"All In A Day's Work"/Rogue Beaver

Shown above here is one by American maritime painter Charles S. Raleigh (1830-1925), a study for a panoramic oil painting "All In A Day's Work" (1877).
While browsing through my favorite used bookstore in town, I picked up an old copy of a book on "American Folklore & Legend." I absolutely love reading folklore and fables, and they are a rich source of all sorts of random trivia and tales just ripe for shoveling into this mulch-pile of a brain. You just never know when inspiration's going to hit (which is why there's several stacks of random trivia books + pencil & paper piled up next to or on the couch, the outhouse, the bed, kitchen table etc.) and a few illustrations just so happened to catch both eye and imagination...

One of the things I absolutely love about this job is the freedom to wander down whatever path interests me at the moment, follow the whimsy as it were. Always staying open to crazy ideas and keeping curious has probably been as much of an attribute of art as constant practice,hand-in-glove in fact. So over coffee and bummed scrap paper (embarrassingly busted with my artistic pants down - one of the rare instances caught without a sketchbook) I did a quick doodle to start mapping out the remix.
Then the next day I spent an altogether ridiculous amount of time penciling, inking, scanning and coloring the reworked version. Still not done tweaking it (thinking about dropping some old-timey sepia-ish effect filters on another layer), but will have a nice tabloid-sized color print to proof tomorrow while in town. And of course I tipped ("after") Raleigh in the fine print in case anybody's remotely interested in the original source image.

And now I can also cross off another Nuggets for the newspaper - rather inordinate effort went into the panel but hopefully I'll maximize usage for the image and get something out of it in the end. Remains to be seen if it'll run in color, thereby completely nullifying any CMYK work as it's run through the photomechanical reproduction process - might actually look better run in black & white when all is said and done.
Granted it's a wee bit irresponsible of me not to promote PFDs, but at least those are cans of soda they've been drinking. And speaking of, seeing as how this makes my 200th post, I think I'll grab one myself - Cheers everybody!

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." - e.e. cummings