Writing seems to have pretty much won in the eternal battle of writing vs. art — but in an ideal world, I’d be one of those magical people who can actually ~*multitask*~ and balance the two.

Until then, I guess I’ll just have to settle for churning out one portrait every few months. Here’s what I’m working on right now:

I haven’t done much since finishing that baby commission in November, and I’m utterly delighted to be stressing out over proportions, nose shapes and eyebrow curves again. This is what it’s all about. (And no, seriously, there’s not a hint of sarcasm here — I love it!)

The plan is to ink/crosshatch this drawing once I get the pencil work down, similar to this portrait of my sister. I might also trace it on a new sheet after and do some experimentation with markers — I have a whole assortment of shades of grey, both warm and cold, and I’m in dire need of more practice.

Of course, there’s also that pesky ’50s superhero novella waiting to be picked up again, so we’ll see…

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.

Shut up, ‘booking’ is totally a verb. I mean — with a different meaning from the one it already has.

… you know what I mean.

Anyway, within 24 hours of Heirs magically de-aging itself into YA, I’d written over 5k. Progress has been a little slower since, but still fast considering, you know, I shouldn’t be writing a book in the first place. What happened to my delightful novel-free summer? The one with the art and the short stories and the reading? Anyone? Bueller?

Oh, fine. I’ll stop complaining. I’m pretty darned happy to be writing this, actually, both because it’s fun and because it never hurts to have something else to focus on during the submissions process. For the curious, I gave the book its own page – check out the pitch here, along with a visual representation of the main characters. Which, er, I’ll draw (or commission someone else to) soon enough. I’ve been a little blind-sided by this sudden development…

Anyway, here’s the opening paragraphs of Heirs — which, unsurprisingly, needs a new name:

      There was a demon in the church.
      Distant enough not to draw any attention to itself, but powerful enough to draw mine. At least half-grown. The hairs on my back rose, and I glimpsed from left to right, past cheery singing faces, eyes fixated on the band on-stage. Lyrics scrolled past on screens on both sides of the podium.
      Good. The sound probably masked whatever noise the demon made.
      And if I noticed it at this range—it had to be big enough to make noise.
      I slinked to the left, where I sensed the demon the strongest, and smiled tightly at the couple blocking my way of the aisle. “Sorry,” I said, hoping the music didn’t drown out my voice. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
      They smiled back, said something, and let me pass.
      Three months without demons, and the first one I ran into was in a church. Figured.

Word count at the time of making this post, not including scenes written out of order:

6400 / 75000 words. 9% done!

I’ve also been working on The Audio File. And by ‘working on’, I mean, ‘feverishly reworking the first panel of the first page over and over’. (Well, okay. I have sketches of the other panels. But still.) It’s a little embarrassing to be so slow, knowing how fast actual comic artists have to work, but I’m still new to this. I’ll get into the groove soon enough. (Watch me be an optimist!)

So here’s part of that still-sketchy first panel:

But first: join me in celebrating Jodi Meadows’s kickass book deal over at her blog. If you know Jodi at all, you know she more than deserves this. I would spend all my savings to have that woman’s work ethic *g*

I actually had the pleasure of reading Erin Incarnate back in January, and I cannot wait until I have the actual thing in my grubby little hands.

As you can probably imagine, yesterday I felt about ready to hit something out of frustration, so I decided to defy my germs and pick up some paper to see what I could do with it. Here’s my progress so far:

I’ve been wanting to do a self portrait with my new Hair of Awesome™ for ages now, and I’m mostly pleased with how this is turning out so far. I still need to figure out how to pull off the hair and freckles, among other things, but… it’s nice to get my hands dirty with charcoal again. I’ve missed it.

I’ve been taking pictures intermittently, so I might be able to do another post detailing my step-by-step progress when I’m done.

Oh, it feels so good to be done with this book.

Not that I have much time to rest. I’ve got a short story to finish and revise within the next two weeks, two books to beta read, art to make, all that good stuff. I’m also secretly brainstorming edits for draft two already, plus that sci-fi YA I mentioned earlier. It’ll likely be a very different book from the one I originally planned, but that’s a good thing. It’s just taking my mind some time to switch gears.

Anyway, I thought I’d share some tidbits from the world of The Hands of Cally Wu, as the title implies. First a Wordle picture, since I still love running my finished manuscripts through this thing:

(What this taught me: I need to cut down on describing people’s physical aspects. Yowza with the breath/hand/hands/mouth/voice/arm/eyes/fingers/hair/what’s with the size of the word like/oh lord this is making me dread revising already.)

I’ve also been working on a drawing of Cally on and off for the past week. Mostly off. I had a book to finish or something weird like that.

It’s not remotely finished yet, and I see a lot of things I need to fix–especially about the coat–but I like where it’s going. It’s been a while since I really finished something, so hope this will break my artistic dry spell as of late.