July Update

You know, I've noticed something that could, you know, be aggravating. You know what I mean? Because, you know, my brain tends to get stuck in a rut sometimes when talking and, you know, I regurgitate the same stupid words or phrases a few times. It drives me crazy, you know. AAARRRGGH!!

Anyway ….. I've been working on brainstorming through some things for Taloner: Wekthusia to try and hammer out and refine issues that are bothering me. I already mentioned this in my last post, so I won't go into more detail on that today. The other thing I've been doing lately is working on world lore, particularly for the world of Gaia. When I say lore, what I'm referring to is miscellaneous things like how certain types of magic work, detailed pieces of history for races or areas found in Gaia, random bios for individuals who appear throughout the world's history, things like that. It helps kind of stretch my creative muscles at the same time it maintains sanity for me, as well as giving me stronger bases to build story elements off of. I'm someone who enjoys history, and I'm a detail-oriented person. I like having material already developed which I can reference while writing, rather than being halfway through a paragraph and having to go, "Oh well, this character is descended from … Greg the Great, who um, was known for …. I mean, he ate lots of …. pancakes …"

Yeeeeah. I prefer to have things that are already a little more fleshed-out to draw upon when I'm writing a story. It's kind of like anchor points for building a web, in a way. If there's no anchor point for X details, then you have to hurry and make something up, and on-the-fly isn't usually my favorite method. But if I took the time beforehand to create some lore, then oh! Look at these handy anchor points I can use to help build the basis of some of these ideas I'm writing. Yeah, you get the point.

I haven't done much art of any kind for a while, and I'd like to start sketching out a few of these non-canonical characters I've been coming up with, just for fun. We recently found a channel on our television that sometimes has a competition show on blacksmithing/forging, and it's helped kind of rekindle some flame for me in working on ideas for both smithing characters and different types of weaponry that appears in Gaia. Seeing some of the unique (and sometimes just plain wicked) weaponry that really does exist in our world is amazing to me.

Okay, back to work. Stay cool!

New Logo, New Problems

With the reboot of the trilogy, it was time to give the series logo a makeover. I've never been able to find a font I really, truly liked for this logo, so I ended up just drawing an alphabet of my own letters. It will do for a while.

Warning: rant ahead!

Oh. My. GOSH. Never have I EVER had as much trouble getting a book into print as I have with this one! And this is self-publishing! I just blew four hours of this evening fighting with the formatting of both the interior and the cover for Wings of Fate in order to get it to be acceptable for print. And even then, I have a feeling it's going to get kicked back because of the dopey interior maps that can't seen to figure out that they're supposed to be 200+ DPI. Tomorrow is D-Day, so I'm really, really hoping and praying that any rejections found in the files are quick and simple fixes. I just about croaked when the site through which I'd like to publish came back and said I had to add a .75 inch gutter to the manuscript!

What's the gutter? Oh. It's the section of pages inside your book that you can't really pull open enough to see because the book is too thick. And weighing in around 650 pages total, this one is a whopper! I'm a little scared to see what happens with Path of a Hero and Eternity's Edge after I have completed the revision process for those two.

So what with bouncing back and forth between my two challenged laptops, the internet usage on my phone nearly running dry for the month, health recovery and plenty of issues with various software, I have had it for today. I have been so bent on getting this book revised and back into print that all of my Christmas activities for today got thrown in the garbage. It wouldn't be so bad if I knew this book was going to end up netting me a large sum of income, but honestly, I'll be thrilled if I even get more than $5 in royalties. No, I'm serious. I don't write my stories for mulah. That would be nice, but my main drive has always been to have stories that I can sit down and enjoy and not worry about something inappropriate appearing partway through. Even with self-published authors, making a decent chunk of change on your work is pretty much like winning the lottery. Tens of thousands, dare I say hundreds of thousands of authors probably don't make more than a few bucks on their work, and I'm willing to bet that most of that comes from family and close friends.

Okay, my laptop is starting to burn my hand. I'm off to skulk around the kitchen and watch Star Trek. See you tomorrow.

Mailbox makeover

I finally got around to painting our mailbox on the 4th. I chose to do a golden eagle on one side and an American flag on the other. It looks much better now that just a dented, white and rusting box.

Happy privacy patch is happy to protect our identity on the internet, yay!

Art Trade - Jarkul

My half of an art trade.

I very much enjoyed drawing this character! The perspective didn't come out quite how I wanted, but meh. This particular character is very bad, and I ended up listening to "Bodies" by Drowning Pool while working on her. Seemed fitting.

Jarkul is the creative property of S. A. Thorup. Done in Krita (oh, how I love it!)

Inktober - Fellbeast

I don't think I made him creepy enough. Sure was fun to draw, though.

Inktober - Meditative Angel

Alright, now granted that this is not a tall, leggy blonde babe of an angel. So what? I would like to see more armored angels that are short. Or plain. Or maybe even a little overweight. And I'm tired of fantasy angel art where the woman is flashing way too much skin. I say angels can be beautiful without revealing half (or more) of what the good Lord gave them. I am determined to do more of these!

Inktober - On Yon Fell Horse...

....sits a hurdy gurdy man.

Inktober - Autumn King

I'm enjoying working on my inking this month. Alas, my dearest hubby is away hunting without me because of work. But hey, look! I got an elk, anyway!

Inktober - Release

Happy Inktober!

A few friends of mine are participating in Inktober, a kind of art challenge where artists try to ink something for every day of October. I won't be able to do quite that much, but I wanted to try and draw a few different things, anyway.

Here, Have a Griffin!

I woke up yesterday and wanted to draw a griffin. This piece was good practice for me with Krita, as I'm learning how to better use the tools available to me. This is the first time I've been able to do line art with the program, and it's pretty much required me to draw my lines backwards from how I'm used to inking them. It was challenging, but fun. I'm so thankful heavenly father has blessed me to be able to draw the things that are in my head.

About 3.25 hours. Done in Krita.

Oryx symbol

An emblem that appears in one of the short stories for Wayside Tales. The animal pictured is an oryx, done in a somewhat calligraphic style.

What I see

Want to know something? Some of my scariest dreams involve sea creatures. This is the best I could do of a part of what I saw in a dream last night. These are mostly prehistoric sea things, so far as I can tell. I would paint up some pictures of the more detailed things, if I could do them justice.

Last night, I saw things like biomechanical octopi that could use short bursts of magnetic forcefields to grab prey. Other times, I have seen some of the scariest, darkest waters you can imagine with creatures to match them. I'll see fish, eels, and monsters who are slimy and deformed. They'll be impossibly huge with glowing points or bristle with teeth, fins, and spines. And often times, I'll feel as if they're sucking me toward them and I have to vacate the area very quickly.

I'm not sure why I have fish in my nightmares. I was never scarred by sea creatures as a child. I never watched the movie Jaws, and I never had a tragic incident with pet fish. But it never fails that if I see murky water choked with algae or shadows in a dream, I feel very inspired to run.

Badge Collage

Oh, you thought I was kidding when I said I must be crazy? Hmmm nope, afraid not.

Here's some of what I've been up to for the last seven months or so. There exists a fandom of the anthropomorphic art of animals, the fans of which are collectively known as "furries" (because their individual characters are usually fur-bearing animals of some kind). I don't consider myself a furry, but I've been participating in the monthly trade community I found on Livejournal, which is where members are randomly matched up with each other to draw name badges of each others' characters. It's been nice to be able to trade art with some other people, since it's hard for me to find an art community I like and stay there for a while.

Most of these were done in micron pen, brush pen, colored pencil and a little gel pen, though one was done digitally.

Characters are copyright their respective owners.

Color me!

So I'm sick right now, and it's a bummer. Want to help cheer me up? Color this picture however you want and then let me know what you did! I just ask that you please do not modify the original line art, and please credit me as the original artist if you post your results anywhere. Have at it!

Actually, it's not my favorite color...

You know, because of the colors I'd used for my online avatar, I think I've given people the wrong idea that my favorite color is green. It's not, actually. I have three favorite colors, in fact, and they're all present in this picture. Can you guess what they are?

So if green isn't my favorite color, then why did I use it for my avatar? Well, why not? When I came up with the dragon character, I wanted it to be all black. And glowing green looks cool against black. It's as simple as that :)

Had some fun with the Neon effect here. I think it's been one of my favorite filter effects on Gimp since I ran across it, partly because it gives such a nice touch to glowing components and partly because I'm lazy. Hey, if the tool is there, use it!

P.S. And my character's markings are still green :) I just decided to play with a touch of Tron stuff here.

Fun with markers

I purchased a few new markers to play with and needed something to color, so I drew myself a couple of dinosaurs. I don't think I did too badly for not using any visual references, though that Hadrosaur ended up being more cutesy than the red guy.

As fun as these were, I found out that not one, but TWO of the tips of my new markers are pretty dry. The gray one I got seems to be pretty good, though. Maybe at some point in the future I'll get some more of that brand, methinks.

Wandering in Green

Xenithar is so good to me. She agreed to do yet another art trade when I came and asked, and she's put up with me plenty of times before. This is easily the most extravagant trade piece I've ever done, and I think I'm done doing them for a while. (I need to focus on other things)

So I started in on this piece by battling with the original pose I had of the character. I was also having a problem with the terrain, which is meant to be somewhere in a jungle. It was pretty much too flat for my liking, and the angle of the character kept bothering me. I got through the inks and started on the coloring .... then decided to scrap the whole thing and start over. I'm very happy I did this. I was so much more comfortable working on this during round two than I was with the first try.

I very much enjoyed the coloration of the character, and I also had quite a bit of fun with the lighting here. This is the first time I've tried to do some kind of light beam, and while I have room to improve, I don't think I did too badly for an initial attempt. What I did was to select a region with the Free Select tool and filled it with a gradient (foreground to transparent, specifically) then selected a smaller region inside of that and did a second gradient of a lighter shade. After that I cut out some shafts where the character was blocking the light, then played around with some motion blurring. I found out you have to be careful if you use this method for a light shaft, solely because it tends to move the light one way or another. So, if you have your light cut out around the shape of a figure, it might need to be adjusted afterward.

Character is copyright S. A. Thorup. Done in GiMP in 4 hours......and my hand is officially on vacation.

Anger

When I was in high school, I started doing this thing where I would draw a beastly embodiment of ugly emotions - frustration, misery, rage ... those kinds of things. I only did two or three of them, but it was something I liked because it gave me a chance to really think about some of the symbolism of the details I put into the monsters.

Well, today I did another one. Meet Anger, the nasty, hot little demon that smolders somewhere beneath your other emotions when you've had too little sleep or someone is really giving you a hard time on a rotten day.

So let's talk creature features for a minute: I wanted to give this guy an over all burning kind of look. Cracking lava was the first thing that appealed to me, and I think this came out pretty well. I know I had fun when it got to that point! I also gave him some nasty claws and big obsidian/cinder spikes jutting out of his back, by which I was trying to portray that you wouldn't want to get close to him because it might hurt. The horns and tusks are my representation of power - I don't know about you, but sometimes anger is a bully that is hard to kick out of the picture. I tried to make him look a little more on the ripped side, since sometimes when you're feeling angry, it can give you an illusion of strength. Oh yeah, the tail - three little whips on the end that snap and sting and drive anger on and on. Big nasty.

This image was different for me for one very big reason - no ink lines. I'm accustomed to having some form of lines to color inside of whenever I do drawings, so I'm used to relying on them to tell where my lights and darks fall. I've always held some respect for digital artists who paint things all the time without the use of ink lines and create astounding pictures. I'll have to watch more of them whenever I get the chance to see how they figure out where everything goes. I had to leave the rough sketch lines up while I did most of the details in this so that I could see what went where!

Strike a pose

Here are a couple more drawings of my avatar. Just trying to get some different views of it here for reference.....or because I was bored......take your pick :)

I was going to add at least one other figure to this sheet, but I've noticed the last few days that I've been running out of artistic steam, so I think I should take a week to recharge. Plus, my hand is cramping something awful (I never learn) so I should probably give it as much of a vacation as I can.

The Mage and the Martial Artist

Done for my half of a trade with Xenithar. These are a couple of her characters that she wanted drawn. I had a lot of fun with the lighting here and the kicked-back mood, though I do wish I could have gotten the background darker. I guess that's one of the compromises you make when you use colored pencil, but it still turned out pretty good.

Done with graphite pencils (3B and 6B) and colored pencils. Characters are copyright S. A. Thorup.