New pages start up next week.  In the meantime you can get Flowery Death prints on our Society 6 page and I’ll work on getting some of the other interludes up there as well.  Of course I didn’t get as much regular BN stuff done during my break as I’d wanted, but I have 10 finished pages ready to go and that gives me some breathing space as the mobile game art work stuff is piling up, the babies are starting to stand which requires constant vigilance, and I still haven’t seen Avengers cause Jim has too much work… oh and having three kids.  Hopefully in a couple of weeks  I am very glad that Whedon has a giant hit on his hands and I look forward to whatever else he gets to do now with gobs of Hollywood money!

I recently did a cute little commission for a reader’s custom new baby announcement cards (a baby dragon is WAY more interesting than generic pink booties!).  I’m assuming she has definitely arrived by now and is keeping her parents constantly busy and sleep deprived.  Happy first Mother’s Day Ariane!  Anyway, this totally got me thinking about more interesting baby stuff.  For the longest time I tried to find a nice growth chart and couldn’t so we made our own with a large canvas (this was after Sam took a marker to one we’d been given as a gift so I needed a replacement).  I think parents need more options for cool baby stuff ….zombie themed nursery decor anyone?  How about ninjas?  Ooooo the things I could do…

Still a work in progress but here’s the next fine art representation, in this case a Frazetta style Lech, the manliest bear man ever.

Hopefully this weekend went well and some of you got to come see us at TCAF in Toronto (I’m prepping this page on Thursday night before we go) and please let it not be raining so we can still take all the babies to the zoo today.  I’m also hoping we made the five hour trip without any melt downs or diaper failures and that we arrive home tonight still sane.  Fingers crossed.

Kinkojou!

Playing around on Photoshop with creepy Death.  Might re-do this at a higher res at some point as I kind of like the way it turned out.  Hey Sam, want a slightly scary looking poster for your room?

If you missed the bonus Friday update click back and check out the hoodie goodness!  That poll is technically open till midnight tonight (though I don’t think it’s much of a contest… I actually like the white one the best…) but I’d still love your opinions guys.  I’m looking forward to doing more stuff like this in the future, so let us know what you think and we’ll be better able to plan.

Also, Toronto area people come check out TCAF this coming weekend!  This is the only con I’ll be getting to this year so I’m really looking forward to it.  And the zoo.  All three boys are coming with us and we’re going to tour the zoo before we head back to Ottawa so I’m really excited to see how they react.  Fortunately my parents are also coming with us to help babysit and maintain my sanity.  First long family car trip!  Wohoo!  Anyway, TCAF is free so it’s a great con to visit casually, and bring kids.  They always have lots of stuff for younger readers as well.  By the way, Ottawa fans please check out the very first Ottawa Comic Con which is the weekend after!  I didn’t try for a table this year as being away from the twins all day is still pretty difficult but we’re planning on checking it out for sure.  Hopefully it does very well and will become an annual thing.  By the way, I have no idea how a little first year con snagged Patrick Stewart but well done gentlemen.

If you haven’t gotten enough Death lately, here’s more!

I am so excited to finally show you guys these!  We’ve been playing around with some merch ideas with CrazyHeads as I really wanted to create something a bit more original than just a t-shirt (I totally want to do tees as well but we’re starting big!)  But these are a complicated custom design so we’re going to do them as pre-orders and we need to presell 100 to be able to manufacture them.  Step 1 might as well be to find out which bear we should do first.  I have a feeling Death is more popular (but who wouldn’t want to wear a giant red pentacle on their chest??) but we’d like to get your opinions before we undertake this so, new versus and new poll.  Comments welcome as well of course.  The poll will close midnight on Monday so let me know what you think guys

I’ll have more details when we start the pre order but these hoodies will be a light weight sweatshirt fabric with a slightly fleecy inside and the hood will be lined with cotton.  The bear emblems will be screen printed.  There are other examples of hoodies on the Punchbrand site to check out as they’re similar.  These ones will be pullovers though (with kangaroo pocket) and will run $45 each.

Vote incentive:  a bit of a preview for Crack’s upcoming arc… my poor little Crackers…

Floaty Evil was rather fun to color, and he’s available as a print/skin/tee on our new Society6 site.  Their tees are printed with direct-to-garment which only really works on lights, but it does allow full color spectrum images and I don’t have to worry about ink limits.  I hope to do some special edition BN tees on darker colors in the future but for now I have this to play around with.  They print on AA tees for those that prefer to buy local(ish).

I do have a new screen printed tee available now at Captainkyso: my old battery cat didn’t get printed at Woot but he’s available for a limited time from Kyso (my cyberpunk girl is also still available).

And Tilteed also has a logo shirt available right now with my Melee guys on it.

The babies are finally turning a corner on the sleep issue!  The last week has been pretty good, only two bad nights overall.  Oddly enough if one has a bad night, the other tends to as well, just not at the same time.  I had to rock one back to sleep around 1:30 last night, then the other one went off at 4.  Unfortunately he didn’t go back to sleep for an hour, even when I lay him beside me.  He just babbled and scratched my face and pulled on my hair for awhile.  And he still got up before 7 like usual.  At least we’re seeing progress.

They’re also pretty fast on their bellies (they can’t true crawl yet but they’re very mobile).  I do have to follow around behind them and mop up all the spit up they spew and then slide through but they’re getting adventurous, Owen in particular likes to get around.  He started squealing this morning while I was doing dishes and I looked over the counter to find him on his back with Evan on top in a pretty effective cross body… can’t wait to get these guys on the mat!

Got to draw some people (ladies!) recently for game icons, glad to see I can still do it.

Cracken Versus the Cractopus!  I’m still at the planning stages of the Lech Versus which is unfortunately way at the bottom of my priorities right now, but I still have the urge every now and then to draw some pretty silly match ups  Poll for this one to come.

Just got back from taking Sammy to his third birthday party, for a daycare friend this time.  The little dude is the only boy at day care with three little girls who adore him and call him “Baby Sam”.  We walked into the play gym and the birthday girl and “Mantha” (cause saying her whole name is too hard when you can’t do “s”) each took his hand and led him away to the play structure.  Freaking adorable.  He later had too much smothering and ran away from them and they all laughed at his chocolate covered face at lunch (are all little girls so clean??) and then they each had to hug twice before they left, despite the fact that they spend all day together three days each week.  He also pigged down a whole piece of pizza and wanted seconds of cake while the girls ate about a half piece each and none of them could finish their cake…do all little girls eat so lightly??  I can’t imagine what my grocery bill for three teenage boys will eventually be

Floaty (and armed) Evil.

First off, Happy Easter everyone.  Easter makes me think of spring/new life/allergies/etc. hence baby bears!  I think this was a request from someone at some point and I thought it was cute so behold, thy request is done.

And now the bad news: between life, and babies, and work, and sick babies, I long ago used up my buffer of strips and though I have one more page finished (the beginning of that Crack arc) I’m not getting them done as easily as before and I’m at the end of finished scripts so…despite some of your praise that I’ve kept up at all (well deserved I might humbly add!) now I’m taking a month off.  There will be updates on Mondays still (and some Fridays!) with odds and ends, and brain farts, and perhaps some things prophetic of plot lines to come, but I need some time to relax and write those, and maybe get a cover for book 3 done in the process and hopefully get more sleep (3 kids spiking fevers all week-fun times!).

Plus huh?

I’ll leave you with fun (for me at least) tee shirt news:

My Punkgirl design is available now on CaptainKyso which is a pretty new tee start up from India but they do ship everywhere and they even sent me a test print that turned out great!

And available from Tee Fury for one day only on Thursday April 12 is my homage to eighties cartoons that I barely remember even though I watched them all the time:

Oh Lech, your ulterior motives will likely come back to haunt you  Pirate spray sounds like an incredibly fun product that could easily be abused… but it is just Crack’s favorite brand of disinfectant.  And since some of you seem to get such a kick out of my ongoing saga of sleeplessness here’s yet another fun update: both twins ’slept’ through the night, then Sam woke up crying and snuffly around 3 am the next night, disturbing the twins, and was running a mild fever by morning.  Sambit was better today but both of the twins were up most of the night last night with runny noses and stuffy breathing.  Stay tuned to find out if they -wait for it- BOTH have a fever tomorrow and we have a really fun couple of days!  Yay!

A couple of items in the ‘Help support Bear Nuts and my diaper fund’ category:  this silly food shirt is available on Woot right now but only for this week.

And I’m trying out another new site so if you have an account at GoodJoe please go vote for my Batman inspired tee!  Thanks guys!

And last but not least is a really fun recent commission of the Star Wars universe’s much under appreciated hero: an Ewok Jedi!

Nerd’s new “look” is growing on me  I imagine that “style” would be rather hard for him to maintain though…

Somewhat of an update from last week:  BOTH boys slept through the night on Wed.  I should have known better than to get optimistic after only one night but I couldn’t help it and sure enough neither made it through the whole night on Thursday and dashed my frail hopes once again.  And then Owen had a conniption, or a nightmare, or indigestion, or it was just his turn to be a prick, or whatever on Sat night and had to be walked for 20 minutes around 2 am.  Did I mention my husband tends to sleep through this stuff?  Or he just can’t hear it over his own snoring.

Babies are still cute though, kind of.

The babies are horrible teases: they’ll sleep through one night, and not the next.  Owen does it more (his record is three in a row so far) and Evan does it rarely.  Owen will have a great night, and be a horrible monster crying every couple of hours the next.  Evan will go one night only waking up once, and then waking up three or four times the next night (’waking up’ is probably not accurate, sometimes it’s just ‘loudly stirring’ but even if they don’t wake themselves, I hear it, even through two closed doors).  The twin books say that identical twins generally have the same bio rhythms and usually sleep the same

My mother says I was sleeping through the night at six weeks.  WHAT the HELL.

An unlikely collision?