Some time last week I finally dusted off the 10 Things file and got working on it again. I’m currently working on page…well, I don’t know which number it will be, I haven’t been keeping track. But, it has 1 hen, 2 ducks, 3 squawking geese, 4 limerick oysters, 5 corpulent porpoises, 6 pairs of Don Alverso’s Tweezers, and 7 THOUSAND Macedonians dressed in full battle array on it:

Toby-Gray-10-things-1-7-WIP

These last pages are getting complicated…

I have corner registration marks roughed in on a separate layer still turned on here. They just give me a visual reminder to keep the “action” in a particular location. All those little polka dots on the edges are the color palettes I’ve used on the various pages, also on it’s own layer.

Yes, I did resort to some copy/paste here, using the Macedonian army from the preceding page. I pasted it a few times, shrunk down and put in the back ground, as well as warped a portion of the image in the porpoise bowl. I still feel guilty doing that, and I fight with myself about whether or not I should do it, and if I do, if I should feel like I “cheated” because artists several decades (or longer) ago couldn’t do such things. I feel like it cheapens what I do, or something, which doesn’t entirely make sense. I tend to hold myself to high standards and always feel like I’m falling short.

Anywhat, enough about my personal psychological profile. I still have a ways to go on this page, and then there’s…let’s see…uh…six pages left? Not including the little history page I want to include that sums up the origins of this tongue twister and it’s personal significance to me. And a cover.

So that’s what I’ve been working on, and what I will be working on today as soon as I post this. I do have another doodle to share, though. I spent the weekend, while my wife was away on business, camping with my three boys and the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts (thankfully they were camping together in the same location; with all the craziness of the last several weeks, trying to manage them in two different locations, plus the scouts under my care, would have broken me). After we unpacked at home, I took my boys and one of their friends/fellow scouts out to eat at a local diner. The waitress gave us crayons to occupy us (okay, they were really just for the kids) until the food arrived, so as the kids started drawing, I took out my pen and asked them for a subject. They said a big muscular vampire with a potato for a head.

Toby-Gray-cpt-vampire-potato

Yes…3 out of the 4 boys who came up with this suggestion ARE related to me…why?

There you have him, Captain Vampire Potato. A little rushed, very not-done, and produced with an over tired, burned out hand and brain.