The final installment! I’m sure we’re all overjoyed.

Anyhow — as far as the actual drawing progress goes, I think I only have these two pictures to show you. There were three more photos taken between these, but the visible progress on those was so minuscule I figured there wasn’t much point to showing it. By comparing these two, you get the gist of what else I did: the main change was in the shape of the face. The thumbnails alone show how the newer version is much less rounded. I finally did the background, fixed up the shirt, played with the colors and eyebrows some more…

Trust me, it took more time than you’d think.

This is always tricky. Picking out the right frames means needing to hold them against the actual drawing to see how they look – which means lugging the drawing all the way across town. If you know how paranoid I am about my art, you’ll get why that’s such a big deal. Since I work primarily with pastels and charcoal, my work is annoyingly fragile. I don’t even let the frame shop handle the framing – I’ve had way too many people mess up my work to let anyone but me touch it before it’s safely behind glass.

One example of How Things Can Go Wrong: last year, seconds before entering the art shop, a drop of molten snow fell from a roof, smack-dab in the middle of my drawing. OUCH.

Anyhow, at the art shop, I dragged one of the employees aside and we spent at least an hour debating colors, contrasts, paint types, and all those fancy things that go into frames. We pulled out a dozen colors of matting, which we quickly narrowed down to one. The frames were more difficult to decide on; I ended up calling my commissioner to get her opinion. (Super-pretty frame that’s super expensive, or slightly less pretty and slightly more affordable frame?)

We ended up going for the more expensive frame. Why? Because the paint had the exact shade of dark red in it that I used in the drawing. Look at how shiny it is:

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the drawing after I’d actually framed it. Hopefully, the commissioner will e-mail me one soon.

Thanks for following the ever-exciting chronicles of my commission work! And, if you’re curious, check out the final, color-corrected, cleaned-up, Photoshopped-to-death version right here on my website. All the photos I posted before were unedited (aside from size once or twice), so it might be interesting to see the difference.

I meant to update again earlier — but then I got swallowed by PHP. I’m overhauling my website, both because I wanted a new design and because I wanted to integrate the art and writing parts, and it kind of took over my life.

The good news: I should be done soon. PHP, you are my bitch.

Anyway, on to the WIP!

The last picture I left you with bothered me on several levels, most of which I ended up fixing by the time I took this picture. For one, the eyes are less terrifying. (They’re still a little uneven; it’s the same in the photo, which makes it all the more difficult to get right.) For another, I fixed up the colors. In this version, there’s more straight-up red, straight-up blue, and straight-up yellow. In the previous version, those shades got mixed together too much, which made the entire thing look kinda ‘meh’.

Although this is still HOURS from the final version, the other WIP shots don’t really show it. The fastest progress is always at the start of a drawing – I can get the main set-up and color blocking done in under an hour. The thing that takes up most of the work is finetuning. That’s the part where I really want to light the entire drawing on fire.

One example that I touched on earlier: the paper. I usually go with standard drafting paper for my work — white, smooth, thick, designed for pen/charcoal/etc. For this drawing, I went with proper pastel paper. I felt awesome. Like a professional. Investing in pricier paper! Finally matching up my materials!

Yeah, I’m totally going back to the cheap-ass drafting paper.

The thing with pastel paper is that the struture is very different. If you look at the above drawing at full size, you’ll probably see the little flecks of red shining through everywhere. In theory, I like that — but in practice, it’s hard to keep it that way. If you use one layer of pastel, it’s no problem. If you use seven layers of pastel, eventually, those red dots fade away — especially in areas where you keep erasing and adding and fiddling with details. This makes the problem areas really ‘cluttered’ and stand out from the other parts where the red shines through. Because of that, I actually ended up grabbing a fruit knife to scoop out pastel and show the red again. (Later on, I found out an empty mechanical pencil did an even better job.)

In case it’s not obvious: this was really irritating.

Another annoyance was that, when I erased, sometimes the paper would turn black.

Seriously. There was no getting around it. The paper turned black, and I could try to erase that blackness, or scrape away the top layer of the paper, or go over it with all kinds of different pastel colors, and it would stay black.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how erasers are supposed to work.

So there’s a small peek into the frustrations that go into these things sometimes. Ha! The last installment — featuring pretty frames! — is coming soon.

Yesterday, I left you with a half-finished portrait of a very blue baby. Today, we continue with a slightly less blue baby. I used various shades of brown to go over the bottom layer, resulting in a more cohesive whole, but also somewhat grungy colors. Baby skin should never be puke green, people.

You’ll notice that I’m mainly sticking to the skin so far, not really bothering with the shirt, eyes or mouth yet: that’s because my focus now is to get the shape of the face right. What you do with the eyes themselves affects that, but not enough that I want to let myself get distracted. Focusing on too many different things at once — it doesn’t work for me.

So, with that same goal — getting the shape of the face right — I applied more yellow, to really bring out those planes the light catches. Next, I finally filled in the eyes and mouth,  and again went over the earlier layers to ‘connect’ and soften up the colors.

A lot of different things came after. For one, I finally filled in the arms, shirt, and some of the background. She magically sprouted hair. I made the highlights even highlight-ier. (What would you call that? Highlighting the highlights? I actually have no clue.) There’s a lot more volume in her face now. The most important changes — to me, anyway — were the shape of the face, though. If you compare it to the previous ones, you’ll notice some difference around her left cheek and chin.

Also, I know those eyes look ridiculous. I promise those will change.

More coming later this week!

Last year, I shared some work-in-progress photos of art I’d done. I figured I’d do another one of those with a commission I finished in November, but I should probably split it up into multiple posts. Otherwise, as those links will tell you, they get loooong.

So, in October, I took the train all the way across the country (it took a full HOUR!) to take some reference photos of my model. My model was, at the time, four or five months old, so that was problematic. I ended up with 82 photos, which is relatively little, but taking more would’ve been too much to ask of the baby. Her mother and I made a selection of eight photos we liked and that I could work with, and finally settled on one, where she’s laughing.

I liked the warm red background in the photos — in fact, I asked for that specifically, since it usually makes for some nice skintones — so I decided to go with red paper, too. I knew I’d draw over every inch of it, but these things have a way of shining through. I chose pastel paper, which turned out to be a huge mistake — but more on that later.

For the sketch, I started with yellow pastel pencil. The blank eyes and open mouth made the girl look pretty freaking terrifying at first. (Not that adding eyes helped much.)
Once I had the basic features in place, I started filling things up. First, I started shading with dark-blue in the darkest places. After that — and this is where the real fun started — I took a close look at the colors in the photo. There was a lot of red, yes, but the other primary colors also showed up a lot. One side of the face was quite blue, and the light was yellow. So what I did then freaked out everyone who saw the WIP: I grabbed blue and yellow and applied them. Quite liberally.

At the start of this week, I was freaking out at how much I still had to do and how many things I had planned outside of the house. The solution, of course, was simple: cancel the first half of my plans so I’d have energy left for the second half of the plans.

At which point, my body went “neener neener neener!” and got sick, so I had to cancel all the other plans as well.

My body really needs to deal with stress better. Just sayin’.

So instead of dressing up as my superhero identity and attending a dorky Halloween party with some friends, I’m sitting at home in a futile attempt to let my body recover.

All of that means that if you were expecting an insightful, coherent blog post, you’re out of luck. You get miscellanea. (Which, by the way, may be one of the coolest words in the English language.)

Halloween
If you’re looking for an awesome bit of Halloween-themed flash fiction – and who isn’t? – check out The Monster in the Night by budding author Owen Polson. If that doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will.

Writing

I got Cate Gardner’s Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits in the mail this week! I am so excited. I have a BOOK! And it has a friend’s NAME on it! There are few cooler things in the world, dudes.

Also, a brand-new novella just went live over at The Red Penny Papers! If you’ve got some time available, take a look at Particular Friends by Camille Alexa. I haven’t had the opportunity of checking it out yet – apparently, germy brains don’t make for the best reading mindset – but I’ve no doubt it’ll be glorious.

Especially looking at that cover. Whoa.

Art
I drew! Holy crap, I drew! Given how little I’ve done so far this year, I thought that was quite an achievement. Check out Abed from Community (possibly the best comedy series in all of history) on the left, and an in-progress commission on the right.

I’ve been neglecting WIP Wednesday terribly as of late. The embarrassing truth is that I simply haven’t been doing much that warrants WIP Wednesday-ing; it’s hard to share snippets when beta reading, and though I truly intended to do some writing of my own, I, uh… didn’t.

That’ll change by next week: though I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo all official-like, I do want to set a personal goal for November so I won’t be sitting on the sidelines while everyone else is busy writing on the wind.

The nature of this goal? Beats me. Right now the most likely candidates:

* Revising The Hands of Cally Wu
* Finishing the rough drafts of Heirs and some short stories

I do have one goal before November: to finish a commission I’m working on. Right now, it looks like this:

I promise it’ll look less terrifying soon.

In news completely unrelated to the commission I just finished (see left): I heard from the exposition committee yesterday, and I’m ever-so-pleased to announce that my work was selected! (Unanimously, too. Gotta point that out…)

So, should you be in the neighbourhood at any point between 14 and 17 January 2010, make sure to drop by Realisme ’10 to see some of my artwork in the flesh/paper/charcoal/pastel. It’s the first exposition where I’ll be actually selling work. I am – as usual when something is new and shiny – ridiculously excited.

And slightly nervous, but, er, don’t tell anyone.

In equally important news, I bring updates on the WIP – The Cat Formerly Known As Romy, Currently Known As Milla:

I think that just about says it all.

(I’d post some writing updates too because it’s been so long, but I’ve been mostly caught up with beta reading, incessant plotting, and fretting over imminent Always Read the Fae Print edits. Such is life.)

Yesterday, I left you with a half-coloured drawing of angry unicorns.

Today, we continue.

I coloured in the details on the orc faces.

I gave the unicorn highlights in their eyes.

I tinkered with the darkness of the horns to help create distance.

I shaded the unicorns, the orcs, played with the manes to give the vague illusion of silver, made sure some of the orcs and unicorns cast shadows on those behind them, made the unicorns in the background slightly faded, tested different background colours, and thought I just might be done.

It occurred to me that, unlike my usual MO, I hadn’t mirrored the image yet.

(As a minor aside: if you’re into art, for the love of a very angry herd of wild unicorns, mirror your images. Flip them horizontally in Photoshop, hold up a mirror if you work with real media. Take a picture with your digital camera and study the miniature version on its display. Hold the actual picture upside-down. You won’t believe the number of mistakes you catch.)

I mirrored the image, felt like weeping bitter tears, and redlined (greenlined, in this case) some corrections.

It might not seem like much, but once you’ve gotten far enough to outline, colour, and shade, it’s a freaking hassle. My bad entirely.

The image was completely tilted composition-wise, so I redrew the unicorn-mass in the background to better balance it. I adjusted the angle of the horn on the left unicorn and made a few other corrections to better balance the picture, including erasing and redrawing a unicorn head on the left and changing the position of the hind legs of the unicorn on the right. The other changes were less integral to the image as a whole, but just didn’t look right when mirrored.

Back to work I went.

Here you can see the difference between the new unicorns (outlines) and old unicorns (faded white).

All those changes made. Another actual-size inset. Another realisation that, crap, I wasn’t done yet – none of the lineweight variations showed up when resized.

(Are you noticing these blocks of text getting shorter and shorter?)

And after several attempts…

And playing with the background colours some more…

Yeah.

Done.

Finally.

Rock on!

What I Learned From The Angry Unicorns

• Horse heads are funny-lookin’.
• I need to take colours into account sooner.
• I need to not wait until I’m nearly done to mirror it.
• I need more practise colouring digitally.
• I need to do more stuff like this, because it’s challenging as all hell, and that’s always a good thing.

As suggested by the fab Ms. Noles, I might make a print out of this. Can’t hurt!

Tomorrow, we get back to our not-so-regularly scheduled writing updates

The Actually Quite Mellow Plugging
Some quick linkage before I dive into the art-heavy, writing-lite post:
* K.V. Taylor is hosting a contest at her blog – only one more day to enter! Talk about your favourite atrocious-yet-lovable character and win cool stuff, such as:
* A copy of Grants Pass, a truly nifty post-apocalyptic anthology from Morrigan Books with a concept to die for.

The Angry Unicorns
I thought that with all the focus on writing WIPs in the form of WIP Wednesdays, I thought I’d do a one-time-only WIP Thursday and show my art process in the form of a bunch of WIP shots.

After months of on-and-off work – mostly off, to my shame – I finally finished a commission for Pam Noles. Check it out:

Why The Unicorns Are Angry
Back in May, there was a not-so-minor kerfuffle dubbed MammothFail ’09, which resulted in a well-intentioned white SF author implying that, before the advent of the Internet, there were no non-white SF/F fans. This ties in to a more common belief that they don’t exist, period. Tired of being constantly rendered invisible, someone on LiveJournal started the wild unicorn check-in, asking people who identify as a PoC/non-white fan of colour to make themselves known.

(As a minor aside: this post was in May. People are still commenting.)

Pam Noles mentioned on it in her blog, suggesting people take that phrase and run with it. The word was spread over a couple of other blogs, I was intrigued by the concept and interested in helping out, and doodled up the sketch to the right.

Pam came across it, dug it, and shot me an e-mail commissioning me to finish it. The rest is history (and described below).

How The Angry Unicorns Came To Be
First, I focused on refining the orcs. I enlarged the file and sketched over it on a new layer, adding details and fixing the poses where necessary. The orc on the left (our left) needed the most work – I drew the original sketch without putting an awful lot of thought into it, and now it was time to wonder exactly how someone would ride a horse an angry unicorn. The leg worked all right; the arm and head did not. The right orc was equally stiff-looking in the first picture – what I fixed was the leg (which was drawn up awkwardly initially) and the arm (which needed more foreshortening as well as a prominent hand).

At this point, I only used reference for the orcs’ hands, as well as their designs, which were tossed together haphazardly based on Lord of the Rings merchandise and screenshots.

Next, I worked on roughly sketching out the unicorns – more detailed in the front, then fading into the background. I also started outlining on a new layer.

(In case you’re interested – the background colour is there because the standard white background is very annoying to work on. Staring at that brightness and contrast for so long can really hurt your eyes.)

I kept on outlining, and added another unicorn in the middle. The outlines of the front-and-centre unicorns are thicker than those of the others to give the illusion of closeness. Here’s what it looked like without the sketch:

(Note: none of these insets are actual size. I worked on a 10,000×10,000 pixel canvas for this piece. That’s 85x85cm, about 33.5×33.5″.)

This was in August. Pam posted a slightly different version on her blog, which included a lighter background so the lines would be easier to see, and the sketch versions of some unicorns I hadn’t outlined yet.

At this point, there’s a pretty large gap in WIP versions. I finished outlining and started flatting – in other words, colouring on a layer positioned underneath. Because the line-art was all on different layers, this was a pretty tough job, made even tougher by the fact I had no freakin’ idea how to colour it.

Unicorns are traditionally white, which also worked with the picture as I originally conceived it, which has them fading into a big ol’ mass of white in the background, with only minimal outlines. Of course, due to the story behind this picture, it would make an awful lot of sense if the unicorns were anything but white – as they are in other wild-unicorn-herd-inspired art. I shot an e-mail to Pam asking her preference, she said she had none, and so I went ahead with how I’d originally envisioned it.

Unicorns problem solved.

This left the orcs – and at this point it became abundantly clear how little experience colouring I had. The orcs, who wear traditionally dark, grey/brown colours, were incredibly prominent in front of an all-white background of unicorns. (Going with the alternative of brown unicorns wouldn’t have worked, either – that’d just have reversed the problem and made the orcs much harder to pick out.) On top of that, all those desaturated shades made the picture look awfully plain.

I played with the colours, saturating and desaturating them, darkening and lightening, upping and lowering the contrast… it took a while before I found a compromise I was happy with. Neither of the above problems are solved, but they’re minimised.

Without any details filled in, this was the picture at that point -

(This time, the inset is actual size.)

The background is obscenely bright because that made it easier to spot when I missed colouring a few pixels. As an aside, to help with that same contract and to make clear which layers some of the mane/tail colours shared, they were originally bright shades of green, red and one other other absurdly bright colour I don’t remember. It had a certain charm, I must say.

For part deux of this rapidly growing post, in which I actually fool myself into thinking I finished this thing early, check back tomorrow.

So Wednesday is technically over here, but most – if not all – of my readers are west of my time zone, anyway. You’ll forgive me, I’m sure.

So, much of today was spent editing my short story Rule of Threes in hardcopy. I even took a photo of my writing space:

That’s right. Sun. Be jealous.

The obligatory snippet:

      There was a car, there—a ute that had swerved off the track hours ago and come to a screeching halt, ending with its front facing town once more. The driver hung over the wheel, dead.
      From this distance, Cath couldn’t see how many creatures were gnawing on him—in this darkness, she couldn’t see anything at all.
      The engine was still going, an irregular whine in the distance. If no one came soon, the ute was their way out. They could make a run for it and tear out the body and the creatures. They’d have to ignore their own cars, parked right below in the open garage, Marlene’s white and battered and Cath’s blue and sleek and spattered with the neighbour’s blood.
      She’d loved that car, once. It’d be faster than the ute, faster and closer, but they had no choice. If they went inside for keys—
      Marlene had gone inside for keys.

Yeah, at this rate, I’m going to have the entire danged story up here. I’m waiting to hear back from an Australian friend who was kind enough to beta for me to get the setting/dialect right, but I’m hoping to get these edits finished this week… and that’ll mark the longest I’ve worked on a short story to date. I started this danged thing in February or March. I’m happy with how it’s turning out, but I’ll be even happier to be done with it after so long.

Anyway, it looks like things are reversed for a change – I’m doing my writing on paper, and my art on the computer. Wild. Here’s a preview of what I’ve been working on for most of this week:

And with that, I bid you good night.