Skyrim comes out in six days, and it’s all that I can think about – so much so, that I thought I’d better declare SKYRIM WEEK and have done. Why fight a losing battle?

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, Skyrim is a videogame which sets you loose in an enormous and exactingly detailed fantasy world, within which you can do very nearly anything (here is the trailer). It’s the fifth game in a long-spanning series, and its predecessors were largely what I had in mind when I was writing my posts about The Crossing.

Guys, I’ve been waiting for this game a long time.

So for my first SKYRIM WEEK post I’m planning my larder – both imaginary and realistic. On the 10th of November, to kill time and suppress anxiety before the midnight launch, I mean to make a serious larder pilgrimage, and collect enough tasty things to allay starvation while I play the game for roughly a week straight uninterrupted.

The ideal larder would be, you know, ideal. Even though I couldn’t actually consume all of that food before it went bad. But the realistic variation is nothing to damn well sneeze at. A comic artist’s budget means a nearly meatless existence (at least for me), but I have this $20 gift certificate to Oyama Sausage – a gift from my BFF – which I’ve been saving for a rainy Skyrim. I’ve been thinking about those roast beef sandwiches for weeks.

Tomorrow night I’ll dive further yet into murky nerddom, and post a (speculative) character sheet. Just you wait.

Thank you very much to everyone who ordered a package, and also to everyone who hawked them around for me. The gnomes and the big packs are all sold, but I’ll offer Northlanders pages and small packs until the end of October for anybody who wants to get in late.

And since I’m up to my nose in sketches and package-making, here are some of the various tasty things that I found on my camera’s memory card. I blew my whole food allowance for the month (don’t worry, it wasn’t much) on the opals above, so I’m looking at those summer muffins with more than usual yearning. You know I never regret a good shiny, though.

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I’ve put together some packs for sale, which you can browse below. I wanted these to be as much like art care packages as possible, because receiving a nice package in the mail is the coziest thing ever.

I’m also selling Northlanders pages on the cheap. I put more-than-usual energy into these pages, I think – I could draw rustic medieval subject matter forever and not get tired of it (plus, I was feeding off of my bottomless Skyrim hysteria, Viking-wise).

There are three gnomes available. I might have gone a little overboard with the gnomes (like for instance,  inventing a runic gnome alphabet… )

This month feels timely for an art sale. Brandon and I have both been trying to work as much as possible on our personal projects this year (and next year as well, we hope), so I’m trying to get some bills paid, and ensure our survival in general. How that ended with me sewing gnomes for a week straight, I’m still not entirely certain…

Also, our friend Robin McConnell runs a website where he sells Brandon’s work and my larger, fancier stuff – Beast pages and comic covers. If you buy something from him during October, I will happily include a coloured sketch of whatever you like.

The selection isn’t definitive, so if you have a specific request for a Beast page or King City page, or anything like that, feel free to ask!

If you have a question, or would like to buy something, send me an email at:

I should add: I’m taking payment via paypal, if that works for people. Canadian funds are ideal, but I’ll also accept US dollars.

I’ve added a couple new models this time around. Some time or other, I’ll make an expanded creature list for the goblin world – but here, besides my goblin self, we have a lady nymph, and a gangly male troll to whom I’ve relegated all the dresses.

If I could have one item from this lot, I would probably opt for the survival onesie, designed with a certain videogame in mind. Plus, you know, my apartment is just really cold.

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Here is my Autumn/Winter ’11 collection for the imaginary Hchom line. Arriving, now, as if it were just making its way into imaginary stores. I actually decided to do this very much at the last minute, but I figure that I need to post something non-videogame-related before the Skyrim hysteria begins to mount past containment. October and the first ten days of November will have, ahem, something of a fantasy videogame flavour. And the second half of November will be crickets chirping. As usual, I’ll put the “runway” drawings up tomorrow. Continue reading →

I’ve been waiting for autumn to begin, as usual, since early July. This year I tried to embrace the full summerness of things, but I couldn’t really manage it. Autumn is when the adventures begin – when the shinies, deep in their caverns, are waiting to be pried loose and carried home.

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This is a Bedford Jacket. It’s made by Engineered Garments, which is a brand I love – and a menswear brand, all the better. I have a winter coat by them, altered to fit my lady torso, and it’s the best coat ever. So what I want now, since what we have is never good enough (and really, the coat is getting a bit worn at the cuffs…), is a version of this Bedford jacket in a heavy wool flannel (and a nice dark navy, if you please).

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find it anywhere – only hints that it exists this season. I’ve seen it in navy cotton canvas, and in navy wool serge, but not in the flannel. This is where having some kind of jacket agent in New York would be helpful, I expect. Jacket agents! Why isn’t that a real thing?

Also, while I’m free and easy with the unreasonable demands, I’d like some bright yellow gentlemen shoes. For my Urban-Dandy-Tom-Bombadil cosplay project, you understand.

I wasn’t planning on putting this up, but my other posts are all in a state of half-completion, so why not.

I drew these a little while ago, after playing through Dragon Age 2 a second time. I wanted to make my own version of an armour item pack, more reminiscent of the classic RPGs from my childhood which I now regard with all the unreasonable nostalgia that nearly two decades can create. Kids these days, and their new-fangled pointy-pauldroned gratuitously buckled armour! They just don’t know how it was back then, trudging uphill both ways through 8-bit pixel forests. Have some respect for your elders!

Anyway. Item pack and stuff. You might recognize the quilted armour on yonder rogue, because I draw it at every opportunity. I’ve also been playing mage-type characters lately, and with particular enjoyment in this game, except that I keep coming up against the fancy dressy lady mage issue (to be fair, this is probably only an issue for me). Can’t we have some nice, gender-neutral robes? For some reason I don’t often play warriors. I also never seem to make blonde characters, so I combined the two in this version.

Normally I’d save this level of geekery for my private affairs, but I can’t help but obsess.

And here’s the cafe menu. If I could wake up every morning, and stumble downstairs to be presented with brisk coffee and a softboiled egg with buttered toast soldiers… well. It would be hard to find fault with life.

And here’s some store inventory, as promised. It’s like a yuppified version of Bilbo’s larder, isn’t it? Well, there’s no hiding from yourself.

Cafe menu tomorrow.

I don’t expect I’ll ever own property. And as a comic artist, this is a prudent belief. But there’s this house down the street from me, and dude! It is clearly meant to be mine. It has two tiny businesses at the bottom, which in my version of things would be filled by a cafe and some kind of all-purpose shiny-hunter’s adventure market. Brandon could have the first floor, and I could have the second. Why can’t this just happen? Why I can’t I have a magical pony and a million dollars?

Anyway. Tomorrow I’ll put up my Goblin Market inventory. The universe may never provide, but I’ll keep hinting all the same.

I’ve got this salad fixation, lately. It’s a totally unexpected turn of events, since for the past decade I’ve been carrying around a firm conviction that salads are something people inflict on themselves as part of some unpleasant dieting ritual. How wrong I was!

So this is my “crunky salad”, and what I’ve been eating nearly daily (at least at the beginning of every week, while the allowance is still holding up). Note that I often add a hard-boiled egg, making it, I guess, a kind of Oyako-salad.

P.S. I’m not sure why I chose a Badger as my proponent of the crunky salad, because that makes no sense at all. Blame Brandon, who is a strange badger fanatic.

I think I mentioned already that I have a fancy wedding I have to go to in August, and the fact that I have no formal clothes (or formalish, even) has become a total daily fixation. So this is the kind of androgynous gentlewoman look that, ideally, I would like to show up in. All I really need is very expensive pants. Isn’t it the right of every human being to have very expensive pants (don’t think about it too hard)?

Also, I wish this shiny-holding leather pouch actually existed. I have an ongoing daydream that I’ll someday meet the amazing local leatherworker Tannis Hegan, and convince her to take a commission for one.

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Since I did it last year, I thought I’d better make a birthday list. I’ve ordered it from most reasonable to least reasonable (approximately). I leave it to you to judge where it crosses over from one to the other, but the curve starts getting rapidly steeper starting at about #5 (which is where my realistic hopes and expectations end).

I’ll leave it there, before I start getting into giant plushy Turian territory. Nobody wants that.

Some while back, a commenter challenged me to list my four favourite breads. Now, after much hardship and personal sacrifice, I have chosen five (one more for the cheap seats).

Having prepared this list, I’ve also decided that I should add a Vancouver section to Hchom, keeping track of my favourite bakeries/restaurants/whathaveyou. Ideally, it might be of use to somebody visiting or living in Vancouver. At the very least, it gives my obsessive documentation of baked goods some kind of official sanction.

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