Writing: Angels, Anime and Steampunk

So my actual writing of new fiction isn't going spectacularly well. This past week was long and busy with letterpress rather than writing. But, I do have a few things to say (and didn't say them on Wednesday because I was out much of the day and got home very late and very weary, and the same thing happened on Thursday). I have managed to write a couple thousand words on "Brother Thomas's Angel"-- part two. I can't tell how long this part will be, but I'm starting to have some of the other characters' voices come clear, so it's possible that one of them may take over for a part 3 once the angel is finished with his bit. I'll figure that out when the time comes.

Another bit of not-so-new news: I've been writing a couple of columns for the media/pop culture site Mania. I'm doing a "Creator Spotlight" series on anime and manga artists/writers/etc and I'm doing articles on the sources of anime and manga in folklore and myth. Here's what's posted so far:

• Creator Spotlight: Moto Hagio
• Creator Spotlight: Kazuo Koike
• Folklore and Mythology as a Source for Anime and Manga
• Laputa, Atlantis and Floating Islands: Ancestors of Ghibli's Castle in the Sky

The next two are submitted and should be up this week or next.

And finally, the first chapter of the serial novel Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective (under my steampunkish pseudonym Calliope Strange) is now up on Smashwords and processing at Amazon Kindle. Apple iBooks will follow in a few weeks, as well as Sony eBooks and a couple others. For now, you can find all the various formats on its Smashwords page.

Miscellaneous Things

My brain seems to be scattered all over the place lately. I'm about to head in to Halifax to teach my last wood type letterpress class for the semester, and I'm waiting to deliver two print jobs and get paid for another one. And I've had one binding job almost certainly canceled and one probably going ahead but I don't know quite when yet. And I have a craft show in early December to prepare for, holiday cards to finish, supplies to order and shops to visit for potential wholesale orders.

And if that's not enough, I'm still working on some copper jewellery, some ATCs, some ilustrations and various and sundry other things. Oh yes, if ever I have free time, I very soon fill it up with things to do.

Other things going on: a truck in need of repair before it's driveable and a letterpress workshop I'll do if the truck is fixed in time. An anime website/blog I started and am waiting to move to its permanent domain before promoting. Collapsing offshoot blogs back into this main blog because I have too many things on the go. I promise I'll write something that makes a bit more sense next post. In the meantime, here are the latest ATCs I did, with manga/anime as the theme (and yes, that's yet another version of my foxgirl).

Tsukiko has a Fox Mask

Yuki Makes Foxfire

Dragon Hurricane Oolong

Snowblind

I tried colouring with markers again, which was harder than expected at such a small size. Plus I'm not that practiced with markers. So I'm not entirely happy with the results. But the sketches were originally much larger than ATC size, so I plan to ink and scan them, and then colour digitally (well, except for Tsukiko, which I've already done).

Merry Foxmas

Cards! Banners! Miscellaneous other things!

First, a new card design that I'm counting as a spring 2011 design, because it's kind of spring-ish and spring 2010 is long past.

It came about when I was working on (finally) finishing my fox girl banner design for my soon-to-be-something-you-can-look-at anime project. First, the banner:

Which then became a digital illustration (which was supposed to be neatly sized to work as a card that would fit in a standard business-size envelope, but looking at it now, I think I put the dimensions in wrong):

Then I realized the bamboo would be lovely as a letterpress element. I added a fox design that started life as an illustration for a intaglio project (as yet unfinished, though the actual prints are done--maybe I'll get it done in time for the holidays), then got adapted for a jewellery project I'm planning to attempt (the bits are laid out on my worktable, but I haven't tackled them yet). Now it's a card element. I'm thinking about maybe using the fox with other background elements to make a seasonal series. Maple for fall, snowy bare branches for winter, tall golden grass for summer? Yes, I think I'll do that.

And, speaking of foxes, I finally remembered to take an in-progress shot of the snowflake-catching holiday fox. Here's a few of them on my messy table, with just the black.

In a normal printmaking situation, I'd actually print the black (or key [hence the K in CMYK]) plate last, but because the red and blue plates don't register to each other and I don't want to waste the amount of cardstock necessary to add registration marks, I need the black down first so I can see where to put the other two. (In printmaking, you generally print lightest to darkest, though that can vary depending on how you want the colours to lay on top of one another.)

Other than that, I have a print job to be paid for, one to deliver, and one coming up to order paper for (which I really ought to have done today, but forgot). Also possibly a binding job (which I was supposed to email someone about, and also forgot). Three more wood type letterpress classes, during which I hope my students will have time to do a second small project once their cards are done. (And I know that was not actually a sentence.)

And two more images: the small, acrobatic thief who raids our bird seed.

Teaching and Foxes and Other Things

So one of the things that's been occupying my time lately is teaching. I'm teaching a wood type letterpress class at the Dawson Printshop for NSCAD Extended Studies. We've had two out of the six weekly classes so far and I'm having fun. I hope my students are also having fun. I haven't had the presence of mind so far to remember my camera or even snap some photos with my phone, but one of my students and fellow Bookbinding Etsy Street Team member (and also fellow Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild member, I believe) Rhonda Miller has some posts about the class on her blog here and here.

If all goes well, I should be teaching an intro letterpress class (metal type, I think, though I don't know for sure yet) in the winter/spring semester). I'm hoping this is the start of a regular schedule of classes and workshops at the Dawson.

And speaking of the Dawson Printshop (and CBBAG), we'll have a table at Word on the Street in Halifax this Sunday, so if you're in the Spring Garden Road area, drop by and see us (and hope it doesn't rain). I think there will be a small tabletop press going with some of the cuts from the collection available to pint your own keepsake.

I've also made a little progress on my fox girl illustration (which I had hoped to have finished ages ago). I'm still getting used to colouring in Photoshop, as you can no doubt tell. The background is a placeholder again, until I figure out what I actually want to do with it (probably something fairly plain, as it's going to be on a long top-of-the-page banner on a website). The background image is a photograph by Brian Jefferey Beggerly of the Fushimi Inari Shrine (used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license), processed in Photoshop (yes, using a filter--how tacky).

And in other news, I finally got a rejection letter from Cricket magazine for a story I submitted a million years ago.

Niko Does Anime (and a Fox Girl)

I had intended my next post to be either a new in-progress image of the steampunk satyrs or something letterpress. Alas, I haven't started printing my letterpress projects yet as I somehow got almost no sleep last night and decided an hour+ drive to and from Halifax was probably not the best idea. So I'll start on that tomorrow. And the satyrs illustration got pre-empted by a banner image for another project I started working on, which I'll explain more later, when I have more to show.

In the meantime, the image I'm working on for the banner . . . It's for an anime-related project, so I wanted anime/manga style art (which is not my forte). To my surprise, I ended up with a sketch I really liked. So I inked it, scanned it, cleaned it up a bit, and got this:

Now I'm in the process of colouring it in Photoshop. I have the flats done, and am about to start adding shading and highlights.

I'm going to keep the image quite flat, so it will (I hope) resemble an animation still, rather than going for the fully-painted look. The background colour is just a place-holder. I'm either going to add some stylized foliage or maybe process a stock image of an Inari shrine somehow. I haven't decided yet. Also, it will be rather more banner-shaped. I'll post again when the image is done and the project is something you can actually see.

Crap

Had my last day of work at the VRC (aka slide library) today. Had my last day of printing the lithographic photoplate experiment today. Got some information today that made me cancel a date. I don't know if the information was good or not, but I thought it best to err on the side of caution and only have dates in public places for a while. Feelings ended up hurt on both sides. Oh well, I thought. I will drink tea and eat xmas chocolate and watch anime and things won't seem so bad. Maybe I will stop feeling guilty (I am very good at feeling guilty). Apologies didn't help. Apologies didn't seem to do anything except make me feel like I was apologising too much. And Naruto seems to have vanished off YTV's schedule, so I have to wait for anime. So tired. Shower now, then Bleach and Deathnote, and maybe it will help, but probably I'll go on feeling guilty for a while. Probably quite a while. I love words, but sometimes they don't communicate. Crap.