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"Hey, come see, it's the fairy tale artist!" The Cultural Center down the street has art exhibits and art classes, and while I have no time to take or teach the latter I like coming by and seeing what they're hanging. But it was while I was trying to enroll my daughter in their baby music class that one of them teased out of me that I draw. "You draw?" "A little," I say, mindful that I no longer do as much as I used to. A few hours a week is definitely the smallest slice of my life right now. "What do you draw?" I grin. "I paint dragons and wizards. Fairy tales." "Oh, you must bring some of it for us to see!" "All right," I say. So I do. I bring Willow and Hadara, the Bone Dancer, Morgan and the Calligrapher. "Illustrative work," one of the women says. I nod. "For fantasies." They are delighted. They'd like a showing, or for me to teach or give a talk. I think an art exhibit sounds fun and promise to come back to talk to the curator next week. On the walk back home, I remember days when I would have been sure that they wouldn't have been interested in my long-eared lords and furry ladies. I wouldn't have been sure what to call myself. "I do science fiction and fantasy art" is an instant ticket to a tiny niche. But fairy tales have always belonged to everyone. Wise witches, wicked sorcerers, genies, talking animals, people who can fly, magic swords, golden looms... spaceships and little green men, all of it. There's not a human alive who isn't heir to all these things. Why assume that people who might never pick up a novel from the SF/F section wouldn't like fantasy? It makes no sense. So now I'm "that fairy tale artist"... one of thousands of people who have put pencil to paper to that purpose. No niches; no assumptions. I think that'll be my line in the future. "I illustrate fantasies." What excellent company that puts me in! Stardancer Home.Tags: art, philosophy
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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! Stardancer Home.Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, donations
Current Mood: whoot!
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• Re-reading Shell has made me think I'm going in the wrong direction with the packaging. I might do something far more understated. From the distance of a few years, it's easy to think of it as Dlane's book... but it's Thenet's, and the eperu aesthetic is austere. I'll have to do more new work for it, but a lot less than I was planning, which will mean the book will come out faster. • Still trying to figure out a good way to scan oversized art. Kinko's has an oversize scanner, but the last scans I got back from them had digital artifacts. I ended up stitching " Hadara and the Sun King" together by hand, which was... not... fun. *sigh* Getting a scan of " Willow" I can actually print has so far been a non-starter. • Right now " Just Because (I Love You)" is on the painting board because the paper I want to put the baby+dragon piece is in the mail. Hopefully it'll come soon because I'm utterly intimidated by " Just Because." That order also contains replacement brushes for the three that I've destroyed finishing these last two paintings... yes, I'm still trying to get a good scan for the postcards to send the people who sponsored those brushes, and they're already being replaced! *shaking head*• I'm just now going through sketchbooks 11-20 for the Retrospective... if you want me to scan more pictures from this set, you can do that here. Remember to tell me your LJ Name so I can list you as a sponsor! • Also, I've figured out the third illustration for the Admonishments and am trying to put that together now. I can tell it's going to be late, though. It's complicated. • Related to all this scanning/archiving of artwork... I found somehow that I got water into one of the portfolios I use to store old originals, which ruined my original of "Ragna." I need to get more of these things out of my house before I destroy them. :P • Finally, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) arielstarshadow has cracked the top five commenter list, and in doing so has asked so many questions or made so many leading statements that I'm just vibrating with the need to write or draw things. Comments are love! Stardancer Home.Tags: art, books, writing
Current Mood: sigh
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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! )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. Stardancer Home.Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour
Current Mood: sleepy
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