About a month ago, I was on the rpg.net forums, keeping an eye on the upcoming 3rd edition of Nobilis.
Incidentally, this was because:
*Nobilis 2nd edition was THE best system I knew for making characters
(and dragging a concept out of Chaos, clothing it with stats and actualizing it in sheet form is generally my favourite part of RPG:s)
*By all accounts, 3rd edition would be twice as awesome at making characters.
(I've read the book now. Char-gen is 2.5 times as awesome. Three times, if you count estate properties.)
*Nobilis is, well, it's just an awesomely cool setting. You get to play characters that could fit right into Sandman, you have philosophical discussions by default when arguing game events, and there is not a single dice roll involved, so characters don't die from freakishly bad luck.

ANYWAY, Nobilis was days away from print, when someone spoke up about a problem with the art. Turns out one of the main artists - responsible for all the Excrucians, among other things - had traced art from other sources in several of the images. From Touhou fan-art. (WTF, by the way; if you're going to steal, steal from the very best. You're going to get caught either way - it's the INTERNET AGE, for crying out loud - and at least that way you learn more actual skill while you're doing it.)

So Nobilis was suddenly less 67 illustrations. (Jenna Moran, the author, is classy like that; tracings, while probably legal, are just lame. No way was she going to have those rip-offs in her books, so she delayed printing several weeks to find another solution.)
And that's where I and several other amateur artists came in.
I'm enthusiastic about Nobilis, and Dr. Moran is very approachable, posting regularly in the forums, so I simply mailed in an offer to help, and got a choice of two Excrucians and two Abhorrent Weapons. I signed up for all four.
They're in my gallery, now, so that's that.

As for how pleased I am with my contributions, ehhh. I classify myself as an amateur, and my illustrations as amateurish by default. I mean, I've put in enough effort, but I know what professional artwork looks like, and mine doesn't go in that category. I knew going in, that sooner or later I would look on the finished art and wince knowing the evidence of my sub-par skills were in print and spread all over the world.
But hey, you've got to make sacrifices for the things you like, or you will live in a poorer world in the end.
And it's better than no art at all.

So if you've been wondering about my excessive lateness with the comic, this is mostly why.
(Also, I've had Cintiq troubles)

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EPILOGUE - NOW IF I WERE PARANOID, AND SUPERSTITIOUS TO BOOT...
It's oddly fitting, isn't it, that the Excrucians, known for robbing the world of concepts and generally making things less themselves, are the ones whose images threatened to disappear, leaving the whole book poorer for it. Almost as if the artist's Credibility or Originality was Excruciated...
And isn't it odd how right after I started sketching the replacement Excrucians, I lost my Cintiq connector cables along with my whole backpack, so I had to use inferior non-digital tools for all the linework?
Note how, as Jenna herself has pointed out, a work like Nobilis would be much more likely to be created in a world where it was in fact how the Universe worked...
Eh, good thing I'm neither superstitious nor paranoid.
Nor, for that matter, secretly concerned I might unknowingly be a creature from beyond creation capable of jinxing things simply by thinking *huh, I wish I could have contributed art to that book*.