in the final version you can’t even see them.
And here’s my fortnightly plan for the last little bit before Craig gets home:
Finally, here’s a picture of my folks and the birthday cakewreck. It makes me happy to see them smiling.
My Dad’s 83rd birthday was this weekend, which in itself is quite an achievement, I figure.
I was stuck about what to draw for his card — surely not another flat cartoon of him in his wheelchair — so I stopped for a moment and thought about some happy memory I could portray.
I immediately flashed back to a lake somewhere in Ontario, where Dad was pointing out fossils in the rocks. No matter the subject, when I was a kid I could ask him any question about the world and he always had the answer. I thought he was brilliant.
This, of course, was also the occasion for my next cakewreck — this time a chocolate cake with cocoa-avocado frosting (better than it sounds) and a peanut butter caramel drizzle (which didn’t thicken and just soaked in, but at least tasted good).
What we didn’t eat at dinner Saturday evening, I brought to the home yesterday, and we shared it with the staff. Everyone seemed to like it — so there’s another bit of food activism: “Vegan food isn’t lifeless, and is more than tofu.”
My Comics Club friend Tyler perfected the image with a few subtle finishing touches:
In related news, I’ve found a place that sells supplements for dogs (Vecado) and provides recipes for making your own dog food. (The commercial bags of kibble are way too expensive — like two to three times the price of regular food).
I’ve also got a dehydrator and am trying to work out how best to make sweet potato chews (I mummified the life out of the last batch; Doug wouldn’t eat them).
So I hope to finally transition Doug to being a plant-based doggo. Despite bone-headed comment sections (“Dogs are carnivores! How do I know this? Because I’m insisting on the internet!”), dogs have been omnivores eating our scraps for about 30,000 years, and it seems Doug can get everything he needs with real food and the right supplements. He’ll also not be subjected to the same needless Standard American Diet diseases humans get — which are, apparently, what kills most dogs, too.
I’ve felt out of integrity about the food issue since we got Doug. Technically, I wouldn’t buy animal-derived food when I could help it, but that’s just abdicating responsibility.
Fingers crossed I can find a solution that isn’t too expensive, too much work, and that Doug will enjoy. Given how much he always wants our food, I figure he won’t miss the kibble.
Hopefully I can get this implemented before Craig gets home so there’s a routine and he won’t have to figure out what to do with this stuff.
And, finally, I reworked my website last night, since switching to Apple stuff meant I lost access to the Windows program I used before to create my site. Hopefully everything still works, and naturally I want to redo bits — like the front page.
My lovely Edinburgh friend Wendy and I are working through this snowy day, tackling side-by-side the blocks in our personal passion projects.
For me, today was going to be about working on the script for my comic, but the depth and honesty of my conversations with Wendy made me see that the reason I wasn’t working on the story is that I hated the way my drawing looked after the first panel.
She suggested that I practice drawing the characters over and over. So I did, and I slowed down to do better roughs than the too-rough, too-loose ones I’d done for those pages.
I worked on that, and — breakthrough! Now what I see on-screen matches the feel of what I did on paper. This is new territory, and I need practice; I can’t just jump to product.
Wendy and I have also been down in the mines of Clip Studio Paint, the program I use to do all my digital drawing. She’s figured out one quarter of it, I’ve figured out the other (half is still The Realm of Mysteries), so we’re able to geek out about all the specifics, but we’ve also shared gifts of really helpful shortcuts and solutions.
I just dashed out through the snow to the grocery store, and now we’re set to make coffee and tea, put our heads down, hide out, and bash through our projects.
I rarely repost anything, but this is just too close to home not to memorialize it somehow. I must have this conversation at least once a week.
I’m trying to figure out a new time management game to play — something to justify why I keep track of my working time, and to reward me for the progress I make.
At a loss for any better unifying theme, I remembered Disney’s old Sword and the Stone movie, which I loved as a kid — I think I had a book about it — though the movie looks pretty sketchily drawn and Sixties-loopy now. So I thought that might be one way to go, the pieces evolving through different critters up to a final challenge.
I dunno. Like my comic book story, sometimes it’s hard to get traction on things that I’m doing just for myself.
I have roughed and inked several pages for the comic, though. I’m feeling very iffy about it, but I suppose that’s natural when doing something completely new and different, drawing on skills that… well, that I haven’t developed yet.
So I’m glad that Dan, the team, and I are working on a new book. That’s solid ground, and helps re-motivate my other projects, too: “Oh yeah, that’s what I wanted to explore.”
Hello. I know I haven’t posted anything in a while. I’m still adjusting to changing computers, switching things over to new programs and such.
So, yes, the website’s going to be changing as I move to a new design program.
In the meantime, here’s a dragon:
Well, this is exciting: Last night I went to Comics Club, and there I tried to turn on my PC.
It wouldn’t turn on.
Okay, I’d just hold down the power key; I’ve had start-up trouble like that with PCs before.
Nothing.
I went home, plugged it in, and it still wouldn’t start. So I went around the shops to see if I could buy a replacement — a Surface Pro, perhaps? But both the computer shops in town were out of the pens. So I went home and gave it some thought.
That thinking led me to dash out this morning and buy an iPad Pro. I’d been contemplating it and convinced myself I didn’t need to make the change. Fate had other plans.
I’m glad. While it’s a pain to have to reconfigure a new device, I kept having to do that every couple of months with the PC anyway, because they just seem to get jammed-up over time (part of which is my fault, I’m sure, because I just can’t leave them alone, and am always trying out new software, betas, removing things, and so on).
Already, though, it’s delicious using this machine: the apps are all so much nicer-looking, and they just work, whereas on the PC I felt like I was always fighting to get the machine to do the most basic things (such as synchronize my calendar — like, seriously, how is that a problem in 2018?).
Even better: Our head of Tech and my team leader have said they’ll reimburse me for it, plus send me an old Mac Mini as my full computer (because apps can only do so much).
It’s fun working with a really successful company: they never begrudge us the tools we need to do the work (which makes me feel like they appreciate the work, too).
Phew!
Back to reinstalling all my brushes in Clip Studio Paint. (I can’t believe this program is available on the iPad, but now I’ve used it, and… yup, it’s the whole thing!)
P.S. Hours and hours later, I’m all set up and ready to create stuff.
