Most of the entries so far seemed to be variants of the existing one — many of them submitted by the same few people — so I decided to go a different direction with just an image depicting his trademark white mic stand.

Winner gets a T-shirt with the new design, signed by Jon. In my case, winning would mean an ecstatic Teresa, which is way more fun. We'll see if this is anything close to what they were looking for.

The book doesn't go in much about graphic tablets per se – I'm just going to have to get the first few thousand crappy drawings out of the way so I can start to learn how to use this thing right – but it does give you some excellent tips on coloring lineart in Photoshop. Tips on organizing your work, using layers and channels to best effect, painting with light, all sorts of cool tricks. And it comes with a CD full of scripts and brushes and sample artwork (Terry Moore art to play with! Woo hoo!) that will have me occupied for weeks. Except…

In the beginning of the book it stresses the importance of calibrating your monitor to get the best duplication of what you'll see when you print. And I tried that, using their suggestions. And I hosed my monitor royally. I suspect it's because I have the monitor settings as well as NVIDIA's color management going, and changing one around screwed up the other. Only I couldn't get back to where I was, even with multiple Resets, and everything I tried made it worse… Also tried Adobe's Gamma calibrator, which added a third layer to the mess.

After an hour or so of tweaking back and forth, my computer doesn't look quite so much like it's on Ecstasy any more, and I can make out subdued colors, so I'm going to stop there.

All of which means: if my artwork has a glaring, garish color quality from now on, it's, it's… a new school of art! Yeah! The F-ed-Up-Gamma school. Very popular with the college students, and people who just close their eyes and poke at the Contrast button.

Just finished a design I wanted to see, a pic of the River you don't want to cross.

Haven't decided yet if I want to color it although I'll probably try anyway just to thoroughly aggravate myself. I'm convinced that daVinci, Michaelangelo, and Picasso would never have made it if they'd had to color their work with a trackball mouse and the world would be a much poorer place for it.

Finally, some new art to add. Check out "An Audience of One."

Took over a year of amazingly talented, world-class stalling and procrastination, but I finally finished the thing so I can work on something else with a clear conscience, for a given value of "clear."