As usual, the Reuben Awards weekend was a blast thanks to the hard work of NCS President Jeff Keane, awards show coordinator Steve McGarry, emcee Tom Gammill, all the speakers, presenters and many others too numerous to list. It’s great fun getting to hang out with so many of the giants of the cartooning world, but it’s easy for those attendees who’s greatest challenge is dragging themselves out of bed after a late late night to forget how much time, effort and energy go into giving us that time. A huge thanks you to Jeff and everyone who worked so hard to make the weekend so much fun.

Here are a few pictures from the 2010 Reubens:

The Lovey Anna and me at Southside Seaport

Me, Steve Brodner and Hilary Price with the hardware

Me with John and Anne Hambrock

MAD men Sam Viviano, me, Ray Alma and Nick Meglin

The legendary Mell Lazarus

Adrian Sinnott and Stephen Silver

Eddie Pittman waits in anticipation for Ed Steckley to sneeze all over
his unsuspecting wife Heather

Me and  Magazine division winner Ray Alma

The 64th annual Reuben Awards from the National Cartoonists Society are history. It was a great evening as usual. Master of Ceremonies Tom Gammill was brilliant and there were two hilarious films that opened the show that were fantastic.

Here are the results of the awards and the

The Reuben Award for “Cartoonist of the Year”:

• Dan Piraro

TELEVISION ANIMATION

• Seth McFarlane – “Family Guy”

FEATURE ANIMATION

• Ronnie del Carmen – Storyboard Artist – “Up”

NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION

• Tom Richmond

GAG CARTOONS

• Glenn McCoy

GREETING CARDS

• Debbie Tomassi

NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIPS

• Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman – “Zits”

NEWSPAPER PANEL CARTOONS

• Hilary Price – “Rhymes with Orange”

MAGAZINE FEATURE/ MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION

• Ray Alma

BOOK ILLUSTRATION

• Dave Whamond – “My Think-A-Ma-Jink”

EDITORIAL CARTOONS

• John Sherffius

ADVERTISING ILLUSTRATION

• Steve Brodner

COMIC BOOKS

• Paul Pope – “Strange Adventures”

GRAPHIC NOVELS

• David Mazzucchelli – “Asterios Polyp”

You can see the list complete with links to images from the winners at the NCS website.

I was thrilled to win a divisional Reuben for Newspaper Illustration, and more than a bit shocked because the other two nominees, Bob Rich and Bob Sanchuk are crazy good doing fantastic work. Actually all the nominees in all the divisions deserve their award and yet it has to go to someone, so many thanks to the Southeast Chapter for the honor. All the nominees are winners, in my opinion.

Artwork by Patrick McDonnell

The annual Reuben Awards from the National Cartoonists Society is currenty happening in Jersey City, NJ. I’m at the event all weekend, which is filled with speakers, seminars, parties and general mayhem. Tonight is the big awards banquet. Here, again, are the nominees:

The Reuben Award for “Cartoonist of the Year”:

• Stephen Pastis
• Dan Piraro
• Richard Thompson

TELEVISION ANIMATION

• Kevin Deters – “Walt Disney Prep and Landing”
• Mike Gray – “The Infinite Goliath”
• Seth McFarlane – “Family Guy”

FEATURE ANIMATION

• Ronnie del Carmen – Storyboard Artist – “Up”
• Tomm Moore – Director – “The Secret of Kells”
• Barry Reynolds – Character Designer – “The Secret of Kells”

NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION

• Bob Rich
• Tom Richmond
• Robert Sanchuk

GAG CARTOONS

• Glenn McCoy
• VG Myers
• Dave Whamond

GREETING CARDS

• Glenn McCoy
• Kieran Meehan
• Debbie Tomassi

NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIPS

• John Hambrock – “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee”
• Wiley Miller – “Non Sequitur”
• Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman – “Zits”

NEWSPAPER PANEL CARTOONS

• Dave Blazek – “Loose Parts”
• Tony Carillo – “FMinus”
• Hilary Price – “Rhymes with Orange”

MAGAZINE FEATURE/ MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION

• Ray Alma
• Anton Emdin
• Tom Richmond

BOOK ILLUSTRATION

• Lou Brooks – “Twimericks”
• Tom Richmond – “Bo Confidential”
• Dave Whamond – “My Think-A-Ma-Jink”

EDITORIAL CARTOONS

• Nick Anderson
• Rob Rogers
• John Sherffius

ADVERTISING ILLUSTRATION

• Steve Brodner
• Randall Enos
• Mort Gerberg

COMIC BOOKS

• Terry Moore – “Echo”
• Paul Pope – “Strange Adventures”
• JH Williams – “Detective Comics”

GRAPHIC NOVELS

• David Mazzucchelli – “Asterios Polyp”
• Seth – “George Sprott”
• David Small – “Stitches”

You can see the list complete with links to images from many of the artists at the NCS website.

I will attempt to Twitter the winners live from the event, but tomorrow there will be a complete list in lieu of a Sunday Mailbag.

I am currently in Jersey City, New Jersey getting ready for the National Cartoonists Society’s annual Reuben Awards, sometimes called the “Oscars of cartooning”. The festivities begin tomorrow and I am in early for an NCS board meeting (of which I am a vice president) and to mooch lunch off Sam Viviano and the guys at the MAD offices… if they let me into the building that is.

I will be live tweeting the winners of the divisions and the big award for Cartoonist of the Year if $#@#$%* AT&T has service for my iPhone there. Follow the action here.

I’m sort of taking this week off from the “Sketch o’the Week” after spending quite a bit more time than usual on that series of ink wash sketches over the last two plus months. This week’s sketch is actually the rough sketch for a small project. It’s a trading card that is part of a series being used in an ad campaign for a company. Once the campaign is launched I’ll post the finished art here, and tell you about the project and the rarefied company I am keeping in doing one of these cards… some of the artists they have doing art for this series are legends.

Sorry, I know The MAD Blog has been extremely LOST-centric for the last few months. This will probably be my last post about the show now that it’s over. If you have never watched LOST, then talk amongst yourselves… but I feel sorry for you.

I know I am always saying I never watch TV, but that’s not exactly true. I do catch the occasional episode of “30 Rock” and “The Big Bang Theory” and maybe one or two other shows. This is mostly through osmosis because The Lovely Anna and my kids watch TV which means I do occasionally watch TV. However I find few shows very engaging and think most of it utter garbage. I find most TV shows are full of cliche, recycled plots and dumbed down dialogue and stories… and don’t get me started on “reality TV”. So, when a show comes along that I find so original, so well written and so tremendously smart that I am actually looking forward to the next episode every week, it’s a truly rare occurrence. LOST is the first TV show since “The Sopranos” that did that for me.

I was first hooked on it when MAD assigned me the job of doing the artwork for the parody back in 2005. I had not watched it yet and it was about 7 episodes into the first season when I got that assignment, so I had to borrow some taped episodes from friends and MAD staffers. I started watching the first episode one night after dinner, thinking I’d watch the seven I had on tape over the next couple of days. I turned the TV off at about 3 am having watched every episode I had and setting the TiVo to record the rest of the season automatically. I can’t say I’ve seen every episode as it aired (in fact I’ve watched most some times weeks later if I’ve got a lot going on), but I can say I’ve always made sure the recordings were set and have watched every episode through the series finale last Sunday.

And I’m very glad I did.

That’s not the case with everybody. I’ve read more than a few venomous Facebook posts and tirades on the interwebby. One good friend of mine who I thought was a little less close minded tweeted “I’m sorry but LOST is BULLSHIT”. I’ve always found it funny how some people can’t stand anything that reaches a certain level of popularity. They seem to have this odd opinion that if anything is that popular it has to be crap, even though they either haven’t seen it or didn’t give it a chance and therefore have no valid opinion. I have a certain theory about that. I think these types just can’t stand not being part of the event, and rather than get in on the fun they would rather just show it disdain. How sad for them. If they truly did not watch LOST because of that reason, then they missed out on something special for nothing. A show like this isn’t easy to follow because it’s serial nature demands your constant attention, so I don’t blame anyone who just couldn’t do it… but I do feel sorry they missed the ride.

LOST was not a show for the faint of heart, the short of attention span or, not to put too fine a point on it, the stupid. The writers never treated their audience with anything but great respect for their intelligence and imagination and never talked down to them. They never came out and beat us over the head with a cut and dried explanation of anything (no matter how much we begged for it sometimes), preferring rather to make us actually use our heads and think about what we had seen and to discuss (or argue) about what it meant. In the end it did all mean something. We weren’t greeted with a Sopranos ending.

The writing was refreshingly original and sharp. The characters were beyond engaging. The story unfolded and unfolded and unfolded and walloped us with more surprises than I thought could possibly have been rolled into a single storyline. Nobody… and I mean NOBODY saw it coming when we realized in the final seconds of the season three finale when Kate came out from the shadows that the recent scenes outside the island were not flashBACKS but flashFORWARDS. My mouth hung open on that one. That’s just one example, although the most hard hitting of them all. At times it seems the show was doling out too little in terms of answers and it was frustrating, but once the network and studio decided to end the series the ship righted and it’s been one fantastic journey since.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Final episode details abound shortly!

So, what did I think of the finale? I thought it was terrific and true to the entire series. It left a lot of things to ponder and think about, but in the end it DID explain it all (well, the big stuff). However, like the series itself, it didn’t present us with a user’s manual of an answer… it made us think about it and rewarded us for paying attention and left us with some things to keep thinking about. I’d have expected nothing less.

What really amazes me is how many people I’ve talked to didn’t understand the ending. I’ve heard a lot of complaining about how cheesy it was that they castaways had been dead all along since the crash. THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENED. They didn’t die in the crash. Everything that happened on the island really happened. Everything. Everyone was dead at the end, but not from the crash.

In the final moments of the show, Jack has sacrificed himself to restore the island’s light and again stop up whatever terrible power is kept at bay there. He had passed the ageless gift on to Hurley, who agreed to be the new guardian. Realizing Jack is gone, Hurley asks Ben to help him protect the island to which Ben agrees.

Back in what we were calling the “Flash-sideways”, Desmond has been going around to the other castaways, who are all living lives that we believed were a result of the explosion that took place in the past that prevented Oceanic 815 from crashing at all, and reawakening them somehow to their memories of being on the island. These memories seem to be more than memories. Sun and Jin, when reawakened, suddenly know how to speak English. These reawakened people seem to now actually become the ones from the island, and not their “sideways selves” remembering alternate memories. We already know something is not right with these “sideways selves”, because they are not living continuing lives that are the same as the ones they had been living prior to the Oceanic 815 crash. Sun and Jin are not married but having an affair. Jack has a son he never had before. Desmond doesn’t know Penny and works for her father. Sawyer is a cop with Miles as his partner. There are many more examples. These lives had been changed far before flight 815 failed to crash, which had been a recent occurrence in this “sideways world”.

The reawakened castaways all go to a church where Jack’s father’s body is finally brought for his funeral. Jack is the last to reawaken, and his dead father appears to him seemingly real and explains some things. We discover Jack is dead, as are all the people in the church. They have been waiting for Jack to join them to “move on”. The place they have been, which we thought was a new timeline resulting from the prevention of the crash, was not a “flash sideways” but a kind of way-station world where those saved by the island, those who found what they were looking for there, have been living a kind of dream life they have created waiting for the day they would all finally be dead and able to gather and move on. When these events are happening we have no idea, as Jack’s father says “There is no ‘now’ here”. Some of the islanders cannot move on, and are missing. Michael is not here, he is doomed to haunt the island because of the mistakes he made (that’s why he appeared before Hurley a few episodes back, and that’s what the whispering voices are… some who committed evils while on the island are stuck there as spirits). Anna Lucia isn’t here, although her spirit is in this limbo world still wandering. Not all those moving on are from the crash… Jacob brought others to the island and not all on that plane. I believe that the island gave everyone that came to it a chance for redemption of their souls, and some didn’t take advantage of that chance. Some did bad things against their fellow islanders, and that excludes them from receiving the island’s final gift.

How do we know they didn’t die in the crash? Outside the church Hurley and Ben say goodbye. Ben will not come in, choosing instead to remain in limbo… or perhaps he cannot move on. Hurley says to Ben “You were a great number two.” Ben relies: “You were a great number one.” This tells us that Hurley is done with his guardianship of the island and some time has passed since he began that task. How much time? Given the agelessness of the guardian it could have been hundreds of years. He and Ben had some times together, and are saying goodbye. Also, in the church Kate embraces Jack and tells him how much she missed him. Kate was one of only a few who actually made it off the island in the plane Lapidus flew. She obviously lived some kind of life, perhaps a long one, before finally dying and coming to the way-station world. No, they didn’t die in the crash and events and time have passed since Jack saved the island and the plane flew off. One by one they all die and end up at the way-station, awaiting the time they can all be together again.

Regardless, now those who embraced the island and what it offered them are whole again and move on together. Is it Heaven? Does the stone cork in the cave of light keep back Hell? We don’t know, and many little things remain unanswered. Instead we are left with the uplifting message that these people whom we have gotten to “know” over the last six years have found a peace in themselves they were all desperately searching for before they found themselves on the island, and are moving on together.

What a journey. It’s a cliche to say that the joy is in the journey and not the destination, and perhaps that is true in the case of this show, but I found the ending to be as smart and thoughtful as the journey was wonderful.

Bravo J.J., Jeffery, Damon, Carlton and all those who believed in us as an audience and took us on this terrific ride.

Well… LOST is over and it will be a day or two before I will blog about my thoughts on the wrap-up of the show. Overall I will say I was satisfied, but I am a little sad the journey is over.

On a purely crass and commercial front, I am now auctioning off most of the sketches (the good ones, anyway) I did over the last two months for in honor of the end of the series. each of the sketches below is up for auction on eBay, all ending on Sunday, May 30th. If you are interested in bidding and directly participating in the college education of my kids (or at least a hamburger and fries for lunch when we move the first one in this fall) then click on any of the images below to go to the auction page!

Bid on Matthew Fox as Dr. Jack Shepard

Bid on Evangeline Lilly as Kate Austen

Bid on Terry O’Quinn as John Locke/The Smoke Monster

Bid on Naveen Andrews as Sayid Jarrah

Bid on Ken Leung as Miles Straume

Bid on Henry Ian Cusick as Desmond Hume

Bid on Josh Holloway as James “Sawyer” Ford

Bid on Yunjin Kim as Sun-Hwa Kwon

Bid on Daniel Dae Kim as Jin Kwon

Q: If I have just begun working as a cartoonist/illustrator what should I include in my portfolio since I never gotten published before? I know I should include my best work but what’s the subject for me to illustrate? Finally, how to get my work noticed?

A: These days a “portfolio”, meaning a little case that contains samples of your illustration work, is almost a thing of the past. It’s the electronic age, and websites have taken the place of the traditional leather portfolio. Website porfolios have so many benefits over thier physical counterparts… they are accessible 24/7. They do not need to be dropped off or returned, thus the client has it at their fingertips always, you can change it easily while sitting at home with no pants on, etc. I can’t remember the last time I sent out my actual portfolio or brought it to show to an art director. Still, many of the concepts that apply to the preparing and presentation of the old fashioned leather portfolio still apply to the virtual kind. Preparing a portfolio is like any exercise in marketing: you identify your target audience and their needs, tailor your presentation to fulfill those needs and then present it to them in an easily digestible form.

Your target audience is of course your potential client and their readership or audience. You determine what they are looking for by examining their magazine/publication to see what kind of content they publish. I’m not talking about looking at the illustration work already in their and trying to show them something similar (although the type of illustration they use can tell you if your style is something that might or might not appeal to them), I’m talking about seeing what kind of articles and audience they are reaching. If it’s a magazine about sports, showing them product illustrations of sandwiches probably won’t be very effective. Some things are universal… like illustrations of people and people interacting is some kind of scene, but it’s best to show them work that fits within the scope of their audience. If it’s a sports magazine, show illustrations of athletes and people playing various sports. If it’s a magazine for the entertainment industry, caricatures of celebrities are always good. Medical magazines want illustrators that can draw hospital equipment and doctors in uniform, etc. Art directors as a rule won’t spend any time trying to imagine if the artist who’s unrelated work they are looking at would be able to draw their kind of subject matter. They want to look at pieces in a portfolio that they could imagine being printed as they are in their publication.

It might seem unrealistic to tailor a portfolio for a single client like this… it likely would involve doing some sample pieces specially for that client, and who has time for that? True, but you can generalize and use many pieces for multiple portfolios. A caricature of a baseball player could be shown to any sports related publication, but would also fit well for showing to newspapers, entertainment magazines (especially if the player is A-Rod or some other tabloid darling), health and fitness magazines or any publication that might use caricature. A humorous hospital scene would be good to show not only medical themed publications but those dealing with insurance, finance, business or health in general. In fact a humorous scene like that would be good to show any art director looking for humorous illustrations.

Also, you need not have every single piece in your portfolio specifically targeted to the client in question. Actually just a few of them would do, as long as the rest are in general of the type that would appeal to them. If you are showing your work to a serious art colletors magazine, having a bunch of goofy cartoon work in it would probably not be wise. Likewise if you are showing a portfolio to a kid’s entertainment magazine (if there even is such a thing anymore) it’s pointless to show them realistic paintings of ducks.

The virtual online portfolio is a little harder to tailor to a specific client since you don’t show it just to them but it is there for the entire world. In that case it’s best to break your work into categories of sections, possible using tags and simple links for things like “Caricature”, “Sports”, “Humorous”, etc. It’s tempting to put every piece you’ve ever done on the website since you have virtually unlimited room, but too much work makes it unappealing and overwhelming to browse. Limit yourself to a few dozen pieces at most, or create more specific sections with similar themed artwork in multiple mini-portfolios like the categories previously mentioned. If you want a great template for creating a solid onlien portfolio, visit this link at FreelanceSwitch.

Finally, there are some things you DON’T want to include in your portfolio. Sketchbook work is one. It’s fun to look at people’s sketchbooks… if you are another artist or a fan. If you are a professional art director you don’t give a damn about a potential illustrator’s creative process or how good they draw stealth caricatures of people in the coffee shop. They want to see publication-ready work. Likewise do not include life drawings, which are just another kind of sketchbook drawing and have no commercial applications. Don’t include x-rated or possibly offensive stuff unless that’s the kind of work you are aiming for.

As far as “getting your work noticed”, well, that’s the trick. Having a strong portfolio is great but doesn’t do you much good if nobody sees it. You need to aggressively look for publications and clients who you think your style would appeal to, and then get your work out to them. Doing a postcard mailing with a few samples on it and your website URL is a good direct marketing technique, but it involves a lot of legwork to find the contact info you need. There are mailing list services that will provide you with a list of buyers of illustration for a price, and that might be a good place to start. Postcards and mailings cost money, but you have to do some investing in your business to get it off the ground. Other possibilities are source books like the Directory of Illustration or the Workbook. which cost a fair amount of money to be a part of.  There are also online source books like the iSpot. Again, these cost money and may or may not be effective for you. I would start with the direct marketing mailers and go from there.

Thanks to Kim Chen for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

It’s been a while since news of the proposed bio-pic of the life of MAD publisher William M. Gaines saw any light of day. It’s been in the rumor mill for about 4 years now. About three years ago The MAD Blog linked to reports that Joel Eisenberg and his Iron Mountain Media had picked up the film “life rights” of Gaines and planned to co-produce a biopic based on his life. tentatively titled, “Ghoulishly Yours, William M. Gaines”. A year later director John Landis (Animal House, Blues Brothers, Trading Places, etc.) was attached to the project.

Just this past week the film project reared it’s head again, with reports that Landis was indeed gathering up funds to direct a film about the life of Gaines.

The obvious drama of Gaines’ testimony before the senate hearings that stemmed from Fredrick Wertham‘s misguided book Seduction of the Innocent aside, there will be plenty of story to fill up a film based on his life. If you’ve ever read the book “The MAD World of William M. Gaines” by longtime MAD scribe Frank Jacobs, you’ll know although he was one of the giants of innovation in the comic’s world, Gaines didn’t want to have anything to do with the business when it was thrust upon him after his father’s untimely death in a boating accident, and the stories his antics while producing of the different comics from the E.C days to MAD are full of hysterical moments. Gaines became quite an eccentric as well, and he will be quite a colorful character for the big screen…. assuming this ever gets made, of course.

As promised, here is a step by step of the ink wash sketch process I have been using for the sketch series of LOST characters over the last month or two. I’m afraid it’s not exactly scientific, so I don’t know how much people will get from it… but here it is regardless. Our subject again is Daniel Dae Kim as Jin Kwon.

Pencil Sketch

Here is the initial sketch (darkened to show up better on the screen). I lightly sketch out the caricature using a hard lead, in this case an “H” but a 2H or harder works fine. Ultimately you want the sketch to disappear under the washes, so too dark a lead or too many lines won’t work as well. It’s hard to see but I will lightly draw around some of the main highlight areas because these are the areas I want to paint around with the first washes to create the highlights.

Wash #1

The first thing I do is “knock down” the pencil sketch a bit so I have the minimal amount o lines needed to do the wash painting. I do this by rolling a kneadable eraser over the sketch to pick up the lines slightly. I also did a few corrections with the mouth and some in the eyes.

The first wash is mostly water with just a few drops of ink in it. I use a disposable dixie cup with just a little water (1/2 inch or so) at the bottom and then using an eyedropper I put in three or four drops of ink. I’m using a Pelikan’s Drawing Ink A on this one. Using a #6 watercolor brush, I start to lay in this light value. Since ink dries permanently and very quickly there is always a certain amount of mottling and inconsistency in the wash. I try to do an initial flat value but with the wash still a little damp I go back here and there with the same wash and get a slightly darker value in places like the neck, under the cheekbone, to the side of the nose, etc.

Wash #1.5

Once the ink wash is dry it is not going anywhere. You cannot “lift off” or lighten an area like you can with watercolor. That makes ink wash work different than watercolor but you can use this to your advantage because dry layers cannot get muddled up or dead like they can with watercolor gone over and over. The same value of wash gone over top of a dry layer of that wash will produce a slightly darker value, so after I wait for the layer to dry I do another wash with the same mixture. I’ll go over areas again and bring this second wash into some of the first highlight areas to tighten up the highlight shapes and blend the two areas more. Areas from the first wash I do not paint over with the second become another highlight value… not quite as bright as the white of the paper but as I get darker and avoid covering these ares they will become more and more of a highlight.

Wash #2

Now I take my eyedropper and add another few drops of ink into the same dixie cup, making the value a few steps darker. I paint in the areas that need to be darker, avoiding the highlight areas and creating another value of lighter tone by not covering some of the areas tat has one or two coats of wash already applied. I’m still using the #6.

Sadly at this point I notice that either I have a bad piece of bristol or maybe my ink was a bad choice… I was using FW inks for the other LOST pieces and never had a problem with the paper getting so pilly and overly textured. Oh, well… too late now.

Wash #3

Here’s where things get less rigid and more chaotic. I add more ink to the dixie cup, and with this darker value I switch to a #3 round watercolor brush. I’ll add in darker areas and try to do some gradations as well, like in the cheekbone on the left. I do a gradation by laying down a fair amount of wash to a small area like the underside of the cheekbone, immediately rinsing my brush in clean water and then with the brush loaded with clean water go back to the still wet wash and draw it out into the direction I want the gradation to fade into. You have to be quick because even a few seconds will turn the wet wash too permanent to get it to flow away with the clean water into a fade.

The Rest of the Washes

At this point it’s all quick brushwork and controlled chaos. I add several more drops of ink to the dixie cup to get a much darker value, and am only adding washes here and there to establish the main shadows and forms. I will occasionally get just a touch of some straight ink from my inkwell and mix it on a scratch pad with some of the wash to produce varying degrees of even darker values to do really dark areas like in the hair, the eyes, the nostrils, etc. I also go over areas several times with the same darker value to build up some shadows. Too many small steps to scan in here.

The Final

The last steps are the final washes and white. I will now add a bunch of water back to the dixie cup to get a mid value again, and use it to go over some aras with bigger washes to blend in and add a few more subtle shadows like on the left of the forehead, under the brow etc. I’ll go back to the #6 brush for this as well as using the #3.

Finally, I use white gouache to add in highlights like in the eyes and a few hot spots on the face… although if I did this right I’ll need to do little of that. The whole idea is to paint around those highlights in the first place.

So, there you have it. The LOST “Sketch o’the Week” series is done as the show’s final episode airs this Sunday. On Monday I will be doing a special LOST post that includes the details of what I am going to be doing with all these sketches.