Diminisher of Peace
Always Becoming
A Corner Not Dipped In Styx
Nanowhere Chapt. 1
This is turning out to be the most difficult thing I've ever painted. I've always meant to do this, a character painting with all three sisters from SEABORN, Jillian (left), Kassandra (center), Nicole (right). I've cut each of them out and posted them below. A piece of the painting with all three sisters at the bottom. I'm not even close to complete, and I've spent a good four hours painting so far.
Click for the larger view.
Kassandra:
Jillian:
Nicole Garcia:
Olivia's an old character of mine, the youngest of five sisters--all Naiads. She has sharp teeth, a matching temper, and...let's just say that her idea of fun in the water isn't going to be yours.
"Come on in. The water's great!" (I wouldn't if I were you)
I spent around 2 hours painting. Here's the full piece, which I'm still tweaking.
Click the pics for the full views
Here's a detail crop of Olivia:
Spent a couple hours painting this afternoon, this one for Illustration Friday topic: fierce. (Yeah, I'm a little late). This is Kassandra dragging some unfortunate Seaborn troublemaker to the surface by the hair. Click for the larger view.
And I'm certain this will not be the last. I've posted at least three times on making maps for created worlds (see links below), one on the different kinds of maps I like to make, and two focused on how I make maps with watercolors and pencils. The map on the left is one that I've been adding to over five years. I had this idea for a roughly pentagon-walled city on the Atlantic's floor in 2003, and tonight I scanned--in two sections--my original 11x17 pencil drawing of the Nine-cities, Enneapolis, the Great City of the Seaborn--actually made up of nine cities inside massive walls, gates, protective shields, and a bunch of other stuff.
I love maps, love making them. Click the pic for the large view.
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2007/07/fictional-maps-.html
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2005/10/fictional_maps.html
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2006/06/fictional_map_m.html
This is an old one--one of the first sketches and paintings I did of Kassandra.
Click to see the full view.
Here's a page from one my many attempts to put some of my writing into something more visual. The first scene of Saltwater Witch, with Kassandra falling into Red Bear Lake in Nebraska. She was pushed. I saw the whole thing. Click for a larger view--or click over to my deviantArt page to get even more. (http://the0phrastus.deviantart.com/art/Getting-graphical-89733965).
Painted this for Illustration Friday topic: punchline. Digital, about 40 minutes. Knock knock...
Quick painting of a pond surface. Click the pic to see the large view.
No, he's not going to attack--that's her pet.
Speed paint, about 45 minutes. Click to see the full view.
I have a character in Seaborn, Michael Henderson, who's a minor character with a background in science, and I've sort of left it up to him to try to explain how people can live and breathe under the sea. He has the "curse" himself, all the abilities the Seaborn have. He writes pages of notes, sketches the things he sees in the deep, imagines why things work the way they do with the Seaborn--all with a scientific mind.
I've written and drawn a bunch of stuff in the character of Michael Henderson, which started out as part of the worldbuilding exercises, and just kept going. I wrote the chapter headings in Seaborn from Henderson's perspective, taken from his notes, his journal, his "conversations" with various notable characters.
Here are some samples from my journal:
Seaborn Notes
Michael Henderson
I have been to the deep ocean, the Very Deep, and I have set my feet down in billion year old sand. I have kicked through the dark with blind animals that change shape with their moods, with fish ten meters long that glide through the deep sea without fear--and only eat microscopic food, with arthropods made of glass, and creatures that defy classification, I have touched the bioluminescent lures of fanged ambush predators in the abyss, and I still have all of my fingers. I have done all of this without equipment, without SCUBA, without feeling the pressure, or need for air. I am no longer a surface human--or as the Seaborn, say--a surfacer, a Thinling. I have become one of them.
I have experienced, l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs, Jacques Cousteau's "rapture of the deep," but not as the nitrogen narcosis that Cousteau described in Silent World. Say, rather, that I have experienced the rapture of the unexpectedly normal in the most unexpected place on earth: the deep sea.
The Seaborn do not suffer from any of the affects of breathing compressed gases, for example the squeeze of barotrauma on descent, because presumably, these do not exist in effective amounts in their bodies.
SCUBA stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. This is a device enabling surface-living humans to recreate, as near as possible, and within well-defined limits, everything the human respiratory system needs above the ocean surface, in the air. While in the water, it appears that the Seaborn do not--or even need to--breathe in the same manner, possessing a different, possibly more advanced system for taking in the same gases and nutrients directly from seawater. Out of the water, the lungs of a Seaborn human appear to function the same way as the lungs of any surface human.
Lungs: Alveoli are the small grape-bunch like structures that line the lungs and take up oxygen, CO2, Nitrogen--gases the human body needs to survive, with oxygen fueling so many of the processes. The Alveoli are highly susceptible to damage from heavy substances like seawater, which really shouldn't be in the lungs. Damage then leads to low blood oxygen levels (hypoxemia) , low tissue oxygen levels (hypoxia), and then death. The alveolar-capillary membrane is a delicate, one cell thick membrane through which the gases we breathe are exchanged. It appears to be the case that the Seaborn possess a more rigid surfactact--a sort of stiffening coat for the alveoli to prevent them from collapsing under the weight of heavier substances like water in the lungs.
Sketched this for Illustration Friday topic: forgotten. A character study for something new I'm writing. Click to see the larger view.
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Not in what you eat but what you write. (Think Dr. Seuss). So, I'm wondering about the world that fills the pages of what I'm writing right now, and I'm looking back at my last three Seaborn novels--and then I'm studying the Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom painting by Repin, and one of the thoughts that strikes me--rather sharply--is that many of us writers of fantasy fall into the worldbuilding groove of basing the fantastic on something very real, familiar…solid fortress walls of stone, cities made of towers. Even when we take a few steps over the edge, and say, make our characters live in the trees, we tend to think of houses in the branches, flat level floors, rectangular windows, gabled rooflines--the familiar bolted on to the fantastic.
Is it because it's the simpler path? Is it because we need to stick with something readers can reference--I mean we're already asking them to accept magic, faeries, things that live off human blood? Could we lose our readers with a blind rush over the imaginative edge--into the absurd--readers scratching their heads a third of the way into your book, thinking, why can't the protag live in an ordinary house--you know, stucco, Spanish tile, etc. Why does the author insist on dragging me through the character's "house"--some amorphous, self-propelled, windowless, floorless, jelly candy the size of a gymnasium with shifting walls the consistency of yogurt?
Here's Repin's masterpiece, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876). Click to view the larger version.
Back to Repin: What I noticed right off is that here's this fantastic underwater world, and everybody's dressed like they've stepped out of a fête in Victorian England--with a few nice eastern touches to add an exotic element. Where's the weird natural ocean feel? Where are the spines, fins, bold coloring, bioluminescence, organic branching coralline growth of the world under the sea?
I did some doodling for this post. Wouldn't a city under the sea look like this?
What do you think? An author needs to hook readers with something of the familiar? Or should an author sprint for the edge, not look back, readers be damned? Somewhere in the middle?
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Spent a few hours painting tonight. This is in progress, so I'll be updating--really like the way this is going, though. (Click the pic for the large view).
Painted this one for Illustration topic: seed (Click for full view).
Corina Lairsey, one of the main characters in SEABORN. Painted this one this morning, about 3 hours of work. If you've read the first ten chapters of the "samplers" that have been handed out at RT Con and elsewhrere, you probably won't recognize her. She will become this.
Click the pick to view it larger:
How many of the characters in the stories you write are artists? Any kind of art. What do they do? How deep do you get into it as part of the story? Do you find—or think it's the case—that visual arts would be more difficult to portray in writing—or is it pretty much the same? Unless your character's a writer or poet—in which case, you can simply include some of their work to pull it off—or you're writing a graphic novel, it's tough to get the art across to the reader.
I have three different artsy characters in Seaborn. One who paints and draws, one who dances, one who's a music composition major at a music college. I'd guess these abilities or interests help define a character. A dancer would certainly be athletic, someone who plays music, paints or draws might be thoughtful.
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Click the pic to view the larger version:
I drew this tonight, another take on the circle of Macrocystis porifera (Giant Kelp), but this time went with the direct marketing approach for SEABORN. What do you think? Would you wear a shirt with this on it?
Click to see the large view
A quick painting of Kassandra--still looking good after all these years, digital, about 45 minutes.
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Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
Here's an update to my earlier "primitive god" painting. (See the earlier post here).
I painted this tonight for Illustration Friday, topic: primitive. Believe it or not, he's teaching his worshipers and a few fellow eldritch gods the Fox Trot. Go ahead, make fun of him. I'm telling you the guy can dance.
What's he saying? Look, Cthulhu...well, I'm going to be blunt. You're just not that good on your feet. Line up over here with the beginners.
Click the pic to see it larger. (I have updated this painting here).
This one started life as a watercolor, and then went digital.
Click to see the larger view.
Live by the sword... Painted this one tonight for Illustration Friday--click to see it larger.
A quick post with images and notes on how the surface of water picks up light and plays with it.
I'm interested in drawing and painting water--yeah, I know, big surprise. The surface of water is difficult to paint--for me anyway. It's dynamic, a fluid mirror with shifting light and changing colors, transparent enough to let sunlight through. It comes in endless--for lack of a better word--formats, curling like a breaking wave, rolling with a gentle tidal surge, flat and smooth as glass, pouring, filling, bubbling, spraying.
I've been using pics of water I've taken to help me understand how to draw water better, and posting them here to see if they may help others. Click on any of the pics to see them larger.
In my last painting--Kassandra stretching on the beach, I spent some time looking at how light reflects across that hard compact sand at the wet edge of the tideline. It's almost like watching someone walk across a mirror, walking feet that smear into the sand, nothing but the color of the sand reflecting smooth sky and then bold watercolor-like strokes sprouting from the subject's feet toward you.
Here's a shot looking down on Puget Sound. I love the way the reflected color plays across the water's surface with this container ship, the way the letters in HANJIN stretch through the dark reflection of the hull--and all the way to the bottom of the image. (I haven't touched up any of these images, except for the one I filtered to bring out the reflections in the rippling surface--see below).
Water gone wild.
Here's another interesting shot of a sailboat berthed, late in the afternoon with the water undulating and reflecting the world in thousands of distorted rings.
A couple close ups:
I'd love to see what others are doing. Comment with links to your own watery creations.
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To the Sea... Painted this tonight. Click to see the larger view.
Did some drawing this afternoon, including this one. This is the guy Kassandra is named after, Kassander. It's the early 1800's. He's Seaborn, but he's gone to the surface--walks right out of the Charles into Boston, taken a place aboard a ship traveling the world. Every once in a while he longs for the sea, and pretends to be clumsy, falling overboard. He swims around for half an hour while the crew scrambles to find him. He loves sailing, the wind, climbing high into the rigging, but can't abide the closed cramped quarters for long. One of his pet peeves.
I painted this tonight, another panel for the graphic version of The Gatherer (short story based on one of the backstory threads in SEABORN). I spent an hour at lunch yesterday storyboarding, and, although it takes me a bit too long to produce something like this, it's coming together.
Here's another panel--skeletons!
Click the pic to view the larger version.
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Here's a quick look at one of the frames for the graphic version of my short story The Gatherer, which picks up the Seaborn story 200 years before it starts, sets some of the background (not necessary for the plot of SEABORN), but I think neat stuff nonetheless. I'll be giving the complete graphic and text version away when Seaborn hits store shelves in July.
Click the pic to see the larger view:
What's sort of weird is how much that skeletal chap in the background looks like Jack Nicholson. What's up with that?
Watercolor, 18x24 original size (cropped below) - Syren Tears wiegh more than normal tears. I was more or less goofing with big brushes and sponges to paint this one. Click the image below to view it larger.
Sonnet 119:
What potions have I drunk of Syren tears,
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.
Painted this one this afternoon for Illustration Friday topic: leap. Click the pic to see it larger.
Here's a quick one I painted this morning, sort of a forest demon who's in the next story. Don't worry, he doesn't bite. Maybe a quick nibble is all. Click the pic to see it larger.
My first character study for this work: Cira
Here's my final painting of Cira, a character from the next story. Really coming together. I've done plenty of character studies for my writing, but this time I thought it would interesting to make it look like an interview--a job interview. You know, questions like what are your strengths and weaknesses? How well do you work under stress, would you consider relocating. Only, with Cira, she might say something like I'd tell but then I'd have to kill you. Then you laugh. It's so overused, but still we all get a good chuckle out of it. And then she says, no, I'll really have to kill you. And if you ask about the dragon-crab thing on her back, well, she'll probably just kill you outright for being nosey.
I had fun creating her outfit, cool collar on her blouse, little fringy stuff at the sleeves, flip-flops, faux ripped hem on her pants. The chair sort of came together as I was painting, and turned out to be something I'd like to have in the house--sort of mod retro-urban uncomfortable.
Click the pic to see it larger.
Here's a character from my fifth novel, going in a different direction. I just started this a couple days ago. It's contemporary fantasy. I'm gathering ideas, doing character studies, making up names, and doing some really loose plotting. I have a title already, but I'm not certain about it it. Call it WD for short.
Her name is Cira (soft S, like Seer-ah), and she's a breeder of sorts, a witch who can--and does--make that thing hovering over her shoulder, multiply. You and I cannot see them, howver. She's not the protag, but a very important supporting character.
Click on the pics to see them larger.
Here's a quick sketch, about twenty minutes of work. The Sea contemplating her next move, plotting something dangerous, maybe just wondering how air-breathing land animals like humans can survive in the ocean depths. She has her theories. I have mine.
Click the image to view it larger. Even larger version over on my deviantArt page.
Perfect for Illustration Friday: choose, a scene from Chapter 15 of The New Sirens (sequel to Seaborn - out in July from Juno Books), Nikasia getting the ride of her life on a dragon, and she's about to have to make a choice between remaining with the beast or letting the innocents on the surface drown. It's tough, but she has to choose.
Click the pics to view the large versions.
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I started out wanting to do something a bit different, intending to work in the idea of "stitch" (this week's Illustration Friday topic). I wanted to stitch together two worlds, the ocean and the surface worlds, weave them together, and everything was heading in that direction, when this tentacled thing rose out of the depths and took over the world. It's crazy how things don't go as planned.
Click the pic to see the large view.
Here's a quick one I painted tonight, watercolor pencils and watercolors, very plain...flood plain. (Did this on a scrap of Hahnemuhle, Albrecht Durer, 210gsm paper that has a very cool weave).
Click the pic to see the large view.
Okay, spent a few hours painting this one, a scene from Chapter 15, Nikasia getting the ride of her life on a dragon. Here's my first sketch and what I completed along with a detail.
Click the pics to view the large versions.
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Sketched this seadragon this morning, the start of something big (I hope). I'll post an update when I'm finished.
Click the pic to see the large view.
I spent some time adding to the orca painting I did a few days ago, some seashell-ish influences to his armor, an archer in the background with crossbow, a few other little mods.
Click the pic to see the larger view.
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Here's a new one of Kassandra, 100% percent bad-ass.
Just so you know, normally yelling at something nasty like this doesn't work at all--you'll just get eaten. So, here's Kassandra from a scene in chapter 25 of my current work in progress, taking on something I'm calling a Basilikalchainos, (basil-, king; kalchaino, make purple, dark, troublous like the sea). This is about 4 hours of work. I'm still tweaking, but I thought I'd post what I've painted so far. Detail of Kassandra below.
Selling a limited edition of 20 signed prints of this one on Etsy.com for $32. http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=8681638
Please click the images for a larger view.
To people living at the bottom of the sea, up is bad, down is good, and our world is backward. I was up late last night--couldn't sleep--and painted this scene and character, the next ruler of the Seaborn, a few years after she's settled in, after the current king is removed from the throne. Click the pic to view it larger.
Gail's post at Fiction Beyond The Ordinary few days back got me thinking about motivation and writing...and drawing.
I'm a visual sort of person--maybe we all are. In writing, I always "see" what's happening to my characters, I picture scenes, see the tension in the room through the posture, the space between two characters, the expressions on their faces. I see characters in action and I write what I see. Pretty much the way it works for me.
I have sketched scenes and characters for years, and it helps me in several ways:
Drawing scenes helps anchor the future plot, keeps the plot from straying. Drawing also helps keep the characters fresh. Characters grow during the story. They're rarely--or perhaps shouldn't be--unchanged when you reach the final chapter. An early character sketch can show characters smiling, untroubled by all the bad stuff your plot's going to hand them a moment later. It's good--it works for me anyway--to have character studies at key points in the story.
I also use character studies to keep them fresh in my mind. There's the old writing rule: don't go back and read or edit everything you write. Move forward or you may stall and never complete the book. For the most part I do write forward, but I do look back--mainly for motivation. I go back and re-read my work. A lot. I may read the first 3, 5, 10 chapters a hundred times before I've completed the book's first pass. When those chapters become unbearably dull
