This is a part of a larger Christmas card I’m doing for an organization. Happy person! A simpler line than i usually do, but what best fit the subject matter.

The Christmas Garden Affair by Ann Ripley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A standard mystery that probably goes a bit far describing the garden business. Certainly overblowing it’s importance. Though it needs to balance the book.

The writing is fine. Wish there were more descriptions of the setting of scenes. Also, though the characters were well defined, somehow I was getting confused as to who was who. It could be that my not being a fan of landscaping had me a bit detached.

I read this because there is an indication by the title and the cover that Christmas was somehow involved. Christmas is barely mentioned until page 218 and then the reference continues. All culminating in an epilogue involving the holiday. This book could have been set at anytime and Christmas was just a tool to sell the book.

A big pet peeve involves a detail that is just wrong – PBS leaves their programming to the individual stations across the country. Especially since the time this book came about. Some prime time programming is consistent with stations, but a garden show could fall at anytime anywhere during a time period. That throws off a conflict in the story that is noted early on.

Bottom line: i recommend this book as an average mystery.

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Caricatures galore for Everest University tonight!

This is part of one of the editorial cartoons I inked today. I’ll post one of the editorial cartoons I’m working on that is more of a commentary of Christmas life soon.

I love drawing dragons, dinosaurs and other types of reptiles. Dragons and monsters are especially fun. Don’t get much chance to draw them, except in caricatures. I could force the subject mater into the editorial cartoons, but that’s a lousy way to tell stories. So glad Nancy is a fan of dragons!  

This event went fine until the past week’s grueling schedule caught up with me and really slowed me down.

I had to head straight home after this to get back to other projects I’m working on. It was a long drive and got home around 4am.

A Lone Star Christmas by William W. Johnstone

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Am I ever surprised that i found a book worse than the last Johnstone book I read a couple weeks ago. This is the 4th out of the last six Johnstone books I’ve disliked, this one being the worse. This is one of the worse I’ve read in a decade. I better check reviews and be sure to dip into a good one of the Johnstone clan or it’s going to be real difficult to continue with so many books I still have ahead of me in the various series.

This book is atrociously written. One thing that writers are taught is to cover the who, what, why and how in a story. However, don’t actually use the words. This book is full of the ‘w’s and ‘how’s. Throughout the book the rhythm changes constantly. The ending is completely ridiculous as suddenly out of the 15 or so Johnstone books I’ve read, a supernatural silliness occurs. Then their are all sorts of historical issues involved.

This book raises questions for me such as how many writers were involved with the project? The book’s writing style swings from heavy romantic to violent gunfights. Neither of those two written the same way. There are many scenes that have other styles. The supernatural scene suddenly finds no one asking “who”, “what, “why”, etc, when then it just might fit. The dialogue of Smoke Jensen also changes throughout the book depending on scenes. Apparently this was a collaborative effort gone real wrong.

Was there a continuity check? The usual setting descriptions are nearly gone. The only character who seemed to stay the same as in other books is Sally Jensen.

The book appears to have been planned with an ending in mind that, based on the 15 books I’ve read, is a real easy , simplistic plot device, that has to have the reader wonder if there are other astral entities floating about in the series not yet revealed. Is Smoke so fast because he’s really an alien from another planet? Will that be a plot in a future Johnstone entry? When a series suddenly breaks out into fantasy, readers have to wonder what the heck is going on.

The underlying Christmas theme is spotty and otherwise dreck.

Something that may not be helping is that just before this book i was reading one of Nancy Atherton’s Dimitry series books that is beautifully written. Coming to this is a major let down.

I almost took a further step down. This morning I thought i would start Rite Mae Brown’s ‘Santa Clawed’. Got three pages in and realized that I was about to read something worse than ‘A Lone Star Christmas’ and, for the first time I can remember, put the book down. I’m pretty sure cats and dogs are not thinking such trite, shallow human thoughts as applied by Brown. Yuck!

I feel pretty cheated by ‘A Lone Star Christmas’. However, I’ve had fun in this past year tracking down the Johnstone series and don’t want to give up on it. The next book I read will be selected carefully and I sure hope for far better results.

Bottom line: Don’t read this book.

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Penciled and prepped this caricature yesterday afternoon before wheeling out to the event I posted about last night. As was the case yesterday, i met with Kristina, below, who requested this illustration. Yesterday we met in Winter Garden, Florida, and today met in Leesburg  to watercolor the artwork at the Leesburg Library coffee shop.

I watercolored the artwork with the exception of the orange color seen. Used a Prang marker brush to really pop the color out representing the colors of the Tennessee college that has a football team, the Volunteers.Not surprisingly I know more about the name of the volunteers and it’s place in Civil War history than the name of the college that has a football team with the name. 🙂

When I woke this morning I had no idea the day would take so many sudden turns in so many directions! First I answered the call for a last minute caricature by changing plans and meeting the client and doing the artwork. While I was working on the caricature with the client, I got a call about a last minute caricature gig about an hours drive from where I was. Decided to meet that challenge and head in the opposite direction of home and drew at that event for a few hours. Now I’m staying overnight nearby and plan to see home tomorrow afternoon….. Depending on last minute requests! 🙂

Here’s a preview of Sunday’s Swampy’s Florida cartoon which has something to do with horses and telephones. Want to guess what the subject is? 🙂

This is part of sketches for a project I’m working on that is being bounced around by the clients and I. We’ll come to a final rough drawing along the way for me to build on for the final illustration. I’ll likely post pieces of that project as it comes along in the next week. I’ll be penciling and inking on paper and coloring using Photoshop.

This is a small drawing for a much larger project. It’s a fill-in piece. Tomorrow, I’ll be embarking on larger illustrations. Saw this blown up much larger on Facebook and realize, I need to use a brush even when doing tiny drawings like this. I disliked it so much that i pulled it and whipped up this Santa Frog to go in the shopper lady’s place for the Daily Inks.