This morning I received a box in the mail containing the paper for issues 4 and 5 of Wits End. It’s a bit momentous for me–I’ve been working on these stories for a long time, in one form or another, but the end is in sight. I will have a complete collected volume sometime in 2015. But before I really dig in and start drawing new pages, I have a few more small projects or parts of projects that I want to get out of the way.
I’m starting to put together my spring convention schedule and figure out my inventory for shows, exploring possibilities for making handcrafted sketchbooks and other dinosaur themed items, heading to an academic conference in Albuquerque, and continuing my tradition of Sketch-A-Day February. Though I am already working on rewrites, thumbnails and rough pencils for issue 4 of Wits End, I will not be ready to start posting pages until late February or early March.
But no new pages yet doesn’t mean you have to live without new art! Tomorrow begins Sketch-A-Day February, my yearly tradition of spending the shortest month of the year sketching every day. It’s going to work a little differently this year though, for a few reasons.
1. I intend to do most of the sketching traditionally this year, and because of my work schedule and travel plans I am not going to be doing daily posts online. Instead, I intend to scan and post chunks of about a weeks worth of sketches all at once.
2. If you comment on this post, email, tweet, or message me with your favorite dinosaur, I will draw that dinosaur doing something not typically associated with dinosaur behavior (unless I am over saturated with dinosaur requests, in which case I will have to pick and choose which requests I can fill, or keep drawing dinosaurs after the end of the month, which would not be a bad thing at all).
3. I will also be doing Q&A sketch comics with the cast of Wits End. If you have questions for Francis, Scribbulous, Theodorus, Edward or Lucy, or any of the other characters appearing in issues 1-3, ask away!
You can follow the progress of Sketch-A-Day February on tumblr or twitter.