Haven’t worked on either novel, because of my schedule, but I haven’t been totally non-creative. Last week between my daughter and I we made ten different batches of cookies. Wouldn’t think all that cookie baking would be a lot of work, but it is. Plus it makes me move slower than normal lol.

I have been a Woot.com fanatic for years. Woot is a daily deal site where at midnight central time (I’m in eastern, d’oh!) they put up an item for sale for 24 hours for a great price. Now, not too long back, they started a spin-off site called shirt.woot.com (there is also sellout.woot.com, and wine.woot.com, but we’re not going to go into them.) Shirt.woot features a new t-shirt design every day of the week, and three of those designs are the top three vote getters in their weekly competition called a “Derby.” That’s where the designers post their concept ideas for t-shirts and the Woot community votes on which they like. And yes, if you are one of the lucky three top ones, you do get paid $$$ for your design.

I’d been following the site for a while, but been a little more serious about it for a few weeks. I have been following the derbies, and tempted to try them. Now, as I said before, I consider myself a writer first, and an artist second, but I have been trying to bump up my art. I kept wanting to try, but kept holding back because of a) slight intimidation, and b) the damn wrist. I can’t hold a pencil for long enough to do a detailed drawing fast right now. (They announce the theme on Thursday, and open for submissions from Friday to Thurs, but if your submission isn’t in the first two days it’s got a really hard hill to make it to the top.) But this week’s theme was neat (doing the design in one unbroken line, so I decided to give it a try. (Click if you are a Woot member and want to vote for me!)

it’s not what I would call perfect by any means, but I did it and that is what matters. I had done some concept sketches Friday, my daughter cut her foot last night and wiped out any chance I might have had to work on it yesterday after work, but today I did it. I sketched it in pencil, then drew it with my micron pens. Scanned it in and worked on it in paint shop pro. I’m ok with how it turned out actually.

It’s titled “It’s Not Lost” and the caption is (and yes it sucks, but I was brain dead by that time):

As the world advances, and we become physically synthetic, what will we retain of our humanity?

I have a new DigiPro tablet (that I got from Woot actually!) that I haven’t broken out and used yet, but I think I will shortly. I may not do shirt.woot every week, but it is along the same kind of exercises as NaNoWriMo - it forces me to do it, and not obsess too much over getting it “just right.”

Now tomorrow I must upgrade my site to WordPress 2.7 *sigh*

Couple of sketches below, along with the models I used. I’m more focusing on the build of the creatures, shape and muscles and stuff like that. Click to see bigger.

One more, probably unfinished, I think I might fill it in.