...since I haven't blogged in a while:

The 4th of July was good - we just headed over to Jenny's folks' place and relaxed and had lots of barbeque. Jenny also went to a beading exhibit at the fairgrounds with her mom, and picked up a bunch of cool stuff she can use in her jewelry making. We didn't stick around for the fireworks spectacular, since we got stuck in the traffic trying to get out of CdA last year and didn't want a repeat experience. Instead we got out early and still heard plenty of illegal fireworks going off around here.

It's cooled off a bit over the past few days, and even rained some. We were over in CdA on Sunday and got to see an awesome lightning storm, but all we got here was a tiny bit of thunder off in the distance.

There's still some cold/flu type bug going around, and we think Jenny brought it home from work and gave it to me. I'm sure it's nothing major, but it's still annoying. The heat saps enough energy from me as it is, and this certainly doesn't help.

Jenny's taking the day off from work this Wednesday, as it's our 2 year wedding anniversary. We don't have anything big planned, although we're thinking of walking around downtown and going to Riverfront Park. The new Harry Potter film also comes out that day, so we'll be seeing that if nothing else. :)

I've been attempting to write more than draw lately, as I want to get to work on these 2 different comic ideas I've got and figure it'd help to actually have a story to draw before I dive in.

For the past couple of weeks I have been doing daily sketches of The Avengers and posting them on my deviantArt page. I started with Ant-Man and am working my way through the alphabet, drawing one character per letter. Here's the first 9, and the rest can be seen here: http://piotrov.deviantart.com

Things have been going well enough, if not particularly exciting. But then, I guess that's nothing to complain about.

Jenny had her dentist appointment on Friday; she hadn't gone quite as long as I since her last check up, but it'd still been about 10 years. But she had nothing to worry about, as her teeth were in fine shape - no cavities or problems.

It's back to feeling like summer, with temperatures in the 80's and up to 90. Looks like more of the same this week, so I'm thinking we'll be breaking down soon and turning on the A/C. Which means higher electric bills. Yay.

Sunday was our monthly meeting of the Spokane Comicsmiths Guild, the group of local artists and writers that was formed after last year's 24 Hour Comicbook Day. We've begun planning for the next 24HCBD, which this year falls on October 3rd and will again be hosted by local shop Merlyns. We also discussed some other possible plans for this coming year which unfortunately are only in the discussion stage, so I won't go into details yet.

And, of course, we also sat around and drew. I began sketching out designs for another character in my Fight City superhero comic - a super-genius crime boss known as "Brains" McBannon. I think these are the closest so far to what I want:

Anyone who might be in the area this Saturday (May 30) should be sure to check out the 3rd annual Spokane Comic-Con, being held at the Spokane Falls Community College from 10-5.

Jenny normally works on Saturdays, but was able to get the day off, so we plan on spending the whole day there just hanging out and being geeks (next year I hope to have a table there myself...). Several of my friends will be there, however, so be sure to swing by their tables and check out their work. You can find a lot of them on deviantArt:

Ben Hansen
Jesse Acosta
Lars Brown
Levi Skeen
Matt Nelson

More information about the convention can be found here: Spokane Comic-Con 

Also this weekend (Friday through Sunday) is Spokane Art-Fest, the annual arts and music fair, sponsored by Spokane's Museum of Arts & Culture. You can find out more about it here: Spokane Art-Fest

And finally, Jenny also has her Crafty Club meeting on Friday, which she organizes through the library (where she works). Needless to say, we plan on being pretty busy this weekend, but it should be a lot of fun!

Here's my entry for the current contest running over at Project: Rooftop. This one was to design a new costume for Wolverine, to go along with the release of his recent movie. 

I tried to make a somewhat "realistic" outfit for him, inspired somewhat by the X-Men movie costumes and those designed by Frank Quitely during his and Grant Morrison's run on the New X-Men comic.

This was actually the second design I came up with. My first attempt can be seen over at my deviantArt page: Discarded Wolverine Design

Speaking of Wolverine, I did see his new movie last week and it was... OK. Not great, but still entertaining. Some good action scenes, with a couple of CGI bits that could have been improved. But I did like it more than the last X-Men movie, so I guess that's something.

We also saw the new Star Trek, and it was excellent! JJ Abrams did a great job of re-starting the series for a new generation, while not erasing or stepping on any of the stories that came before. Well worth seeing in the theatre - I hope the inevitable sequels will be just as good.

• Jesse Acosta


• Lars Brown


• Levi Skeen


• Matt Nelson


• Mike Lail

A few miscellaneous things that I haven't really blogged/twittered about. Just trying to catch up....

• Our local bank is Washington Mutual, which is of course now becoming Chase. Not particularly pleased about that, but we don't do much banking anyway, so it's probably nothing to worry about. I am glad that Jenny and I both hung on to our credit union accounts in Alaska when we moved...
  
  
• I'd mentioned the wasps coming back - I did get the maintenance people over here to spray bug killer and knock down their hives, and it seemed to have done the job. There's still a few around, but they're not swarming directly outside our windows anymore. It got really bad last year, with wasps regularly getting into the house, even after we got the new windows installed.
  
  
• Avista is our local electric utility provider, and they've already been catching a lot of flack recently for raising their already high rates in the face of the current economic conditions. We normally pay our bill on-line, but when we logged on last week we found they'd switched to a new 3rd party company to handle their billing transactions. With this comes the new requirement that we give them our bank account information - even though we're paying with a credit card. We said no, and sent them a check. Just rediculous...
  
  
• We hadn't been watching Chuck, although we had caught bits and pieces of it (since it's on right before Heroes). Jenny decided to start watching it on-line, since about half the series is available, and now we're both huge fans. The show's hilarious, with a lot of geeky in-jokes, and has got some awesome guest stars. Luckily we got caught up in time for tonight's episode, which is the season finale. Unfortunately, it's not certain whether it'll be around next year. Just our luck that we'd get hooked on a show right before it get's cancelled... :)

Also, the AFL tournament I was participating in is over, with Gene Kelly being the champion this time around. For his final entry, instead of just an illustration or comic page, Gene actually made a 2 person flash video game pitting his character against his opponent's! It's really impressive, and can be seen here: AFL 3 - Final Battle

I drew up this pic of his character Rocket, as a congratulations for his well deserved win:

Today was our monthly local artist meet-up; not a huge turn out, but quite a few people had other understandably pressing matters that kept them away. Still, we all produced some art, discussed some new projects we had started working on, and squared away our plans for Free Comic Book Day.

For any who are going to be in Spokane on May 2nd - a few of us will be at Merlyn's from 11-3 (the store opens at 10 am) doing free sketches for any kids 10 and under. Even if you're not a kid, please swing by and pick up some free comics and check out everything else the shop has to offer.

Also, the 3rd annual Spokane Comic-Con is rapidly approaching. This year it will be at the Spokane Falls Community College on May 30th from 10-5. Jenny was actually able to get the time requested off from work, and we'll both be there, but only as fans, hanging out and having geeky fun. I'm planning on getting a table next year, as I'll (hopefully) have something to showcase. Guess we'll just see what I can get done between now and then...

Otherwise, the weekend was good, and mostly relaxing. We were supposed to hang out with our friend Jamie on Friday, but it was his mom's birthday. So maybe we'll see him later this week. We ended up going over to CdA to take the car in for an oil change, and going out to lunch with Jenny's parents, so everything worked out OK anyway.

I've been sketching some, but mostly just doing research and some writing for a new project, and I really need to get some actual artwork done this week. I got knocked out of the AFL competition over on deviantArt, but I haven't actually finished my last entry. I need to do that, and I also wanted to do some fan-art for a few characters that I didn't get to face. The un-ending hunt for a day-job continues as well.

Also, I wanted to wish "Happy Birthday!" to our good friends Alex (on the 19th) and Shannon (on the 20th)!

Every year, Spokane hosts the Get Lit! literature festival, which usually includes lots of writing workshops and speakings by authors. This year they also branched out into graphic novels, with a panel on comics and comic creation. Manny Trembley and Eric Anderson, the two local creators of Panda Xpress and Sam Noir, both published by Image Comics, hosted an hour long discussion about the comic industry.

I was pleasantly surprised by the fairly large turn out and, considering comic books' reputation for having a predominantly young adult male readership, it was encouraging to see that more than half of those that showed up for the panel were female, of all ages. There were a few teachers present as well, who were interested in using comics in their classrooms, which was also nice to see.

The discussion was really interesting, and I learned quite a bit, especially about the publishing aspect. It was also great to meet and talk with Manny and Eric after the panel.

The monthly Spokane Comic Artists Meet-Up (S.C.A.M. ? Hm, maybe not the best acronym... ) is tomorrow at local comic & game shop Merlyns at 3 pm. It's not anything especially organized, mostly just an excuse for artists and writers to get out of the house and get together and chat about comics or whatever, but it's been a great opportunity to meet some fellow local creators and comic fans.

One thing we do have planned is for the upcoming annual Free Comic Book Day. FCBD is a great opportunity to introduce comics to new readers, and especially to get kids interested, so a few of us will be hanging out at Merlyns and drawing sketches for kids 10 and under for free. Should be fun. :)

• 12:18 Slow start to a beautiful day. Waiting for call back about plans for the day. Need food... #
• 15:47 Hm. Plans fell thru, but worked out OK - bills are payed, checkbook is balanced, dishes are done. Hooray for responsible type stuff... #
• 18:08 Our address was randomly selected for Govt Census Survey. Filling out now. Argh. Taxes are more fun... #
• 23:45 Well, today was surprisingly productive. Lot of overdue chores done. Out for walk. Finishing dinner then maybe attempting art. #

I forgot to mention before - I set up a blog over on Wordpress as a pseudo-website for myself. The journal portion is just the same as you'd see here or  any of my other blogs (for now), but I wanted something I could use as a somewhat organized portfolio as well. Anyway, it's a work-in-progress, but it's here:

The New Site

Also, I got my Twitter feed set up to post to all of my various other pages, so that should (maybe) be more convenient. MySpace, deviantArt and Wordpress all have built in widgets for Twitter, and the entries should show up on Blogger and Livejournal as a single bulk post once a day.

And lastly, we're planning on cleaning out our Flickr account pretty soon here. We initially set it up as a Pro account and uploaded ALL of our wedding pictures for anyone to see and/or save, but it's been a year and a half or so since then and we figure anyone who wanted pictures probably already has them. Also, we let our Pro account expire, so it only shows the last 200 pictures anyway.

So we'll be taking down the vast majority of the wedding pictures and probably editing the remainder of them. Then we'll hopefully start actually posting other photos, as well as art.

• 16:08 Finding my way around this whole "Twitter" thing.... #
• 18:14 Tweetdeck's installed, Loudtwitter's activated. Guess I should change the background; but first, dinner. #

Some of Jenny's family have signed up for Facebook, so she signed up, and I went ahead and reactivated my account as well. Much of the problems I had with it initially were actually fixed during their most recent update (which, of course, happened just after I left), so I should be sticking around this time...

I also signed up on LinkedIn - my friend Levi sent me an invite, and I figured it certainly couldn't hurt my chances of finding some work and networking. I haven't done much with it yet, beyond just setting up my profile.

And finally, I went ahead and signed up for Twitter. It was mainly because there were several feeds (mostly pro artists and writers) that I wanted to keep track of anyway, I figured I'd might as well sign up and "follow" them. I also realized that while I keep intending to blog on more of a regular basis, I usually don't want to post an entry if it's just one little blurb - so I wait, and then either don't post at all or post one gigantic entry. Sooo, that's just what Twitter's for, right?

I'm still kicking the tires on Twitter, as well as putting my Facebook page back in order, but here's all the new links:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

It definately seemed like Spring today - it was in the 60s, the sun was shining, and I opened up some windows to let the fresh air in. Felt great. We've been getting back to taking regular walks in the evening (easing back into some much needed exercise), and the nice weather is a great incentive.

Job hunting continues. Another spot opened up at the library which I applied for, as well as some other jobs I found online. Guess we'll see how that goes.

Other than lacking in money, things are going alright, I guess. Besides job hunting, mostly just trying to work on art inbetween keeping the apartment clean. Can't really complain, considering the state of the economy and how hard it's hit some people.

Oh, and our new neighbors seem OK so far. They're an older couple with a teenage daughter, and they seem fairly normal. Hopefully normal = quiet.

I was woke up the other day by someone stomping up the stairs towards our apartment, and my automatic first thought was that it must be the maintenance people and they were about to start hammering on our door for some reason.... however, it was actually our new neighbors moving in!

Apparently they finally found someone to fill that unit after it being empty for the last few months. I went out to check the mail while they were unloading their moving van and introduced myself. They told me their names, but I honestly forgot them as soon as I was back inside (I'm really horrible with names...). I mainly just wanted to let them know that yes, there was someone living next door, and help them put a face to it. Maybe they'll be less likely to be excessively loud and obnoxious if we atleast attempt to be friendly towards them. Guess we'll see.

Well, they probably can't be any worse than our last neighbors. I hope....