Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

Today is a friend's 50th birthday. It's been a busy and kind of crappy several months for her (think typical country song of "wife gets loose, the truck up and dies, and the dog files for divorce"-level things). So I wanted to send a positive greeting, but even if this wasn't 50, it'd be tough to put a positive spin on things. So I figured, perhaps instead of hoping for a time when everything's better, having a glance at how it could be worse.

I guess the elements are mostly from science fiction and fantasy: Godzilla, a meteor (or comet), Planet of the Apes level shenanigans with the Statue of Liberty, an Eye of Sauron toasting someone, and Ray Harryhausen stop-motion skeltons on the loose. The crushed and burning buildings could be Godzilla's handiwork, but I was thinking they were disasters on their own. In the pencil version, we were wearing N-95 masks (which was the style at the time) but I decided something more ominous would be better and converted them into full on WWI-ish era gas masks. And of course the birthday party hats. Must not forget them.

I drew the picture, then inked it, and colored it. The problem is when I scanned it in, some of the brightly colored ink like the pink looked very pale and the orange didn't show up at all. So I took a photograph of it with my camera and the colors look OK but the card is very dark. I tried to increase the brightness but it always seems to come at the cost of the bright colors in the top half of the picture, which are intermixed with white. So I just stuck with the untouched photo. Here is the full-resolution picture.