Merry Christmas! 😀 Actually, it’s only Christmas Eve. But I am feeling the reason for the season. I’ve got nothing but gratitude for the excellent, mind-blowing things that have happened this last year. And I know Jesus is behind all of it and is greater still than every success I’ve had.
The Decorating Danny Christmas tree was a random idea done in my shiny Corel Painter 11. It felt good to do the RE kids again, except for Tokie. Not sure why Lacy is blond. It suits her. >_>; If not for her Asian mom and Middle Eastern dad…maybe she should dye it.
I know this isn’t as cutesy as last year’s Christmas greeting with Danny and Ingrid and the mistletoe lol. I can’t believe that was a year ago. Definitely feels like that’s from a few months ago.
Bahaha. I can’t say much about this because I don’t feel like revealing a lot about Sun-Walking (especially since Margaret will read this), but I love how I’ve complicated the relationship between Levi and Lucienne. Like I was all ready to get excited with this hot scene and then while I was trying to fall asleep and failing last night, I thought about the possibility of rodents I introduced in this location and…hahaha. Had to ruin it.
And I still got to draw something sort of sexy. Win-win, I’d say. 😀
I just have to say (without revealing too much) that apparently it’s not the end yet for Redefining Evil and that wonderful publishing firm. The end might not be a published book, but it’s getting much closer to that than I ever thought it could.
All right! This thing shall be conquered and full of updates on my artistic/literary life! 🙂
First off, this is what I’m currently jamming to.
I heard it off an underground Christian radio station, Effect Radio. I’ve been finding so many good bands through them, and for the first time in a while I’m probably actually going to purchase an album (The Workday Release’s). 😀
Anyway – let’s see. I’m going to go check where everything was at the last time I blogged. Oh – that’s right. I’d just started Sun-Walking. Well, last night I just hit 100 pages of that beast. I like it so much. It’s one of those stories like Farewell, Fairytale where I’m trying to tell myself something. So far, it’s working really well. And I’m working with an all new female, Lucienne (which I thought was a name I made up because I was first going to call her Lucerinne…which sounded too much like Listerine, and then I found out it’s a real one haha). Lucienne is the most successful I think I’ve been with integrating femininity with strength. This is an early sketch I did of her when I first started getting drawn into the story:
Kyra convinced me to make her blond, which actually helped push the story in the direction it went. Helios is more homogeneous, and I had sort of a Swedish/Scandinavian/German/Western European look in mind for the archetypical Helios citizen. That worked really well with the Sun-Walker being a foreigner, because he creates a visual foil for what’s expected of someone from Helios.
It was difficult in the beginning to develop the Sun-Walker because I knew he’d be central to the story. Over the years I’ve tried out a lot of different kinds of guys in my stories. I’ve had the gruff emotionally constipated kinds like Eripmav; the emotionally tortured/deeply commited kind like Julian; the hotshot romantic like Andrew; the goof/deeply injured like Micah…so every time I thought “Hey, the Sun-Walker should be _____!”, my next thought would go, “…Yeah, that’s just like _____.” Haha. But I am unexpectedly thrilled with him. It really helped that I was being influenced by a totally new culture myself. My shenanigans at Augsburg brought me a lot of unexpected blessings this semester. One of those included the chance to live away from home for a month and a half with a new God-ordained friend from Augsburg. She was renting the third bedroom in an old-fashioned apartment complex just northwest of downtown (we’re talking like, skyline out the porch windows) from 2 guys whose third roommate was traveling for the semester. The guys happened to be from India working in the States on their Ph.D.’s in, for example, electrical engineering – all the super-over-my-head sciency stuff. They were really easy to be around and one of the two was very sociable, open, and friendly. In several big ways, he sort of became the Sun-Walker. I have…okay that would have sounded awkward. Uh. His appearance is somewhat Parthiv’s. Also I learned enough from him and Bodhi to incorporate their culture when necessary for Levi. (I just realized that, as a Hebrew name, Levi doesn’t really fit this plan. But he’s too much Levi now to change it, and that sounds better than Atma.)
In all, Sun-Walking’s been really gratifying to work on. Its message is something I really want to tell (it’s about a girl who finds her something, instead of her someone.
Sun-Walking is also a highly illustrative concept since the whole world is only illuminated by organic, localized light called Sun-Nectar.
(lol –> “You’ll notice a trend as the terminology of Sun-Walking develops. It involves the word ‘Sun,’ and a dash, and then some word vaguely relating to its actual purpose. I hold no responsibility.”)
Since that’s the case though, I started mulling over the possibility of making a Sun-Walking layout. That launched this picture.
A lot of the details are lost in the smaller version, but it’s probably going to be about this size for the layout, too. So. Isn’t Levi beautiful? ;_; My mom said that Lucienne looks like Kyra (and she was convinced of this, whereas usually she just says one of my characters looks like so-and-so just to piss me off). Either way, I totally like her look. Helios is sort of a pre-Industrial Revolution society. Which will definitely become obvious for my plans later in the story. >D I figured it out last night. It’s going to be epic.
Anyway, I had one other REALLY EPIC PIECE OF NEWS that I don’t think has entirely sunk in yet!
Remember when I sent off Redefining Evil to an October Fantasy Novel Month publishing company contest thing? Well, I heard back from them! Their response was not “thrilling,” per se, but very encouraging. In the email was words from one of the two head honchos of the company as well as two reader-judges who must have read my chapters. The reader-judges both said they were hooked right away by the story but that there were some stylistic things that threw them off. One person pointed out that switching from Micah’s 1st person POV to more distant 3rd person POVs was uncomfortable. They also said that “I was very hooked by this story – which is saying a lot, because I’m usually turned off the moment anyone says “vampire!’ these days.” WHICH WAS BAM. SUCCESS FOR ME. 🙂 That’s exactly the response I wanted. The second reviewer pointed out it was tough jumping into the middle of the Evereaux/Ingrid&Danny conflict, which I can see, but that might not be fixable unless I decided to give away Mihai’s story earlier in the story. As for the POV comments, I’m at least going to switch Micah’s voice to third person but keep it close in comparison to Lacy especially. I might try to pull Ingrid and Julian in closer because their emotions are really important.
Regardless of how I decide to approach this, the editor wouldn’t like more chapters until April or May, so I have plenty of time. It’s very difficult getting this back now. I’m pretty much in the middle of Sun-Walking. I’ve written two full stories since I wrote the bulk of RE (Farewell, Fairytale and The Catcher). I’ve abandoned pretty much all of the problems that the readers pointed out, and that makes me annoyed to have to deal with my older awkward writing. Basically I feel like I had finally moved on from my dedicated work to RE, and now I have a true, professional reading to go back to it. It’s not going to be a little pet project anymore, it’s going to be treated like an assignment, something that could truly get me somewhere but without a lot of work. I wonder if I should try to print a copy of RE and work with it on paper, and really tear it apart and put it back together. I’m glad I have the time to, so I’m just going to start praying very hard for it.
The possibility of RE getting out there for people to read and enjoy and think about is…well, it’s a bit beyond my mind’s capacities. I can’t wrap my brain around the fact that an editor from a publishing firm (…Okay, screw discretion – it’s called Port Yonder Press) would possibly like to see more of something I wrote. It’s…whoa. It’s not unexpected, but hard to believe that my feelings about RE weren’t just overblown ego. Haha. Not that I thought they were. From my more objective standpoint, I’d say Sotoka-Khepri is probably the strongest character in the story, and maybe Julian. Micah, Lacy and Ingrid are a little harder for me to relate to or feel right now. How odd.
Anyway, just thought I’d share the good news and where my writing’s at now. It’s weird, because I sort of feel like keeping this stuff with RE quiet. I told my editors Margaret and Kyra, and of course my parents know, but I’m not sure I want a ton of people knowing. My dad, from his experienced perspective, said that the news from Port Yonder is very, very encouraging. He ticked off a list of reasons why the way that they responded was good. Later he walked past and mumbled, “You’re going to get a book published before I do.” and I’m not sure I believe him, haha.
The boardwalks here were spindly and creaky, with missing planks and shaky railings. Lucienne loved it. Each step she took was careful as she ascended the slope of a crescent-shaped bridge. Fillip squeezed her hand and inched after her. She stopped and took a seat at its peak. Fillip used her shoulder to slowly ease onto the plank beside her, and then he lifted his head and smiled at the scenery. The bridge’s crest was the highest point in the whole city of Helios. From here, the homes looked like clusters of stalagmites clinging to a cave floor and stretching as far as Lucienne could see. When the moon rose, the stars disappeared, and Lucienne stared at the sole light in the immense expanse of sky that seemed now to embrace her and swallow her up. After a while, she lowered her gaze and focused on the furthermost tips of Helios homes. Then she stared beyond them. Far in the distance, she sighted a tiny pinprick of light. It felt impossibly isolated. With a thrill of wonder and envy and admiration, she knew it to be the home of the eastern Sun-Walker. She knew no one who’d ever met him. Most citizens of Helios went their whole lives only knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone who swore they’d seen the Sun-Walker at the marketplace from a distance.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is so phenomenal to me. I spent 4-1/2 hours there on Tuesday and could have spent another 5 there without getting bored. The atmosphere is exactly what I needed; seeing the whole spectrum of history through another’s eyes and mind is both a reality check and draws me closer to what has been.
The last few times I’ve been there, I was always drawn to this one particular sculpture. This time, I had the chance to sit in front of it, whip out my sketchbook, and embrace it myself. It’s fascinating the details you begin to absorb the more time you spend staring at something. Life to a depth and extent that you didn’t understand before emerges and consumes you. And so I present, “Kiss of Victory,” a sculpture done by Sir Alfred Gilbert between 1878-1881.
My first impression of this in visits passed was that there was some passionate relationship between the winged being holding the naked man in front. This time, one startling realization I developed as I sketched it was that, obviously, of the warrior role of the naked man. The shield in his hand gave that away. Then, though, I noticed that the winged creature (hereon out referred to as an angel) wasn’t kissing him as we traditionally use the term. Her lips barely touch his forehead no matter what angle you’re looking at this from. I clearly focused most on the development of the warrior’s body, at which point I came to realize that — well, he’s just not finished yet! Look at the way his fingers still clench the shield to his hand, and his feet are poised and his leg is extended to take another step. That scrap on his shoulder and the tassly thing by his arm seemed to be some sort of warrior shawl. It’s falling off, but on the other hand, it’s still hanging on. Even if he began to faint into the angel’s arms and lost his sword, he began to faint in the throes of sheer determination. Even if he fell, he fell with honor! (/cheese)
I think the angel’s face is sublime and I’m so glad that I feel like I captured the tension in the warrior’s body.
Sir Gilbert was encouraged by his tutor to sculpt this in marble in the manner of Classicists. It’s possible he did it in homage to his brother, who fell in battle. When I read that, as well as discovering the name of the piece is “Kiss of Victory,” I decided that maybe he has fallen in battle – but, again, he is a warrior fighting for his beliefs until the last moments when he falls into the arms of an angel of comfort and triumph.
The end!
Yesterday while at school and dwelling on the “Kiss of Victory” I doodled this.
What I liked about “Kiss of Victory” and also sketching the Doryphoros (there was no way I could have walked through the MIA with my sketchbook without taking a minute with him) is the way their bodies contradict today’s “ideal” male. The power isn’t just in how chiseled their eight-packs are or how cocky their grins can be. The Doryphoros is contemplative. He seems like he’d been the kind of guy, I think, that you’d want to sit down with over coffee to discuss philosophy. He’s toned, but not ridiculous. His muscles are subtle, his body, it seems, treated more like a treasure than a tool. This was the Greek ideal, the canon of proportions developed by Praxiteles. What happened to it? Why is it now obsolete? I used that theory on anatomy for my little angel dude, and I like the gentle strength that resulted.
And then, to leap wholly to the polar opposite end of the maturity spectrum, I did this.
I just sent off my second-ever query letter with REDEFINING EVIL.
o_______________o;;
It’s been…probably about 6-12 months since I last sent it out to Marcher Lord Press. If I thought it stood a chance then, and the story has since been seriously revised (OH GOLLY, IT WAS TRIPPING UP ON SEMICOLONS LAST TIME ANYONE SAW IT ;_;) and I mean REEEEVISED…well, God’s will be done.
I think I have a lot of Andrew Belle lines as my blog subjects. Huh.
Anyway, I am going to use this half hour before “Bones” starts to actually try to produce a halfway decent blog! By the way – my squeaky folding table of a desk is *really* starting to bug me. Usually, when I say that I am about to do a decent blog post, what follows is some dozen pictures of a relatively finished quality. Unfortunately for this blog, being in school has meant more variety in the materials that I have around me when I suddenly get seized with the urge to draw. This means that the drawings I’ve been doing are scattered across any wide number of sketchbooks (it feels like I have, like, ten that I’m using right now). And I’ve got so many other things I’m thinking about that I’m not usually seized by a drawing long enough to want to do anything with it. Which means that I might not actually have been drawing as much as I feel like I have been, but I guess the important thing is that drawing is become more valuable to my life again. :D!
Oh, and I’ve been focusing on fixing up the first 3 chapters of Redefining Evil and writing a formal query letter so that I can send it into this October fantasy novel month competition thing for a small publishing firm, which for now shall remain undisclosed. 😀
ANYWAY, I am kind of excited about a few art-related things. I’ve been really craving the ability to utilize color as much as I value color, because really there’s been a large gap between those two since my crazy semi-queer color usage days. That probably explains why I tried to work on digital art so much – it let me get the colors that were in my head. But I also wasn’t letting go of my grudge against the precedence of digital art in modern artistry, so to reconcile that I wanted to try other media because colored pencils just couldn’t cut it. They were too much work for as limpid as the results were. I always brightness/contrast-ed the CRAP out of everything once I had it scanned, and even then I was only moderately satisfied with the color intensity.
That’s the direction that I all of a sudden found myself going for my Physics for the Fine Arts project. We’re supposed to explore the phenomenon within something related to our art emphasis, given that you must have some sort of art interest to stay in the course. I was looking at intensity early on the brainstorming phase because we’d spent SO MUCH TIME working on physical intensity. But then I started thinking harder about it, and all of a sudden I wanted to compare intensities throughout different media, and then all of a sudden I was seriously considering the things that I was starting to learn as far as what impact they have on my actual art. I’m including a digital art aspect to the project because of how the RGB color system (derived from screens, which are derived from old photography screen printing techniques, which are derived from Georges Seurat’s pointillism…SHABAM) allows you to rein in the purest form of a color…or does it? ;D I started on Sunday by making a few swatches of similar hues using colored ink, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, and colored pencil, thinking that pastels would give you the most intense hues of traditional media. But my professor, upon studying my swatches, pointed out that while pastels might have had the deepest red, you got a serious texture using pastels because of how thick the wax they use is. And I also noticed that watercolor and colored ink produced some seriously intense hues. That led me to weasel my parents into buying me some smaller paintbrushes so that I could try using ink. But when I started ink on (the picture that I’m putting at the end of this), I realized that not only was it not too different from watercolor, but ink didn’t seem to go as far as watercolor. I’d never thought I could use watercolor over lineart just because it’s so…watery. xD But I tried it with this picture and, in general, I am VERY pleased with the results. I saved an unenhanced version that I’ve been comparing to an untouched version of the maroon/gold layout from late last year (with all the hands). The colors are SIGNIFICANTLY more vivid. O_O; Watercolor took a lot longer and it was much more tedious because the color produced by a single brushstroke isn’t as predictable as with colored pencil. But that I can get results substantially nearer to what a digital piece would produce (and that’s without even touching the traditional piece up digitally) using traditional means THRILLS ME to death. One of my classmates pointed out that the fees for a digital painting product is better since it’s a one-time thing, as opposed to having to constantly restock when your supplies for paints or crayons or pencils run low. But I can’t ever see myself spending $1000 on my traditional materials no matter how many new sets I get. O_O;
I wasn’t actually expecting to find that traditional media can indeed stand up to digital media. I was pretty sure I was going to have accept that digital artwork produces a higher quality color range. It might – but definitely not as much as I would have thought!
I was just thinking about this yesterday, while I was working on some pages of Redefining Evil (the manga) because I spontaneously felt so inclined, and then Der-shing put it so nicely on his latest page of The Meek:
Comics are, to me, the greatest art form because there are so many elements to master. A person who creates a full comic must at the very least; be a great planner, a great storyteller, have an eye for layout, know how to pencil, ink and color in a way that tells their own story, and of course, they have to know how to write. Becoming more than simply “proficient” at all of these components can easily take a lifetime to learn.
Now, I’m glad he added that “lifetime to learn” part, otherwise I’d feel like a real boob for putting one of the pages I’ve been working on after that as if somehow I’ve mastered it. xD I HAVEN’T and sometimes it feels like I’ll never get to a point where I’m satisfied. But that’s stopped me for long enough, and I just have to keep learning.
I’m doing the scene where Mihai/Lucas dies and this page is right before it where you see how Danyil hangs on Mihai’s opinion.
I hate Mihai’s expression at the bottom and yet I don’t because it’s perfect. xD
I’m tempted to scan the page where he gets shot because I think artistically speaking it looks pretty stellar…but the content is really throwing me off. xD
I’m kind of just updating to please Margaret. But it’s not actually going to be art-related, and that’s partly just so I can raise her hopes ONLY TO CRUSH THEM.
I wanted to give props to my awesome host because of how I got their newsletter in my inbox and thought, “Golly, these are so witty…I’m going to read it.” And, unlike how I treat Margaret, I wasn’t disappointed:
Hello, and welcome to the Happy October 2010 DreamHost Newsletter!
Halloween is just around the corner, but nothing in this newsletter will be sc…
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
HA HA! Just kidding. This is not going to be a scary newsletter because I…
BOO!
Ha ha! Sorry, got you again! So like I was saying, I’m not crazy about the whole scaring part of Halloween. I’m more into the candy.
Mostly I stick with choc…
BOO!
Oh man, I totally got you AGAIN! You should have seen the look on your face and I…
BOO!
AGAIN! Oh brother, you’re really not taking this well. Are you sure you’re ok? I could…
BOO!
Ok, now you’re turning red! Seriously, that…
BOO!
I’ll call an ambulance.
Ahahaha. Maybe when things slow the eff down for a while, I’ll try to upload whatever little nothings I’ve been working on off and on. And dude I really need to get my booty in gear for the Fine Arts Scholarship. ;_; I have so much I have to do for it. I should really just submit something to the Variety Show. I got an email about it from the Art Club president, so technically it would be contributing to my scholarship. AAAHHH it’s like some strange combination of obligation to my art and incentive because WAIT THEY’RE GIVING ME MONEY. Hahaha. Weird.
And after meeting with Robert (intimidating man), when he told me even more about the depth with which they investigated the scholarship candidates…well, my scholarship matters – they chose my art. o___O; I’ve never been recognized like this. Now I have to NOT LET THEM DOWN. Ahahaha and then I mistakenly made my Art History timeline on the backs of lame Nikkei and Rebels sketches and Ozzy insisted on seeing them and then him and Betsey were like “We thinks yer a good artist.” when I was all bashful about it haha. IT’S BECAUSE THEY LOOKED BAD. But Betsey found it funny when I called Erik crazy, and then corrected myself and called him ambitious. This is weird. xD
When I went to my first-ever (mandatory) Art Club meeting after classes on Monday, we were invited to offer ideas to the chairs of the club about what our expectations for Art Club were. Pretty much unanimously they included the formation of an artistic community, in which ideas and feedback are freely exchanged and visiting other sites throughout the Twin Cities to expand our artistic experiences. The second was definitely what I was hoping for, but I wasn’t really expecting. And the first one led to the decision that our next bi-weekly meeting would include the sort of feedback panel and we were all encouraged to bring some art to talk about.
AND HOLY CRAP TALK ABOUT AWESOME PRESSURE. o_o; I mean clearly my art is typically self-serving, and inconsequential at best (excluding some of the pieces I did when I was younger that were ideological…but I guess those were still self-serving), and I haven’t known where to go with my art for a long time. I was first planning on just bringing random sketches I work on and being like “my subject matter is so limited…how do I expand?” but naturally as soon as I posed that question to myself, I started to answer it. I was watching “Treasure Planet” today closely enough to really pay attention to the scenery and character design. Then, after spending like an hour trying to find a decent screenshot big enough for a background and running into a million badly done pieces of fanart in the process, I wondered if it might be worth trying to do my own fanart. I’ve done sketches of Jim before because the dynamism of his character is combined with fiercely expressive looks, and he also reminds me of Myoku. But I mean I wanted to do something worthwhile if I was going to do fanart, not some crappy shoddy piece of work. Then I realized that, if I’m going to venture into the realm of developing a piece of fanart, I probably shouldn’t make it be “Treasure Planet” – it’d have to be “Spirited Away”. That movie, and Miyazaki’s work (especially the way he’s streamlined Japanese animation and added a lot more dignity to the otherwise embarrassing array of anime series), have had far too big an impact on me to be won over by a movie that I forget about for long stretches of time.
It wasn’t hard to pick a scene with good enough imagery for me to work on. I also didn’t want to just do an ink/colored pencil drawing…I didn’t think that’d do Miyazaki justice. So I ventured into the realm of watercolor, because “Spirited Away” sort of has that quality to it anyway. But let me preclude this by saying that I have absolutely no skill or experience with watercolor. Oddly enough I didn’t let that stop me from really trying on this (usually it would have). I don’t know how this would contribute to the overall direction of my art, but it’s certainly reminded me that I can, to some rudimentary degree, accomplish what I set my mind to.
*CLICK ON IT*
I’m disappointed at how much better the inked part looks, because it shows how much I rely on line in my traditional stuff. xD Of the water/sky on the left portion of the picture, the train is my favorite part. The yellow worked with my intentions much better than any other color on this did, I think. And I really like the planes of the balcony; I think it’s structured enough to offset the big open space on the left.
