Yesterday was Jenny's father's birthday, and we spent most of the day over in Coeur d'Alene with her parents. We went to see the Surrogates with him - which was a pretty awesome sci-fi flick (based on an equally cool indy comic). Glad we got to see it in the theatre, though I think it could've been a bit longer.

Then after the movie the four of us went out for Thai food at the local Thai Bamboo (which was, of course, delicious), and then caught up on a bunch of recorded TV from the past week. A very fun and relaxing day!

The library is doing sort of an "employee exchange" program, where they're moving some people to different branches so they can see how things might be run differently and meet other co-workers. So now Jenny is working up at the North Spokane branch once a month. Her first day was this last Thursday, and she really enjoyed it, although it does mean a much longer commute (like 45 minutes instead of 15).

Otherwise things are going OK. Jenny had her year review at the library, which went well and got her a raise (yay!). The temperature is dropping, and even dipping to freezing occasionally, but the apartment seems to be holding the heat pretty well. Maybe those new energy-efficient windows they installed actually work.

I've been working on some commissions and tinkering with one of my comic ideas. Doing the 24 Hour Comic Challenge has definitely been an inspiration to get back to work on it - hopefully I'll have more concrete news on that relatively soon...

Jenny's been working on a bunch of cool crocheting projects, which we really need to take some pictures of and post up. It would probably help if we had a decent digital camera, since right now we have 3 old ones that all only work about half the time. 

Local Arts & Crafts People: The next Spokane Comicsmiths' Guild is on Sunday the 18th at Merlyns, from 3-6 pm. The next Crafty Club meeting is on Friday the 23rd at the Spokane Valley Library, and starts at 7 pm. Feel free to leave a comment if you're interested in more information.

And I also drew up 4 Star Wars pictures for the kids coloring contest, which you can see here: Star Wars Coloring Pics!

Participating were myself and:

• Levi Skeen
• Matt Nelson
• Jesse Acosta
• James Bobbitt

Took care of some much needed chores: laundry, dishes, some cleaning, and bill paying. Got started on another commission and brainstormed some other ideas. I think this week will be a bit more productive than some recent ones...

We always have problems with wasps making nests in the eaves of the apartment building - I had the maintenance people come by earlier in the summer and take some of the super bug spray to the one's by our windows. But now we've got a giant nest in the stairwell outside our apartment. I put in a work order for them to do something about it - hopefully they've got a tall ladder.

Oh, and a while back I had posted a few of those daily Avengers sketches I was doing. Well, I finished my A to Z list. They're all up on my deviantArt page (http://piotrov.deviantart.com), and just for fun I stuck them all together in one big image. You can click on the image for a bigger version:

...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)!

They just revealed the results from the most recent Project: Rooftop contest (which was to re-design Batman as if former Robin Dick Grayson was to take over for Bruce Wayne), and while I didn't win, I was pleasantly surprised to see my entry had made it into the Runners-Up. This looked to be their most popular contest yet, with a huge amount of impressive entries, so I'm just happy that I was even mentioned. You can see the winners and results here: Project: Rooftop Batman 2.0 Results

I''m still participating in the AngelCrusher's Fighting League art jam/trade over on deviantArt.com, although I did get behind when I was doped up and recovering from my dentist visit. After I was back to semi-normal, I knocked out the 2 entries I was missing and am now mostly caught up. Just have to get the last 2 entries done in the next 5 days before the semi-final round starts. You can check out what I've done over at my deviantArt page: Peter's Gallery on deviantArt

Jenny had her first Crafty Club at the library last Friday, and it was a success, although she's thinking of changing the time so that more people could attend. She did make a necklace for her mother's birthday, which her mom loved. She's actually in the process of modifying it right now so it fits a little better, but here's a scan of it in it's original incarnation:

We finally went and picked up our digital TV converter boxes today. We got our discount cards some time last month, and we were really lucky, as it seems we might've got some of the very last ones.

So, I got one of them hooked up - to the smaller TV in the studio - and I'm not extraordinarily impressed, but I guess it's OK. Not too excited about having yet another remote to worry about losing (well, actually 2, counting both boxes), and I'm not sure yet how I'm going to set up the other one with our ancient VCR without messing with a splitter of some kind. I'm sure I'll figure something out, though. The only big positive so far is when I realized I'd be able to watch Smackdown again. :)

I drew up the 4 cards I'm contributing to this year's Blue Line Pro sketch card auction over the last couple of days. This is the second year that they're doing this event, and all proceeds will go to benefit the American Cancer Society.

I was going to use water colors on these, but I started and was quickly reminded how the Blue Line cards don't take to wet media, so they ended up being mostly colored pencils. And since my scanner still hates colored pencil, the scans look more like I scrawled them with crayon. I swear they look better in person....

Please help to spread the word about this event. The auction should be taking place the first week of April, but I'll be sure to post a link when it actually starts.

Here's both the black & white and color scans of my cards. And in case anyone's wondering, they're of (clockwise from upper left) : Eowyn in my favorite scene from Lord of the Rings; Dr. Manhatten, Rorschach and Ozymandias from Watchmen; Asajj Ventress from the Star Wars "Clone Wars" cartoon; and Spaceboy and Rumor from the Umbrella Academy comic book.

Well, the computer seems to be cleaned up OK. I'm glad I had recently backed up the hard drive - I need to get in the habit of doing that more often....

Now I'm trying to get back to "work", as it were. No actual work, of course, as it seems everyone is losing their jobs left and right now. I'm still looking, but there's less and less openings, and more people to compete with (most of whom probably have more education and better experience than myself).

So, it's (literally) back to the drawing board. The AFL over at deviantArt started this week, and I'm going to try to do all of my entries as sequential pages, just for the practice. I got my first fight pencilled today, and will finish it and my second one over the weekend.

I also realized that the American Cancer Association Sketch Card Auction due date is drawing near, and I need to submit to that. I got my blank cards back before the new year, and told myself I had plenty of time... well, March 1st is right around the corner, so I'll need to do those and get them in the mail this week. It's a great fundraising event, and I'll post more info about the actual auction whenever I get it.

Jenny's started working on a new craft project today - hand making fabric beads to eventually turn into jewelry. Her first experiments are already looking pretty good - I'm sure she'll post about it over at our communal blog when she gets the chance.

Also, we got our doors re-keyed today. Exciting, I know.

Been a while since I did the weekly sketches thing, so I figured I should get back in the habit. Just a page of scribbles from my sketchbook. And yes, that's the Super Friends version of Wonder Woman....

We finally got an official notice from the apartment people regarding our new appliances - they're doing our building next week, and our apartment is scheduled for the 29th. So less than a week and we'll (hopefully) have a new stove, fridge and dishwasher! Maybe even new washer and dryer, but the note they left wasn't specific, just that we needed to clear stuff out from the fridge, under the stove and under the sink before the maintenance guys get here.

They're having an apartment "party"/meeting this afternoon, where they're supposed to be fielding questions about what's going on. But really, all we wanted to know was when, so no point in going now.

Also, Project: Rooftop (a fan site for artists that deals with re-designing superhero costumes) is running another one of their contests. This one is to make a new Batman design, based on the idea of Dick Grayson (the original Robin) taking over for Bruce Wayne. My entry basically tried to evolve his current Nightwing persona into something a bit more "Bat-ty".