Dates: September 12, 1996 to August 28, 1997.

Stories: Still a lot of the Paradox short stories being written, like the short fiction that would later be collected into Alysha's Fall. Jahir and Vasiht'h appear a few more times as I solidify them as recurring characters, along with Sediryl, Jahir's love interest. Also, toward the end of this set of sketchbooks we see development for an abandoned graphic novel I was developing with silvertales, "Six," an Objectivist furry/human fantasy love story. I'm not kidding!

RPGs: By the end of 1996, Genesis-the-Muck was closing down, spawning a wave of shorter-lived online gaming threads (for me, anyway; some of those Mucks became very long-running successes for other players), so we see the last of Distant Song's Genesis generation story-lines. She reappears again later when the Promised Land Muck opens a few years later. Meanwhile, my sister started running White Wolf: Mage games, and they were truly engrossing: put a history major with a love of esoterica and magic in charge of writing storylines and you get truly intricate campaigns that had me browsing textbooks to get some sense of what was going on.

Settings: Compass Rose. Paradox. Several random game settings that came and went.

Themes: Women! No, seriously. I had a hard time drawing men and wasn't really motivated to do so, very much. I was also still deep in the furry thing, but you can see how it started bleeding into the humans... with the furries having human faces, and some of the humans having animal-like attributes.

Friendly Influences: dracosphynx was still giving me a lot of ideas. But "the Dragon Princess," silvertales, came in around Sketchbook 26 and you can see the sudden change in my linework, which got crisper and more stylized. If she ever scans some of the art she was doing just when she met me, I'll link it so you can see the synergy. I could try to describe the depth of the impact that silvertales had on me, but words fail. Sometimes, special things happen... you get lucky. I got lucky.

Artistically: A lot of emphasis on storytelling. Lot more attempts at backgrounds and situations rather than just character portraits. Some dabbling in computer-shading, a lot of shaded pencil work, particularly in Sketchbook 25 which had very, very smooth pages. More practice at humans, but my anatomy was very spotty.

Sponsors: arielstarshadow, razzek, chlorophyta, tuftears, oldewolfe, asakiyume, nekomavin

( On to the Art! 113 Thumbnails! That's a Lotta Thumbnails! )

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour

The 21-30 Retrospective is half-done; I've chosen all the pieces out of the database that exist and put together the history and descriptions (this took me about four hours...!). Now I'm at the part where I scan new things to add to the database for your delectation.

The problem is that there are so many cool things I don't know what to scan. arielstarshadow, razzek and chlorophyta have sponsored this drive so far, but even with their donations I don't have enough to get it all in. There are at least fifty images I'd scan if I could, maybe more.

So here's where you come in. What should I concentrate on?

Poll #1216358 What to Scan?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

And yes, you can only choose one option!

Or, if you prefer to help more directly, toss me a dollar or two using this post and get more scans into the line-up!


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Taja and the Dwagon

There are about 20-odd pieces I'd like to scan from Sketchbooks 21-30, most of them delicate inkwork. A lot of interesting things were going on during this period: I changed the look (and thus the feel) of the Paradox engineered races to something more humanoid, I was doing a lot of inking, I had just started playing the White Wolf games (with the subsequent grinding attempt to draw more people rather than furries), and... of course... in Sketchbook 27, I met silvertales.

Nothing is ever the same after you find a missing piece of your heart.

After this, I suspect the retrospectives will get faster/cheaper, mostly because it was around Sketchbook #28 that I started uploading things to the existing Stardancer.Org art database. I'm sure there will be things I'll want to scan from the intervening years, but it'll be more like touching up a picture rather than painting an entirely new one... I hope!

But anyway. Help me find the time to scan you lovely pictures of furry girls in spacesuits on distant worlds and first contacts with alien birds!

Remember to tell me your LJ name in the comments here so I can list you as a sponsor!

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Dates: March 8, 1995 to August 28, 1996.

Stories: At this point I was still trudging my way through the first draft of Zafiil, though I was finishing up by the end of this year. Over one thousand pages... there was plenty for me to draw/think about. There's also evidence of some short stories about Alysha here and there (I was writing some early short fiction for fanzines at this point).

RPGs: GenesisMuck was in its most active period at this point, and wow does it show. So many pages worth of plotting, illustration and notes! I even put together a yearbook for the players with their donated art, bits of fiction and a lot of my spot illustrations. If I were to remove the artwork I did for this online RPG from sketchbooks 11-20, I would gut them almost completely. I'd say a good 60% of my art at this point was related to it.

Settings: Paradox, The Compass Rose

Themes: Pastoral landscapes and architecture, oddly, thanks to my schoolwork. Inevitably fashion design, also. And a lot of fantasy and furries.

Friendly Influences: tarinfirepelt and tuftears. The former did really lovely backgrounds, which is what inspired me to work more on those, particularly landscapes and outdoorsy type places. The latter was helpful, particularly in an editorial capacity, reading some of my early fiction. Poor Tufty. :)

Artistically: So. Much. Black and White! I was doing a lot of inking, mostly to have work to send to fanzines. Plus, my Art History classes had a huge influence on me, mostly the Medieval and Renaissance Art History courses.

Sponsors: oldewolfe, chlorophyta, arielstarshadow, endlessland

( On to the Art! 41 Thumbnails. )

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour

Samples from Sketchbook 18

In most every "decade" of sketchbooks, there's some milestone, some event that stands out among the ten. Sometimes it's fairly minor, a blip on the radar.

And sometimes, it's huge.

In the 11-20 decade I was in college... and by the later part of that set, I was far enough advanced in my studio art degree to start taking art history courses. The Gothic, Renaissance and Modern Art History classes were staggering. Sketchbook 18 in particular is full of long, patient drawings, done in class, out of class...everywhere. There's a lot of stippling. A lot of brush-work. A lot of inking. Looking at Sketchbook 11 and then Sketchbook 18, you'd think years had passed.

I happen to think Sketchbook 18 rocks, and I would love to have more of it online! If you'd like to, too, here's the button. If you want to be acknowledged as sponsoring the scans, remember to leave me a comment!

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Wow, if I could I'd scan in most of sketchbook 18...!


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Dates: February 23, 1994 to January 30, 1995.

Stories: At this point there were two major storylines brewing: Zafiil, which started out as a few roleplayed adventures and would later become a sprawling, 256,000 word novel; and my hunt for the signature story about the Eldritch and a member of the Alliance proper. I wandered through several iterations of the latter, mostly with Tam-illee (a foxlike race), but I wouldn't hit on the actual canon story of Fasianyl and Sellelvi until much later.

RPGs: At the time I was on FurryMuck, doing some limited roleplying; then I moved to Aleph Museum and finally by sketchbook 10 we see the beginnings of Genesis, the fantasy roleplaying Muck I ran for about two years.

Settings: Paradox, mostly. The observant will note that at this point I was still drawing the Pelted of this setting as muzzled furries; later on, I'd evolve them to more humanoid-looking, to go with the more science-fictional themes I was trying to write about with genetic engineering and such.

Themes: Babies and Pregnant Women, Lots of Women Sewing, Fashion Design. This is easily linked to the fact that I'd met my husband-to-be and gotten engaged. Well, the first bits. The fashion design has been an eternal interest. Sketchbook 8 also has the "Masquerade" series, which I linked in its entirety below.

Friendly Influences: tuftears, whom I'd met through fanzines, inspired a lot of my art at this point.

Artistically: Big eyes. A lot of ink/B&W work. Some markers and color pencil. Lots of furries, and some attempts at humans, none of them very good. At the time I was aware of how hard it was to draw people and avoided it when I could, but my fixation on the Eldritch made that difficult.

Sponsors: marykate_gift, shockwave77598, allykat, tuftears, roho, arielstarshadow, razzek and three people whose email addresses I fail to recognize despite having seen them before. I am not strong. -_-

( On to the Art! 30 Thumbnails. )
I'm going to try to do one of these every two weeks until we hit 100! The last sponsors took care of scanning extra sketches from books 1-10. If you'd like to donate to the project, here's the post! Every person who donates will get 1 or more scans from a sketchbook uploaded.

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour
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I wanted to do something special for the second week of my "vacation" and was pondering a print sale when I realized I'd run into a truly celebration-worthy milestone: after fourteen years, I've closed the covers on my 99th sketchbook! For fourteen years I've been numbering any sketchbook over 8.5x11 (the smaller ones get letters, and I'm somewhere around "P" on those). These books have fed Stardancer's art archive for years. Yesterday I put the first pencil lines down on the second page of #100. That's over 9000 sketches... more if you count those tiny lettered books!

So instead of a boring generic print sale, I'm going to do a One Hundred Sketchbook Retrospective! I'm going to summarize the trends and best art of each "decade" of sketchbooks, and if I have pieces scanned from them I'll add links.


Now, it wouldn't be any fun without audience participation! So if you'd like to join the fun, for everyone person who donates, I'll scan an unscanned piece from each book, starting with Sketchbook #1. Paypal requires at least $1 donations, but I'll probably be moved by extra money to scan more pictures. *grin*

If this project turns out to be popular, I might make a B&W hard copy available also, so you can flip through the Best Of twelve years of my work, along with my commentary.

Look for the first post tomorrow!

(P.S. For the curious, I'm going to use this money to enroll the baby in the cultural center's "Baby Music" summer class. And if there's leftover... well, paint, baby food, and fencing dues for Mommy!)

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