Rose sketches/new style, Q. Cassetti, 2008, pen and ink.Alex and pals smoked meat all day yesterday. This morning, he went out and gathered up a bunch of old apple wood branches, and started another fire in a nice, neat smoker—placing two chickens he marinated last night (all by himself), and a big piece of pork to make shredded, pulled pork. His buddies came over and they were very clannish. All good.

Am mulling over illustration a bit. Not a problem, but a puzzle in my head. More later as it resolves itself. Need to get some trace in my notebook.

Have a great meeting planned for this p.m. to come up with a strategy with my clients on how to manage this branding process, branding consultants and the due diligence that I did with the proposals they put forth. The question becomes how directive and prescriptive we need to be as the consultant is very much in a “take no prisoners” approach—they are right/we are wrong…So its very much picking the devil or the deep blue sea. There is no middle ground and both approaches have issues. Surprisingly, the whimiscal, more fun approach is a freaking bear to apply. I mean, how can you overlay a fresh and fun look and feel when your company deals in life and death details of people’s lives? I mean, for employee communications and for more lively topics, this is fine—but when you are talking to the financial community, do you want to be considered whimsical and fun? or solid and trustworthy. There is a real hiccup in this thinking.

New resource: Ka-Blam, digital printing for comics and manga. They have cheap comic book formats along with taking that a bit further with a squareback/perfect binding option. They also offer preprinted art boards (their spec or ours) using a nice Strathmore inking paper for the creation of comics (or in my case inked drawings). So, I am looking at using the small sized Manga book 5” x 7.5” to create a small holiday book of my advent calendar pix for a limited group of friends. I am going to do a card for everyone—but then this book will be for the special folks. I may print CMYK all black unless there is color work…And, as with LULU you can order one as a sample before you go further…

Gotta go check on the progress of the smoker, lunch and work. Just wanted to say that I was still up and ticking.