Been doing the caricature thing for a corporate event in Jacksonville, Florida, over the last two days.

Here is one of two images available soon as Swampy’s Florida Easter cards! The cards will be available above in the Swampy store at the top of the website being handled by The Knowledge Exchange. The cards would also be available at Julianne’s Coastal Cottage in Mount Dora. I’ll be posting the other Easter card art later this week.

One Rough Man by Brad Taylor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this book to be excellent. Especially for the genre. I’ve been reading enough of these super human military types to find a similar thread of just about everything.

What makes this book better than the rest is that not only does all not go as planned, but it goes way off. The ending of the book would be mighty difficult to completely predict. The gear change is also more subtle than staged as a surprise twist. You can read along expecting one direction and find the book has taken another.

Even the hero is foulable and makes many a mistake. As do other characters. It’s a change of pace to read of a hero trying to figure out how to get out of an error.

I would have given five stars, but the writing of the story could have been better. It’s more a technical criticism. There are a number of areas in the book that are uneven. I think I see where editors did some slicing and dicing and the author tried to clean it up.

Bottom line: I recommend this book.

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Here’ s a bit of art that will be in the upcoming ‘Swampy’s Florida: Silver Springs’ I’m working on! Putting the book together now and hope for it to be avaialble in about three weeks.

The subject for today’s Sketch Dailies is : Selfie. So, here’s the way it used to be.

Today’s Sketch Dailies involves the pop punk rock cartoon character Jem. I considered where Jem would be today and see her in a bar in Hoboken singing, as she can, the great American songbook….but still in her punk garb. Kinda as the fate of the singer in Copacabana.

Below are a few images of Jem in her prime:

Saw the subject for a daily artistic challenge is the celebrity, Mr. T. A couple months ago i was thinking I wish i had a reason to draw Mr. T. Here it is!

I took the angle of Mr. T’s roll as B.A. Baracus in the television series The A-Team. In the series, B.A. hates anything to do with flying. Thus, he flies!

Signed a couple of Swampy’s Florida books for my friends at the Fort Walton Beach Chamber of Commerce. This alligator pirate sketch is for the book we did for the annual Billy Bowlegs Festival. Last year we worked together to produce two Swampy books about the Chamber’s annual Billy Bowlegs Festival and for the last reunion in Fort Walton Beach of the Doolittle Raiders.

The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I an see why a.A. Milne didn’t see another mystery published. This one is a mighty stretch of reality that is poorly written and seems to have been written as the writer was thin king it all out.

The story opens well and i settled in with what I suspected a mystery in an English setting. Instead, I find myself, after the evil is done, slogging through, what seems, endless patter about what-might-have-happened, what-could-have-have-happened, who-did-it, who-didn’t, etc. All of this barely moving the story along at all for decades of pages.

Worse, the characters are never defined except for the beginning. Making this all worse involves two main characters who pretend to be Holmes and Watson. Seems Milne knew he had troubles defining characters, so he uses others to do it for him.

The solution is intellectually dishonest. Today would be impossible, but pretty hard to believe that such a mistake could have been made even in the 1920s.

Bottom line: I do not recommend this book.

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While helping sell the new Swampy’s Florida Valentine line of greeting cards, I also did a small drawing on the back. A wife was telling me about her husband and his liking of the Gil-Man, of the ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ movie. He also likes hot dogs. So, the imagery above. Below is a photo of me drawing during the event February 2nd.

This is part of the Florida Trail Association cartoon I illustrate for each issue of their Footprint magazine. The Florida Trail Association is the organization for hiking throughout Florida. I need to occasionally post some of the cartoons I made for past issues. I won’t be posting the current cartoon, though, as that’s one of the benefits of membership when getting the Underfoot magazine. 🙂