Disinclined to action

Well, it's been a few days.  Productive ones, after a fashion.  Book store today, I replaced my copy of The Prince finally, and found a Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Dead Souls that I'll start reading after I finish this tawdry account of 17th century episcopal mayhem.  I finished a number of things in the works (although not the last panel of this story, which is infuriating me and I might throw it out of something.  A window.  Or a moving car.), started a few others, finished a couple of those.  Behold-


The fourth and (despite the description there) possibly last part of that line of things.  Seen before, but now finished for real.  The middle bear turned out the best.  The thing is now lined up on my wall, eight feet long and looking weird.


This is revisiting a nostalgic idea a bit.  I find myself doing these when I'm particularly bearing-less.  It's tied to memory that makes me feel better.  A different chain of causation that fired off in some direction that I didn't follow.


And then I did this.  I am actually very pleased with this.  It may well be my favorite.  I've started using gouache in certain ways.  I can't paint in the stuff for shit, but I can use it to highlight certain things.  I haven't done any particularly bloody images in a while, what with this story business being largely bloodless (and the bloody frames done first), so I felt I needed to balance that out a bit.  It worked out.  More blood.  More entrails.  More shattered bone.  And more of this faun.  Definitely more of that faun.


And at long last!!!  A month or two ago, my friend and fellow skull enthusiast RJ Adams informed me that he had a gift to bring into town on his next sojourn.  He visits the hostel every few months to write and (the lucky bastard) examine the Cal Academy's basement specimen collection.  Yesterday he arrived, with a plastic basin in tow full of isopropyl alcohol solution and baby cougar skull.  I am very pleased with this.  I'm still mulling over exactly how I want to mount it.  I'm probably going to go with the bell jar, half exploded and half intact.  I'm just loathe to start taking it apart, because it's 100% complete and in amazing condition.  I'll get to it.  In other bone project news, I'm now soaking my beaver skull and my goat spine in peroxide, so I'll be getting to those soon as well.

Tonight I'm still chasing a ghost.  Waiting here on a suggestion, a hint, the possibility that I might be visited is enough to keep me riveted in place.  Even as I doubt it'll come to pass, I invest myself in that slim probability.  I'm goddam hopeless.