The Retrospective Sketchbook project has just three days to go on Kickstarter. Over the weekend we cleared the “number of books” threshold that enables us to do offset printing (instead of print-on-demand), and with offset we can get color pages without breaking our budget.
The project closes on Thursday, June 4th, at 2pm Eastern. The book will be eighty pages long, and in color, which will make some of the marker-art and blue-line stuff really pop.
It will be a *much* better book than the one we thought we were going to make, and that’s thanks to backers who want us to make an awesome book. You can join them!
I said that to Sandra twenty-six years ago, in March of 2000. Less than four months later I’d launched Schlock Mercenary online. My writing decent, if perhaps a bit dad-jokey. My art was really, really rough¹.
We’re doing a book about this.
You can back the project over on Kickstarter. If we hit our $30k stretch goal (not far off right now, it’s pretty likely we’ll get there) then the book will grow from 32 pages to 80 pages.
As of this writing we have just over two weeks remaining in the project. Click the link to get all the details, and to see some sample pages.
Sandra is in charge of this, because I dislike my early art enough to not want to touch it. I’m spending my time right now working on the bonus stories² for book 20, and that Kickstarter project won’t launch until I’ve made a lot more progress on them.
For right now, though, you can help us a lot by backing Doodling as a Hobby: The Retrospective Sketchbook of an Accidental Career. My art and writing have come a long way since March of 2000, but one thing that has remained constant—and constantly amazing—is the support and generosity of you fine folks who followed me on the trip.
——— ¹ I’ve often said that the only way for my early art to suck any harder would be for us to raise atmospheric pressure. ² Yes, that’s “stories,” plural.
Cover design by Howard Tayler. Cover illustration by Garrett Berner.
The bonus story in A FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER is called “Refulgence of Refuge,” and it will fill in some of the blanks surrounding the end of Earth’s raptoroid civilization sixty-six-ish million years ago.
Would you like to see the first page? Of course you would!
The first page of “Refulgence of Refuge,” written and illustrated by Howard Tayler
Many of the stretch goals have already been unlocked, including some which provide freebies to everyone (not just backers!) Head on over to the Kickstarter page for A FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER, click into the Updates, and get the full-sized mobile and 4k versions of this wallpaper!
I apologize for not posting this sooner. It’s been a busy month, and Long COVID means I’ve dropped more than a few balls, but really, I could have left myself a reminder and gotten this done. Sorry about that!
