Alice and the Mad Hatter

Illustrated in Deleter #3 Black Drawing Ink with Crow Quill Pen on Canson Smooth Bristol Board.

December Workshops and Winter/Spring Classes now being offered!!

To close out the month of December and 2009, I will be teaching four ONE DAY workshops at the Worcester Art Museum. For anyone who has never taken an art class at WAM before, this is a great way to get a taste of the types of classes the Art Museum has to offer:

Comic Art 8 - 10 Years 12/28/2009 12/28/2009 Monday from 10:00 AM to 12 N

Comic Art 11 - 13 Years 12/29/2009 12/29/2009 Tuesday from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM

Mural Painting 8 - 10 Years 12/29/2009 12/29/2009 Tuesday from 10:00 AM to 12 N

Mural Painting 11 - 13 Years 12/30/2009 12/30/2009 Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 12 N

And my list of Winter and Spring classes are up on the website:

Cartoon Characters 5 - 7 Years 01/05/2010 03/02/2010 Tuesday from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM 18

Drawing Dark Stories 14 - 17 Years 01/09/2010 03/06/2010 Saturday from 10:00 AM to 12 N 18

Art of Cartooning 8 - 10 Years 03/16/2010 05/11/2010 Tuesday from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM 18

Comics - Villians Rule! 11 - 13 Years 03/20/2010 05/15/2010 Saturday from 10:00 AM to 12 N

Click on the link below to sign up for any of these classes today:

Introducing the new Polly and Handgraves cover!!

This will be the cover for the next installment of The Adventures of Polly and Handgraves. I penciled, inked and designed the sky. The characters were all colored by Rori Shapiro!!

I liked the colors she had previously used on a color version of my Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear illustration so I asked if she could use them on the cover.

Books you should read: Brenda and Effie

I first got into Paul Magrs writing when I read his Doctor Who novel Verdigris. What I really liked about the book is how he captured everything about the Third Doctor era of Doctor Who on television as well as the feel of the 1970's. I could just imagine the fun tatty sets and gloriously over-the-top villains.

I was also very pleased to get to know Paul Magrs through many of the online networking site and do a little book swap.

This brings me to a series of books he has written featuring a pair of characters by the name of Brenda and Effie. I had just finished reading the first book in the series Never the Bride about a month or so ago and now I'm onto the second book Something Borrowed.

I have to say this is probably the best new series I have gotten into for some time now. The first thing I like is Paul makes the lead characters a pair of older women rather than a couple of young girls going on these rather otherworldly adventures.

As a matter of fact Brenda is quite a bite older than most and had a very long and checkered past before she decided to settle down and run her little bed and breakfast in Whitby and finally live a quiet life...

...or so she thought as she and her friend Effie seem to be dragged from one strange adventure to the next.

There are so many things I love about the first novel alone. The first being how Paul Magrs has broken each chapter in the book to read like a separate television episode. The other is how he has taken the best bits of classic science-fiction literature, the Universal Monster Movies of the 30's and 40's and reintroduces them in a very fun and unique way by blending them with a humor quite reminiscent of writers like Evelyn Waugh and Stephen Fry.

The way the characters talk in the book are so much fun to read.

I highly recommend you pick up Never the Bride, Something Borrowed, Conjugal Rites and the recently released Hells Belles on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com!! You will not be disappointed!!

I should also mention that Paul has also has a series of Doctor Who audio plays out called the Hornets' Nest which star none other than Tom Baker as the Doctor. These plays are great for people who are fans of Doctor Who or Tom Baker. As well as people who are fans of the old Sherlock Holmes radio drama's starring Basil Rathbone. These plays read very much like those radio drama's.

Speaking of the nocturnal dandy Sherlock Holmes, Paul was very kind to write a great introduction for my upcoming graphic novel Sherlock Holmes: The Painful Predicament of Alice Faulkner.

New Alterna Store is opened for Business

Alterna Comics not only has a great brand new website but they also just launched their brand new web store!! So, click on the link below to check it out and either order or pre-order a particular title today:

A Cooking Blog

Cooking has kind of become one of my newest obsessions. I've been doing it off and on for the past couple of years. Most of my culinary dabbling have been steak, chicken, hamburgers, pork chops and meatloaf. What's has kind of gotten me interested are shows like No Reservations, Bizarre Food and Man vs. Food. Yeah, I usually switch it off when it comes to the "potentially watching someone choke to death" sort of challenges. But there were a couple of dishes I really would like to try at some point.

That and doing a lot of cooking on the grill outside over the Summer (well the days we actually HAD Summer) got me to really enjoy (and somewhat obsessed) about cooking.

The third thing was the Montreal Steak and Chicken seasonings got me hooked as well.

One of things I've tried lately that has turned out really well was Shepard's Pie. I had adapted the idea from this restaurant Eller's where they would take the leftover prime rib from the previous night's special and make a Shepard's Pie out of it. Naturally, I wouldn't do this with prime rib because it's quite expensive. And if I did have a cut, I wouldn't be using it for Shepard's Pie.

But I've been able to take a leftover London Broil and use that. The trick is to chop it up into cubes and then slow cook it in a marinade. What I do is I take a frying pan and put a small layer of water on the bottom and add a mix of steak sauce and Worcestershire Sauce and just keep turning over and stirring the meat under a low heat until all the liquid is dried up.

Then you just put it into the dish you're going to be using to make the Shepard's Pie with and add the corn, mushrooms, mashed potato topping and whatever else you use to make your Shepard's Pie with.

This steak and Worcestershire sauce marinade works great if you put some water into a freezer bag and put the steak in the marinade and let it sit all day till you're ready to cook.

Another thing I was thrilled to try this week was Curry Chicken. I love Indian Food. I probably had it when I was very, very young over my Aunt Patricia's house many years ago. But I was too young to remember. But I've absolutely loved it ever since I tried it about six or seven years ago at the Chef of India in Shrewsbury.

Sadly, that restaurant is no longer there and has been replaced by the Bollywood Grill. However, the India Cafe right across the street is excellent!! Especially for those who have never tried Indian Food before and would like to experience it for the first time.

Well, I had some Curry Powder on the spice rack and I decided I would give it a try. What's the worst that could happen? Well, apart from the food being unfit for human consumption, that is.

I found a couple really great recipes online:

http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1839,154163-229204,00.html

and:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Indian-Chicken-Curry-II/Detail.aspx

What I ended up doing was taking the best bits out of both recipes and consolidating them.

And thankfully the results were indeed fit for human consumption. I also opted to use spinach instead of mushrooms in the curry. Which I thought was great!!

The curry recipe was by far my favorite and the most fun to work with of everything I've been cooking. So, I am definitely looking forward to doing that again.

The cover for the next Polly and Handgraves adventure

Illustrated in Deleter #3 Black Drawing Ink with Crow Quill Pen and Brush on Canson Comic Book Cover Sheets.