Zodiac Scribblings - Virgo & Libra

Another two. 5 more to go! More to come after I get back from Gencon next week.

Sketch for Virgo:
Sketch for Libra:

Zodiac Scribblings - Gemini

A few more sketches. It was hard to motivate myself to get much sketching done today because it was so hot! I wanted nothing more than to stretch out on the couch with the fan next to me and a tall glass of icy water, and maybe snooze a bit. But I'm trying to keep myself to an early schedule for the next couple days because I leave for Gencon on Wednesday morning, in Indianapolis, and I'll have to be getting onto that earlier time zone. Might as well stick with the hours I've been doing lately and make things easier for myself.

Going to try and get all 12 sketched out before I start painting. Partially because for now I'm still awaiting feedback from the art director, so I can't really proceed anyway. But also because the deadline for the cover piece comes first, before all the interiors! Marketing department needs a cover to start advertising as soon as possible. This makes things a bit tricky for me since it means I have to figure out the gist of all 12 paintings within the next two months so that it can be incorporated into the cover.

Dreamscapes 2 had a similar situation, where the cover was required far in advance of the interior material. That was easier to deal with however because the cover didn't necessarily have to reflect the interior pieces, just to encompass the general theme.

* * *

1st sketch. Toyed with it a bit. Might use it someday for something else, but it wasn't really calling to me for this.

2nd sketch. Liking this one much better. Hopefully the art director does too.

Had to modify the format of the image a bit too from the sketches I did the previous few days, as my contact initially forgot to mention that the pieces didn't take up the full page area. The right margin of the 12x12 inch calendar is needed for all the astrological information.

Zodiac Scribblings

It's always fun to embark on new projects. The current one will be a zodiac series that Llewellyn has commissioned me for, for their 2011 astrological calendar. I've always wanted to do a zodiac series, so I'm eager to get going on this.

As with the tarot, the challenge is to try and find my own approach to images that have been rehashed over and over by so many artists. Maintaining the meaning and symbology while applying my own touch.

Some of the early designs I've got simmering in my sketchbook:

Shadowscapes Tarot Major Arcana and Sketchbook

A little something that I had been working on the side with a few months ago (before convention-print-matting temporarily took over my life). The border drawings I did earlier this year were a bit of a sneak peak to this project. I was being secretive about it before because I wasn't quite sure if I'd manage to get it all pulled together. But the proof arrived from my printer (after yet another song and dance number fiasco with FedEx *growl*) yesterday and I'm quite happy with how it looks. I went with an offset printer (instead of digital on demand) for this because it's in full color and hardback.

Hardcover with dust jacket, 96 pages, full color, 8x11 inches. Each of the 22 trump cards, along with text to accompany the images and ink illustrations created especially for this book. Followed by sketches of the development of each piece and insights into the symbols depicted, inspirations, and the lore behind them.

I'm expecting the book to be available in about 6 weeks. This is a Shadowscapes exclusive, not available from anywhere else, and a nice companion to the deck that Llewellyn will be releasing next year. Which by the way they have started production on at last yay! I'll be sure to update when I hear more news about the official release date. Oh, another spot of good news on the deck though - Llewellyn has heard all the pleas (most especially from those at the Aeclectic Tarot forums, but I also conveyed the many comments regarding the issue that I got in emails) and will be going with absolute minimum borders for the cards. Only enough for the name of the card at the bottom was what I was told.

I'll start taking pre-orders for this book on the site in a couple of weeks. Price is still to be determined.

Here's a preview of a bit of it!

(Thanks Yeechi and John for proof-reading!)

Comic-con

Back from Comic-con! Happy to be home, but once again, I seem to have caught my yearly summer-convention-cold. Such large crowds of people seem to make it inevitable for me. It's a rather sniffly/sneezy homecoming as a result.

Shared booth space with my artist friend Sandra Santara. I have to say that the nice booth setup was entirely thanks to her, as she brought all the carpet panels for hanging our art up on, as well as all the lighting. My usual convention setup is more sparse than this. It was one of the few occasions I had to bring framed originals with me as well, since I drove the 8 hours south to San Diego with my brother this time, rather than flying as I normally do for Gencon and Dragoncon.

* * *

A snapshot of a quick drawing I did one evening in a friend's sketchbook while hanging out at the Westin. I had left my own notebooks and things back at the hotel room, and with a room full of artists sketching away, I needed something to do to keep my hands busy. And since Allen is a goober and takes 3 years ever to scan any drawings I ever give him at shows, I took a bad photo of it.

* * *

At every show, there's always busy times when I can't seem to pull prints out fast enough or answer the 4 questions that are shot my way at once; and then there are the quiet lulls where you wonder where everyone suddenly vanished off to and whether those garlic pita chips were perhaps perfuming the air around you.

I like to dig out my pens and work on ink drawings during the quiet spells. Once upon a time when I first started going to conventions I would actually bring paintings to work on, but I find now that those are too distracting to start and stop constantly. And having to worry about not spilling the water cup is an extra annoyance (especially so in a situation like Sandra and I had at this show where we were crowded so close we were practically in each others' laps!) Ink is nice and easy to pick up when I have the time, and set aside when necessary.

Inspired by a banyan tree I saw recently on my Maui trip whose roots were tangled around a large boulder (which we dubbed "the big ole' tree ball") I scribbled a quick sketch and worked on this for the first couple of days. There's almost a meditative quality about working on detailed line textures.

"Offerings"
7x11 inches
brown hi-tec-c gel pen on bristol board

* * *

And then when that was done and I got tired of twiddling my fingers, I pulled out another sheet and started with some random lines. They quickly resolved into nautiluses, a few photos of which I found floating in my digital camera, which conveniently was on hand. Perhaps a bit of Cthulu inspiration as well. Hard to go to a con and not see something Cthulu. Or perhaps it was just spirals on the mind.

"Nautilus"
7x11 inches
black hi-tec-c gel pen on bristol board

Thomas the Rhymer Sketches

Thomas the Rhymer. He wandered the hills of Ercildoun one evening, when he was come upon by the Queen of Elfland. He kissed her, and the price of that kiss was to be borne away with her from Middle Earth and the mortal realms. For seven years, he stayed in Elfland before being returned to the world, gifted thenceforth with Truth.

Digging through my old sketchbooks again, as I do when looking for ideas. I came across this one, that I've long wanted to do something with. Lutes are such beautiful instruments, with the carved and layered rose at the center. My flamenco guitarist friend Stephen Faulk is also an instrument maker, and I'm always fascinated at the detail work that goes into the rosettes, both in his flamenco guitars and lutes. Little bits of carved and inlaid wood.

I did some minor research to make sure that Thomas could have played a lute (rather than a harp) and discovered that the ballads of the Rhymer are some of the earliest mention of lutes in Scotland. Artistic license is one thing, but I just wanted to ensure I was at least in the ballpark of reality, so it was good to find that confirmation.

A good starting point, but the sketch was a bit old. It could do with an update. So here came the newer improved version. Surprisingly, it didn't really require much brainstorming or redrawing, but came out mostly as I wanted on the first try without too much erasing and frustration.

Cleaned up and transferred to the illustration board. Details added in. Scooted the whole composition over a bit to the right so that it would be a bit more balanced. The initial sketch was too heavy towards the lower left corner, but that was the only major change really.

It's a good stopping point for today. Painting it tomorrow, and then that should complete the Bard chapter!

Morgan le Fay Sketch

Just a quick little update, and another teaser from Dreamscapes II:

A favorite enchantress for fantasy artists to depict. Sketch for Morgan le Fay:

Trying to finish this one before 5PM tonight when I have to head out for a flamenco show in San Francisco. So can't allow myself to get too distracted today. Focus!

Cafe Flamenco at the Verdi Club. $18.00 for a great show at 8PM for anyone local reading this. :)

Time Management & Sketchbook Meanderings

There has not been much spare time to fritter away these days. The next few months look to be a fairly tight packed schedule. Two more Dreamscapes chapters in June, matting prints (which I hateHateHATE doing) to ship to DragonCon (alas I will be missing this year for the first time in 9 years), L5R cards that I had committed to, and a couple of private commissions.

How does one manage time as a freelance artist?

Well first of all you need to be of a personality type that can handle self-discipline. I think that perhaps might be the most important quality you need to make a living with art, after a love of creating art in the first place. You need to be able to handle drawing and painting for X hours every day, as well as manage the random other less fun aspects: tracking orders and jobs, responding to emails, keeping up your website, dealing with complexities of tax as self-employed (or a corporation). Because here's the thing - if you don't do it, you can't sit around twiddling your thumbs hoping that someone else will. There's no coworker to pick up your slack. There isn't anyone else.

I'm fortunate enough to have had a programming background from my pre-full-time-artist days. As a result, I've been able to write my own system that keeps track of due dates and pending jobs I've got going at any one time. Generally when I have a job incoming, I estimate how long it will take me, and whether I can fit it into the current schedule while working within the client's timeline. Sometimes the timelines just don't mesh and I have to regretfully tell them so.

I like to give myself some nice padding of days with my estimates because the business model I've ended up with is that only about half my income comes from actual commissioned jobs. The rest is from prints, products, and originals, largely from paintings that I do for my own personal expression. It's an arrangement that has worked out well for me because I do enjoy creating work for publication, but I also need the freedom to paint my own concepts as well.

It's possible to eke out a living as an artist from a variety of combinations of commission vs. private work; from solely doing commissions in which you need a constant pipeline of work streaming through and a very precise scheduling of your time, to solely doing private work and selling prints, originals, and products. The former requires more up front investment of time and constant marketing of yourself to potential clients to keep your work fresh in the minds of art directors. The latter may seem more laid back, but the work comes on the tail end - once you finish a piece, comes the work of selling it, processing sales orders, or personally selling your work in some kind of venue or show circuit - be it website, gallery, street fair, or conventions. You have to figure out where along that scale you fit, and your comfort level with other peoples' deadlines and concepts as opposed to your own.

What this all comes down to, is that while it's a wonderful fantasy that all an artist has to do is sit back and create, the truth is that those creations are just the beginning.

* * *

Private commission currently in the works. A couple of the preliminary thumbnail sketches. "Too fat!" she said of the first one. I put the dragon onto a diet.

Random old oak I sketched while at Fanime last week. I think this might work its way to being a painting in the next months.

Another Fanime sketchbook doodle...

Unfurling sketch

"Unfurling"
That's what my garden has slowly been doing after the most recent rains and then the heatwave. Tomato plants have shot skyward happily, and the poppies are poking through with ferny fronds.
Prepped sketch on the board for the next painting coming up, roughly based on that border ink drawing I did a couple of weeks ago. I liked it enough that I wanted to spend more time with the concept and do a full painting of it, after some revisions to make it a more balanced composition instead of a lopsided border.

13x18 inches. I wonder if I can finish this by mid Thursday when I have to leave for Fanime. I don't work well on paintings away from my desk, so it won't be coming with me; and once I return, it'll be time to start on the Phoenix chapter of Dreamscapes. Which means if this isn't done by Thursday, it'll have to be tabled for a while.

Expecting the shipment of Inklings II on Thursday as well. Cutting it close for the convention!

So, enough blogging, and start painting!

Sketches That Want to Grow Up to be Paintings

In addition to rooting through my office preparing for Fanime, I've similarly been rooting through my sketchbooks for a little project I'm not quite ready to reveal the nature of (yet). But I'm coming across various sketches that just never got the opportunity to become paintings. I've got stacks of these Strathmore recycled paper sketchbooks that I start scribbling in whenever I get into Brainstorming Mode.

These books are like a bank savings account of concepts to an artist. Random doodles. Discarded alternate poses for commissions. Lightning inspiration that fades as suddenly as it strikes. They might seem like garbage at the time of sketching. But they are a treasure trove of ideas for the future when I'm stuck and I need a good starting point for a vague idea in my head that just hasn't found the right paper incarnation yet. Sometimes I won't even take a whole sketch, but just a hand or a facial expression; but that little bit will be enough to get me out of a current rut.

I'm often asked, "Do you ever run out of ideas?" (i.e. Artist Block)

Well first of all as a professional illustrator, you can't afford to be blocked. Perhaps some pieces might be less inspired than others, but creating a composition is a lot like solving a puzzle. In a strange way, it can be as logical and straightforward as designing a computer program (says the inner programmer in me). Once you find the right spark to jump start the piece, the rest falls into place in a natural way.

And as for my personal work that is not done on commission, there's never enough time to be blocked. There's always a dozen little bits waiting to be discovered in old sketchbooks. They just need that moment to be able to see them with the right frame of mind, and suddenly the possibilities are opened.

Sun Worship sketch

Started with just the figure, but then I decided it would make a nice matching piece to Moonbathing, and so set about creating the background accordingly to make an almost-mirror shape with the branch. I've never been too fond of absolute symmetry because I find it makes for boring compositions. So toss in a bit of variation.

Going to have to limit myself to more standard colors for this one however, as it'll be going into Dreamscapes as a step-by-step.

Speaking of sun...I could use some this morning. It's freezing here! Makes it hard to hold a paintbrush.

"Sun Worship"...the other thing that title brings to mind, is Lake Merrit nearby with all the cormorants. They love to perch along the strings of buoys that criss-cross the lake. Long rows of birds with the wings outstretched to dry, necks straining up towards the sun. Dana and I always laugh that they look as if the hordes are praying to the sun.

Seeking dryads

Feeling restless again today, so I hopped into my sneakers and set off for a walk across the street into Sausal Creek for a mini-hike. I figured I'd go for the longer circuit, down to the bottom of the gully and along Creek Bed Trail.

It's been raining for about 2 weeks straight. Yesterday and today feel like the first sunny clear days in ages. Just past the stand of unchecked cilantro-gone-wild, there is a newly fallen oak across the path. It's a sad sight. It looks like the same thing that happened to the giant that used to guard the spot directly across the street from my house. Water-logged roots ripping up from the ground to topple the tree down the steep slope.

I straddle the trunk as I climb over it. Pause for a moment from that perch to look up to the freeway on one side, and down to the ivy shrouded creek below. The trunk is completely dry. The mossy covering is soft, made of springy green curls.

Dryads on the mind for the next chapter of the book I'm working on. I wonder what strange melding of cultivated and wild, organic and straight-edged concrete, steel struts and flowing water creature would have spawned in Sausal Creek surrounds.

Eventually I get to the bottom. I realize that my plan was rather short-sighted. A path named "Creek Bed Trail" necessarily means you'll be walking along a creek bed. Which was hidden under about a foot of running water after all the rain. I'm optimistic, and in the new mud I notice many other sets of sneaker footprints. Someone else has been here. Maybe if they were successful....

In the summertime it's barely a trickle. More like a leaky faucet than an actual creek. By comparison to that today, it's about as passable as a whitewater rapid. After hopping precariously around on slippery stones peeking up through the flow and almost toppling in, I have to concede that it's not going to happen, at least, not without some waterproof rubber boots. Reluctantly, I climb back up the way I came. I usually like the variety of a full circle, but I do like my dry shoes even more.

I'm half watching to see if I can catch sight of the condor Dana and I glimpsed the other day, sitting out on a branch not twenty feet off the trail. For all I had ever seen one in the wild prior to then, it might as well be as mythical as dryads, or unicorns (or as my brother's old boss was fond of saying, "the sun, in San Francisco's Sunset District". He did have a point there.... Someone must have felt a tinge of irony when they dubbed it that).

* * *

Speaking of seeking....

I took a fancy to the kodama in Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke. So I started hunting around for some more legitimate source for the folklore of them, coming up with a big empty nothing, aside from some websites saying it means "echo" or "spirit of the trees".

Vague references to folktales of kodama, but no actual folktales. I even asked Japanese friends and acquaintances if anyone had ever heard of kodama stories, some of them living in and growing up in Japan, but alas nothing at all.

If anyone reading this knows of any tales, feel free to share with me.

* * *

Some more Fantastical Visions IV previews:

Tea and sculpting experimentation

This is my morning:

A pot full of Rooibos red tea. Several nights of insomnia last month made me paranoid of caffeine, so though I love my green Dragon Pearl and Monkey Picked (fanciful names are they not?), Rooibos is the only flavor in my teapot these days. Amber glow in my cup, with the faint hint of a vanilla scent.

A bowl of blueberries. In a blue bowl (Can't resist that symmetry).

The doll/figurine I dug up again. I haven't touched her since last November, for frustration about what to do for her hair (thanks yesterday to Damon Bard and Rebecca Schumacher for some much needed expert advice), and for the holidays that suddenly came crashing through, demanding attention from both personal and business fronts.

After having spent this past weekend being a Good Little Artist and working very hard at Wondercon, I decided I needed some time off from necessary projects and work on something for Absolutely No Reason. As well as spending a good portion of the day curled up on the plush couch in the front room listening to the sound of the rain flowing along the roof gutters and trickling to the patio with its strange musicality, while finishing off Robin McKinley's Chalice.

And the drill. To attach her wings. Hopefully I don't screw the whole thing up at this point and end up a with a gaping hole in her chest from being heavy handed after spending several hours painting her (not to mention the sculpting). Oops.

Yesterday, after rummaging through the closets to dig for the black art box, I was fairly surprised to find that my acrylics were still usable and not dried into twisted tube shaped pieces of colored plastic. Those paints haven't been used in almost a decade.

* * *

A few more previews for Fantastical Visions, done in the quiet moments while at Wondercon:

Scent

Took BART back from the city. Public transit is much preferable to dealing with rush hour Friday night traffic bursting out of San Francisco's seams as the clock hits The Hour. Make my way down those familiar steps, down the hallway that echos with with the discordant harmonics of two warring musicians vying for donations at opposite ends of the corridor. Down the second set of steps to the train and then thunderrumblerattle through the tunnel that takes me across the bay and back to Oakland. There's a funny smell to the car I'm in, but it's too crowded to risk giving up my seat by shoving my way to another car with a less odoriferous character.

The train screeches to its halt at Lake Merritt. My brain is still in the semi-comatose state that a full convention day always seems to leave me in. Spending all day every day alone in my office and painting away doesn't give much opportunity to practice the more engaging social talents. I do enjoy the shows, and while at them there is no noticeable strain. But once I'm alone I feel the drain. Step step step up to emerge back into the night.

The scent pierces through the daze, and involuntarily I smile as the fragrance swims through me. I remember it from when I used to live at Lake Merritt and took BART every other day. The trees near the station exit are in bloom, and their sweet and delicate perfume makes my whole body sigh in relaxation. Like the breath I did not know I was holding while on the train (holding all winter) finally exhaling.

I forget about those trees every time, a day or two later. And then some time will pass. And then I'll take a late night train home. Usually from the city, packed into a car, people and old carpet smells, mechanical station announcements, lugging bags up the whirring escalators....

And then that all falls away when those outer glass doors open and I breathe in the scent of my old friends.

Dana's there to pick me up. We drive back to The Foxhole. A scant half hour to toss my convention bags in a corner, grab a hasty bite to eat, pull my mind back from its drifting orbit, and grab up the flamenco shoes and makeup kit. The day's not allowed to be over yet. Back to La Taza de Cafe for the second show of the evening with Bernadette, Monica, and Garnada. Fusion flamenco and belly dancing show. A wine glass gets overly excited with my footwork during our new bulerias number and decides to join in. It skirts to the edge of the table, and as I execute a turn, it emulates me with a somersault to the floor. Poor wineglass.

Poor Monica who has to continue the rest of the show still, barefoot belly dancer around invisible splinters. She manages to avoid mishap.

It is a small, but appreciative audience tonight. They seem to truly enjoy the show, engaging in it, watching us with the enchantment plain on their faces and in the occasional exclamations we overhear.

* * *

While at Wondercon today, a few pieces completed during the quiet lulls. Sneak peak for some illustrations for upcoming Fantastical Visions IV: