An update, and some art

Well, I never did get around to posting something in here yesterday. Alas, alas. However, I’ve been pretty productive with my writing, so I say that makes up for it. I finished the chapter that was bogging me down, and am a good ways into the next one. I find myself making Raphel much nicer this time around, in the way he says things..which is interesting, because I’ve apparently also been making him meaner, too. There is a definite disconnect between his words and his actions, and the gulf is growing as the story goes on. He will do something awful to Saeli, but then he will list all his reasonable, unavoidable reasons for doing so, and show himself to be as worried and frustrated and human as she are, and he doesn’t like doing stuff like that, but…and Saeli finds herself nodding her head in agreement without a clear idea of how she got there. It’s all very underhanded. He knows if he’s outright mean, he’ll scare her off for good.

I’ve also been working on a book cover idea. It’s a scene that doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the story, but is rather a nod to the initial dream I had that inspired the story in the first place. I was with some dark-clad people, and we were hiding in a big city from a group of cold, white-robed people marching down the street, chanting like monks. I wasn’t one of the dark people, though, and I had the impression that I was actually supposed to be with the white-robed ones. But I wasn’t really one of them, either, though I was more like them than I was like the dark ones. But the dark ones weren’t really so bad, I found. (Thus, Saeli’s unique position in the world was born). Originally I had called the two groups the Blacks and the Whites, but it was suggested to me that those names were much too un-politically correct, and I agreed.
 
Scan:

This is the scan of the original drawing I did. It’s cobbled together from a bunch of different sources, which I put together in Photoshop and printed out. I then did what many might consider cheating, and traced straight from that composition using a lightbox. I would torn my hair out trying to get that architecture right otherwise. I’ve had to tweak the image sufficiently that I no longer feel guilty about it. (Wait…no. I never felt guilty about it. Oh well.) It looks weird at the bottom because the drawing is bigger than the scanner, and so I had to scan it in two pieces. The drawing isn’t going to show up on the finished piece; it’s only a guide for my Photoshopping. The figures in the foreground are Raphel and Saeli (if that wasn’t obvious). That is the High Priestess leading the line of professors; I haven’t decided who the others are (if anyone). That’s supposed to be the city Temple in the background.
 
Value sketch:

I learned about the concept of an underpainting in one of my Stetson classes, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever actually *needed* to do one. The purpose of the underpainting is to figure out where all the lights and darks will be. Because my source images came from so many places, my source composition had no consistant value scale whatsoever. (Plus, they were all daytime images, and this is a nighttime picture). The final image won’t be sepia-toned.
 
Where I’m at now:

Here’s where I’m at in the coloring process. I made the scene take place in the purple hour, Saeli’s favorite time of day. Right now I’m just filling in the flat colors; I will go back in different layers to put in the shadows and highlights. White buildings at night are interesting, to say the least. Black and white clothing isn’t much better. I’m trying to make it so that the grays on the left side of the image are made from purples, and the grays on the right are made from yellows, so that I have a warm gray/cool gray contrast. Saeli is pretty dead neutral.

The amount of work I can get done when I’m not at home is astronomical compared to what I do at my desk. I wish Books-a-Million opened earlier than 10AM. Places like Panera Bread and various coffee shops open early, but you really aren’t supposed to just sit in there without buying something (some places have a policy), and that could very quickly get expensive. I suppose I could sit outside and work (maybe when it gets a little warmer, heh). I got a lot of writing done Monday…if I can do that on all the days when Eli is at school, I can have the first book of Shades done by the end of March, which is my goal.

Tags: artwork, Raphel, revisions, Shades

Art!

It’s Thursday! Here’s a drawing I did a while ago of my main characters from Shades.

 
And, perhaps a couple of maps. It’s funny, I actually didn’t draw these until the first draft of the story was almost done, when I finally needed to know exactly where things were.
 

 
Here’s the world as a whole. You can see Aschera and Chisge in the upper center area. The village where Raphel was born is almost due west of Aschera, on the other side of the Midplains. The red area is the cursed Midplains, top-left pointing stripes represent Mantle territory, top-right pointing stripes are Cowl territory, and crosshatching is disputed territory. (You may notice that there is quite a bit of disputed territory, and that the Cowls have much less undisputed territory than the Mantles. The Mantles are winning the war when the story opens). Iadnah and Lanschport are both southern Cowl cities. Iadnah is nominally under Mantle control, while Lanschport is purely Cowl. Lanschport has a rather unsavory reputation even among Cowls, which is probably why the Mantles don’t want it (people on Verre have odd superstitions about the ocean); both Geris and Teja hail from that city. The battle of Iadnah plays an important role in all three of my major Cowls’ pasts: Mora lost her husband, infant daughter, and father; Kaladan lost his faith in the Mantle cause and turned Cowl; and I haven’t yet decided how Raphel was involved (but I have decided that he needs to be).
 

 
Here is Aschamon. A great deal of the action in the first and third books takes place on Aschamon’s campus, so I needed to know exactly where each building was in relation to the others.

It sits on a hill in the western quadrant of Aschera (Aschera I have not mapped yet. Not sure if I need to). The Temple and the main sorarc tower are the hub of the school, both physically and spiritually. The small triangular buildings are the dormitories: one for the youngest (gray) students, three for the various ages of Mantle students, and one for the cleric students. Saeli lives in a Mantle dormitory, even though she is not a Mantle; she and Cara got special permission to be roommates, and since Cara is a Mantle, the school allowed it.

Tags: artwork, Kaladan, maps, Mora, Raphel, Saeli, Shades

Because I’m really an obsessive fan girl at heart.

I think I briefly reviewed The Mortal Instruments trilogy by Cassandra Clare on this blog somewhere. Well, I had this small palm branch that I could never figure out what sort of athame to make out of it…so instead, I decided to make a stele. A stele, for all of you that haven’t read the books, is a writing instrument that Shadowhunters use to draw angel runes on themselves. It is made of special glass, is somewhat bigger than a pen and smaller than a wand.

Obviously mine is not made of glass, since working with glass is not (yet *cough*) among my list of artsy skills. Mine is also more intricate than the canon Shadowhunter version (which, as far as I remember, is just basically a glass wand).

Yay for iridescent white paint. The swirly design is blue twine that I super-glued to the body of the stele. (Yes, that took a while).

The blue twine up close.

The flower is supposed to be an amaranth. Also not canon, but since I intend on hanging on to this thing (unlike some of the Mortal Instruments characters), why not make it personal?

The design on the end is the rune for angelic power. Appropriate for a stele. No, I did not create the rune…someone online did.

The stele in action. (Or rather, cleverly photoshopped to appear so). The rune being drawn is a healing rune, borrowed from the same online source.

Anyway, this project was such fun that I’m not in the process of making a seraph blade from the same book series. If I ever get the opportunity to go to some Cassandra Clare fan gathering, I’ll be prepared.

Tags: artwork, The Mortal Instruments

Icons

So I got a wild hair the other day and decided to make some avatars based on characters in my story. It was so much fun that I just kept going. The pics are of real actors and other famous folk, so you might recognize some of them. (So if by the 0.00001% chance that you are one of these celebrities, and you happen across this site and see these pics, know that they are simply for my own entertainment and all in good fun.) The quotes are things that these characters have actually said, but as I have a massive trimming job to do on my second draft, there’s always the chance these sayings won’t appear in the finished story. (If you can’t read them, just hover over with the mouse…or click to see a slightly bigger version.)

As always, don’t steal…though I can’t imagine what anyone else would do with them.

Tags: artwork, Raphel, Saeli, Shades