The Huntress Engaged

Dates: June 27, 1999 to February 4, 2000.

Themes: An interesting period, in that a lot of my work was either directly illustrative of stories I was working on... or it was an attempt to do something artistically different. This is probably a reflection of my decision to try to put up more varied/impressive work in art shows.

Settings: Paradox. Shell. Compass Rose. Zalitraeq. Free Water. World Tree.

Friendly Influences: dracosphynx (providing a lot of ideas/sounding board); marram (such an excellent technique guide). sythyry, for World Tree inspiration. aureth for kicking me in the tail when my stories irritated him (he gave me one of the most scathing commentaries on Sword of the Alliance ever, and he wasn't trying to be mean about it!). silvertales (waning now as our distance made communication and collaboration too difficult.)

Stories: Most of my story work in this period was in the Paradox setting: two Stardancer novels, Sword of the Alliance about Svetlana's colony world's civil war, and Either Side of the Strand (development sketches, mostly) about the world of the octopus aliens; one collection (Alysha's Fall) and assorted short fiction, including "Flaming Rooderberries," the short story that would become the basis for the "Her Instruments" trilogy about the merchant captain Reese Eddings and her Eldritch, Hirianthial. I also finished off the accidental graphic story "Strange Uniforms," from the previous retrospective, with "Strange Kiss," which you can see below in its entirety under Sketchbook 48.

Finally, I started work on The Worth of a Shell during this period, which means we start getting some illustrative work from that first Jokka novel there.

RPGs: I had three major RPGs going on at this point. Tabletop/in-person, I was running a GURPs game with an original setting entitled "Free Water," a fantasy world with centaurs, furries, humans and pixies, the theme of which was the scarcity of water that didn't mutate you into something weird. The PCs' objective was to free the water from the control of the empire overseeing it. This was... I won't lie, this was a zany campaign. Not just centaur love stories, sex-changing corsets (oh boy, was that a twisted plotline) and PCs getting pregnant by accident, but bizarre things like miniature T-Rexes that ate everything and chickens that shot lasers. It was great. But it was crazy.

Online, my roleplaying Muck was The Redoubt of Stars, which was winding down at this point... my original Ai-Naidari debut character (Ardith) had moved on, her conflict resolved, and I was experimenting with a younger Regal named Ejaeth. This muck didn't last long after this period.

And finally, I started doing illustrations for bard_bloom's World Tree RPG handbook, which remains to this day one of the most entertaining projects I've ever done work for. I loved producing spot illos for that book. Heck, if bard_bloom ever approaches me about doing more World Tree work I'd probably say 'yes' before I checked to see if I had the time to do it! It's that sense of illustrating for someone without preconceptions; few people commmision illustrative work without an idea of what they want it to look like, which can become very frustrating.

Artistically: During this period I was still producing a lot of B&W, having found a brush pen I liked. There's a lot of good brushwork from this period, with increasing line control and a better understanding of tone. I did more experimentation with lighting; there are several pieces from Sketchbooks 46 and 47 with obvious light sources and cast shadows. Some of the B&W pieces from this period remain among my favorites, like "Jeset" and "Lover-Hermit." I was really pushing myself in this area.

Most of my serious color pieces at this time were still being completed in pencil; marker was almost entirely a quick-and-dirty finisher or for thumbnailing/planning compositions. For this reason, a lot of the large works from this time period were completed outside of my sketchbooks; pieces like "Ke Anadi" and "Sensing You" were unusual in that they were sketched and finished in the sketchbook. Other than color pencil and marker, the one significant style experiment at this time was Sketchbook 48 's "Oh Heart, Save Me," which was marker and watercolor pencil, and which remains anomalous (and arresting, I think). Nevertheless, despite all this, this retrospective sees one of my favorite marker pieces, "The Accord's Twin Swords." Something about the execution of that one really worked for me.

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour

Dates: October 11, 1998 to June 22, 1999.

Themes: In Sketchbooks 41 to 45 I see a very distinct transition from someone casting around for a story to tell to someone with a lot of very complex ideas. Like many young people aspiring to be writers, I wanted to write novels but had no novel-length ideas. My first (Zafiil) was so astonishing to me that it occupied me for years. The novel after that was half-baked. But somewhere around now, I began to understand what a novel-length idea looks like, and I started getting more of them. The transition happens around the end of Sketchbook 41; I see myself working out a lot of short story ideas in #41, almost all of them failures, and then I hit on Alysha's novels and with the introduction of the Jokka, The Worth of a Shell. This is one of the defining moments in my early sketchbooks: from would-be-writer to working novelist.

Settings: Paradox, Failing Gates, Shell, Zalitraeq

Friendly Influences: tuftears, dracosphynx, marram, transdraconis, zilvar

Stories: As mentioned, Alysha shows up here a great deal, both in scenes from Sword of the Alliance and in independent work (most notably, a multi-page sketched graphic story involving a conversation with Laelkii). We also see the very first Jokkad in this segment: Tane, who was originally a Muck RPG character (!). I never played her, but she led me to Dlane and Thenet... and from there, inexorably, to The Worth of a Shell. But amid the scattering of short fiction and these novel characters, I'd also like to point out the first appearance of Reese Eddings, the trader with the adventurous ship of aliens. Originally a response to tuftears's challenge to write more merchants in space, Reese would eventually spawn a romantic trilogy: no kidding, three completely written novels, the first of which was the one Roc was on-again/off-again interested in.

RPGs: In table-top, there were a couple of campaigns: I was running a GURPs game in an original setting entitled "Free Water," which had centaurs and furries and... well, it was weird. And fun. My sister's last White Wolf game, a combination Mage/Vampire historical campaign in which I played Hilfy, a Nordic witch, lasted... one session? Those of you familiar with White Wolf probably know why the moment I typed the slash there in the previous sentence. Finally, my Failing Gates Muck, featuring the first Ai-Naidari (Ardith) was winding to a close; Sketchbook #45 ends with pictures of my final character for that RPG, Ejaeth Nai'Zekariatha.

Artistically: At the beginning of this group I go back to battle with color theory, inspiring my first few serious color pencil pieces (seen in Sketchbook #41). The next color pencil pieces are on big sheets of Bristol and don't appear in these pages, but they're far better than my initial color attempts. Having relegated the serious color work to larger sheets of paper, most of the progress seen in these sketchbooks is B&W: I had acquired a brush pen and decided to do some serious exercises with it. The results are some of the loveliest of my brush-and-technical-pen pieces... I think, anyway. Delicate, refined and often with just the right value spread. Finally, in Sketchbook #44 and #45 we see some of my first extended attempts at graphic storytelling, with a Zalitraeq prologue in #44 and an impromptu conversation between Alysha and Laelkii in #45—I remember vividly not planning to draw the latter and it just building momentum until I had to keep going. In fact, that conversation/storyline continues into the next group of sketchbooks.

Nevertheless, it's clear to me now that I was very bad at this way of telling stories: as marram commented on looking at them, they read more like storyboards than they do graphic novels. My fixation on faces and changing expressions and my lack of interest in backgrounds made them very similar from page to page, which isn't necessarily what you want in a fixed medium.

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour

Dates: March 30, 1998 to October 11, 1998.

Themes: Telecom geekery... a rather lot of it, since I was working at a telecom company and doing a lot of training. A lot of pretty girls, probably because I was hanging out with one a lot (*waves to silvertales*). And a lot of struggle with humanoid faces in my continuing attempt to move out of the easy-mode furry stuff. This is not a reflection on furry as a whole... just that for me, drawing furries was a billion times easier than drawing people.

Settings: Paradox, the Compass Rose, the Failing Gates, Zalitraeq, the Ancient Heros

Friendly Influences: silvertales, with a single-minded intensity.

Stories: Still messing around with Zafiil (can you tell how long this novel affected me?). In addition, though, I was working on more Alysha stories and the first standalone Alysha novel, Sword of the Alliance. A lot of idle thought about Zalitraeq because silvertales and I were putting out the portfolios at this time.

RPGs: A lot going on, gaming-wise. I was running my "Ancient Heros" campaign and doing a lot of art for it as the storyline progressed. In addition, my sister was still running a few Mage games, including a short-lived one set in Renaissance Italy. Online, I made a brief foray into a Lion King-themed muck at the encouragement of some friends who were already playing there... I found it... well, bizarre. Not having hands or tools to play with left me feeling at a loss to do much more than roll around in flowered fields and sleep. And finally, I opened a small personal muck for the Failing Gates setting and debuted the Ai-Naidar in a very rough shape! So these sketchbooks see my development of the first Ai-Naidari, Ardith Nai'Errithikta.

Artistically: Fixated on art marker work, from a color perspective, and discovered that way that I knew nothing about color. I was very frustrated with the few color pieces I produced during this period, and they were the inspiration for my determined assault on my color theory ignorance. From here on out I start getting more mindful about color... you'll be able to see it in the coming editions.

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour

Management Versus Leadership: an Allegory

I still love this image, nine years later. While I tend to add symbols to many of my works (like most artists I know of), this remains one of the few purely allegorical pieces I've done. I remember being proud when my VP hung it in his office after I explained it to him.

Good times.

Edit to add the Symbolism! I've never posted this in its entirety!

( The Queen and the Supplicant, and Management Versus Leadership )
And that is one of the things I took away from my time in Corporate America. :)

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Backwards Memories, 1993

When looking at the recent picture "Exhibition" several of you commented on the tail jewelry... so I pawed through my archive and found this piece from sixteen years ago (!) of one of the first times I drew that particular style of tail jewelry. They're called "discipline rings," because (as arielstarshadow guessed) it requires effort to keep the rings from falling off.

These are actually very popular for young children of races with flexible tails because it teaches them to pay attention to where their tail is in space and learn to control it... a necessary skill if you're living among many people, doors, enclosed spaces, etc. Discipline rings are worn variously by both sexes as children, and as adults more dependent on race and world culture and fashion (naturally).

So there you go. Talk about ancient history!

Edit: Here's a male in something similar:


Those Cuddly Harat-Shar



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If you've been keeping up with the 100 Sketchbook retrospective (tag: 100+sketchbook+retrospective), you'll see that in the late 90s silvertales and I were working on a crazy shared world fantasy, all cliches, all fun, all the time. We decided to put out a portfolio a year of pieces to sell and 1998 was our first release. We only made a limited number of them, and there aren't any left. But that project is a great way to see how our art influenced one another's back then... so after some excavation, I have some scans for you!

The first folio was four B&W pieces and one color piece from each of us, broken down into two scenes from captivity in the Sky Wolves' kingdom and two in Zalitraeq. I ended up with the Sky Wolf color piece, and silvertales got the Zalitraeq color piece, so we preserved the split. Here's the art! My work first, then silvertales's. Um, there's nothing showing in the harem pieces but they are of cat-girls in jewelry. Use your own discretion about Work-Safeness.




Note: These are hosted on Livejournal, so the thumbnails are smaller and subject (it seems) to being unexpectedly broken. Click reload if you can't see them.

The following year we decided to do a zodiac theme and put some really great work into creating a zodiac specific to the setting, basing it on archetypes in opposition; silvertales designed almost all the symbols (I think I did maybe one or two of the 20). I'm not sure how far silvertales got with her half, but I finished the four B&W pieces and to this day I still remember them. They were some of my best B&W work, so I'm reproducing them here for your perusal. Look how much my skill changed in a year, from 1998 to 1999!



And that's the book, open and shut, on the Zalitraeq portfolios, finished and undone, ten years later. :) Drawing withsilvertales was a lot of fun!


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A few entries ago, several of you asked about my interest in fashion design and why I chose not to go into it. And the answer is: accident. When I was younger, I used to love costumes, traditional clothing, fashion, anything to do with clothes. I used to buy expensive magazines and ignore all the articles to just peruse the advertisements. My own work drew heavily from historical influences—I saw so many portraits when I was young in the museums of Europe—but I liked contemporary work also.

But the fashion industry seemed cliqueish, snobby, difficult to break into and involved designing either haute couture pieces that no one but runway models would wear... or the kind of t-shirt and jeans practical stuff that is boring to make. I didn't know how to sew, though I had fond memories of my grandmother doing so... and I didn't want to learn just to go down that cut-throat route.

Now if anyone had suggested to me that costume design for films, TV, plays, musicals and shows was different from fashion design, and that I could actually make fancy dresses and outfits to suit my imagination that way, I might very well have made the attempt.

I just finished reading a book that suggests to become truly expert at something, you have to spend at least 10,000 hours on it. And I've already used up my 10,000 hours... more than that, I've already split them painfully between writing and art. I don't have another 10,000 hours to give to become good at sewing. So I will probably never be a costume designer.

Nevertheless, for fun I scanned some old, old drawings from when I was entering contests for fashion design, when I was a kid, including some costume design for D&D priestesses (you'll note that men apparently had to go naked in my universes, as I never bothered to design clothing for them!). You can also browse more recent Fashion Design pieces on Stardancer. Enjoy!



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Dates: August 30, 1997 to March 29, 1998

Stories: During this period I was in a college fiction-writing class and the result was a flood of attempted short stories and resulting illustrations of the characters. Most of these stories are from the Paradox universe and a lot of them were... rather lackluster. I was very bad at short forms, and the Paradox universe with its complex and broad history was a poor choice for a beginning short-fiction author... there was just too much context to impart in too short a space. Nevertheless, some of them succeeded; I sold two of them, "Butterfly" and "The Elements of Freedom." By the end of this run, there are developmental sketches for "A Distant Sun," a novella for which I got my first personal rejections from Gardner Dozois and Ellen Datlow.

RPGs: Sketchbooks 31-35 see the complete rise and fall of Zalitraeq, the over-the-top shared world silvertales and I brainstormed and illustrated for the sheer fun of romping through all the worn-out tropes of fantasy: princesses and their bodyguards, evil wolves, sky-islands, harems, giant dragons, the works. Every time we came up with some cliche, we put it straight in Zalitraeq and giggled all the way through our subsequent illustrations. By the end of it, we had decided that Zalitraeq was so obviously ridiculous that it had to come from the minds of... soap-opera writers, and we got together and roleplayed the actors and actresses of Zalitraeq, trapped into multi-year contracts for a soap operatic epic by an abusive director. The actors and actresses were... um... really messed-up in the head. *laugh* It was a great time. Zalitraeq spawned a few portfolios we joint-illustrated, plus a short story I later sold to Sofawolf that silvertales illustrated.

Along with Zalitraeq, I started running a D&D game entitled "The Ancient Heroes," and we start seeing some of my development sketches for that in Sketchbook 35. Genesis the Muck was dead and for a while there was a vacuum... then I started the Promised Land, which returned to the Le'enle and introduced Silent Chain, the new emperor of the West. And finally, I was still playing a few Mage games with my sister as GM.

Settings: Paradox, Compass Rose, Zalitraeq

Themes: A lot of furries; I was between games so I was filling my sketchbooks with stories I was struggling to write. Also in sketchbook 34 I went from depicting myself as a Florida panther to "lionette" (since I didn't feel wise/old enough to be a lioness).

Friendly Influences: silvertales—a very great deal, especially in the faces of my humans, and marram still.

Artistically: Working on more humanoid faces and not really doing very well. As you can see I was still mostly avoiding drawing men because it was hard.

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Elmo's World

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.

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Tags: 100 sketchbook retrospective, art, guided tour

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.

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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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Current Mood: sleepy

Since there was such interest in them lately, I thought I'd offer a guided tour of the noteworthy masks in the Stardancer database.

The Masquerade Project, 1994
Back in '94 I decided to do a series of drawings of the different species of the Alliance paired off and wearing the costumes of their counterparts, with a mask. These are fairly coarse and old pieces, but I still have a fondness for them.




The Masquerade Project, Revisited, 2004
Ten years later, I decided to apply the skills I'd developed in the intervening time to revisiting the Masquerade Project. I tried to use known characters when I could. This project also inspired one out-take...




Miscellaneous Masks
And a couple of miscellaneous pictures involving masks, including the recently completed one. If you must click on only one of these, choose the first, which is my favorite.




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Current Mood: out there
Current Music: The Bravery - Tyrant

Inspired by ruggels's comment that I'm getting better with light and shadow... the reality is that rendering realistic lighting doesn't interest me all that much. I do it sometimes when called to, but the focus of my art, by and large, is portraiture: chasing pictures of characters I intend to write about. That means being able to see them clearly, something that doesn't happen when you start adding directional light sources and their confusing shadows.

I suppose this could be perceived as making excuses, but the truth is that I'm just not all that interested in presenting realistic subject matter. I want the art to be believable, but that doesn't require realism. But, just to show that I've occasionally considered the matter of light and shadow, here are some samples:




Does this mean I think I couldn't use improvement in this area? Of course not. When I need the tool I want it to work. But in the end, I think there's something profoundly symbolic about the fact that almost no one in my art casts a shadow... and that all my characters move through a world of diffuse and omni-directional light.

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And now for the books that I've set aside for the time being, either partially written or in pieces!

The Exception Novel: "What does it really mean to be an outsider to society?"
On Hold Because: Need more background on the society first.


The Tsipia Novel: "When do you hold on... and when do you give up?"
On Hold Because: None of the short stories about the Tsipia have sold; maybe the world's not ready for bipedal Buddhist dinosaurs.


The Faerie Farmer Novel: "What is the value of family... and faith?"
On Hold Because: Needs more research on farming/climate patterns in the Midwest. (References are welcome!)


The Kediil/Red Honey Jokka Novel: "Why does a society make the transition from nomads to settled... and what does that mean to its people?"
On Hold Because: The first Jokka novel, equally risky, hasn't sold.


The College Novel: "How do you put down roots among people not at all like you?"
On Hold Because: I've written enough books about Eldritch. I'd like one of the existing ones to sell first.


There are also various sequels--obviously not written because the first books haven't sold. A lot of why I choose to work on an idea has to do with career-minded things, really. It wasn't always that way, but I now have enough ideas that I can pick and choose based on their marketability. For instance, the story about Morgan is a good choice now because (strangely enough) I haven't written much traditional fantasy yet.

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Rewriting/Expanding: Even the Wingless
"Who would you become to save the lives of others? How far would you go to prevent a devastating war?"
Lisinthir, Our Hero.


The Emperor, His Nemesis.


The Slave Queen, His Helpmeet.


Notes: The first draft of this novel, barely 300 pages, is what got me an agent.
Status: About 1/3rd into the expansion. Should be 600 pages when I'm done.

Writing First Draft: The Archipelago Book
"How would you change if you had to patch up messy reality... when all you've ever learned has been in books?"
Morgan, the Protagonist.


Amhric, the King.


Kelu, the Bitey.


Notes: Mutated out of a roleplaying campaign I ran.
Status: About 40 pages already!

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Current Mood: still astonished! *boing*