Flashback Friday: Pen & Ink

I started drawing with pen and ink, using a dip pen (usually a little Hunt 102, which is still my favourite) and india ink, sometime in junior high school (that would have been about 1985-1988--yes, I am old). My art teacher at the time thought I had a lot of good energy in my line work, and that was all the encouragement I needed to make pen and ink one of my main media for drawing for years afterward (which just shows the effect a teacher can have).

Obviously I wasn't especially good at it right away, but I liked the results enough to keep going. And while I was still drawing fantasy (a habit I have never broken and don't really care to), I was also starting to do fewer obviously Elfquest-inspired characters, and more things out of my own imagination.

Also of note, it was around this time I started trying to develop a little wordmark or monogram to use as a signature. I later abandoned "Nik" in favour of "Niko," but I've since come back to it (partly because, as indicated by the title of this blog, it's an anagram of "ink").

Flashback Friday: Sorry, More Elves

Yes, more elves. I drew a lot of them. I cannot understate the influence ElfQuest had on me. This time, two of my characters have some... er... private time in the forest.

I don't know what possessed me to draw on lined paper. I was probably doodling in a school notebook and decided to make a finished drawing without transferring the sketch to better paper (I probably didn't really know how).

My backgrounds were always pretty sketchy, but it looks like I was attempting something like atmospheric perspective here, with the background fading out while the foreground is more detailed. Or maybe I was just lazy.

Satyrday

Because I haven't posted anything in a while, here are some satyrs.

Prints are available on my deviantArt site, and will soon (probably) be up on Redbubble and Society6 too.

Also, I will be starting up Stamp Saturday again soon. I'm very excited to finally have time to play with all those materials I bought.

Flashback Friday: Elves

I always loved to draw, and pretty much started drawing (and writing stories) the moment I figured out how to make marks on paper. But in junior high I encountered the wonderful indie comic Elfquest and really started drawing all the time and trying to make my own comics (though many of my earliest drawings were accompanied by words in the form of illustrated stories).

The influence of Elfquest on my drawing style was huge, and still quite visible in my work today. 

This pencil crayon piece was one of my earliest attempts to create my own characters in in the Elfquest world. (Warning: there will be a lot of elves in upcoming Flashback Friday posts. They were my favourite thing to draw for many years, and if you know my work, you know I haven't outgrown them yet.) Oh, and the guy on the left isn't aiming at the girl on the right; they're meant to be two separate character studies.

I think I was around 14 or 15 when I drew this.

Flashback Friday: Rainbows and Unicorns

I was going to try to start doing occasional Throwback Thursday posts, but yesterday I got called in to work early and didn't get time. So instead, here's Flashback Friday, in which I will post old drawings of mine.

Some of these, like this week's, are really going to make me cringe. But I think it's useful to look back at old work, especially for me, because I have a tendency to not see the progress I'm making the more I practice. Looking at these really old pieces makes that progress obvious.

I don't now how old this particular piece is, but if I had to guess I'd say I was maybe twelve or thirteen when I drew it. I'll dig out the original later and see if I might have dated it somewhere (I made a book of old drawings for a second year creative writing class about a million years ago -- aka the early 90s -- then photographed that book maybe seven or eight years ago, so I have quite a few terrible old drawings around).

Anyway, here's a lovely crayon image of a unicorn, a pegasus, and a rainbow. Because I was a tween girl once, and even if I was a tomboy I also liked unicorns and rainbows and sometimes even sparkly things.

Inktober Fish

In an effort to climb out of this creative slump I've fallen into (well, a slump by my standards, anyway), I'm doing Inktober, where you draw an ink drawing every day in October. You can follow my efforts on Instagram and/or Twittter if you want to (I'm anagramforink on both), but so far I've mostly done simple things (especially my two for the 2nd and 3rd days, when I got home after work too sleepy to accomplish much).

Anyway, yesterday I drew a fish I was rather happy with, though I could tell it needed more to really make it a finished drawing. Here it is, in green ink with touches of violet and silver ink, drawn with a brush (well, two brushes -- one for lines and one for washes) on watercolour paper.

This is not any particular sort of fish, just something out of my brain, that developed as I was looking at a little print of a flying fish by Charles van Sandwyk that I have on my wall next to my desk (I'd kind of like to be CvS when I grow up...). The head ornaments are loosely anglerfish-inspired, and the fins might have come from a fancy goldfish.

This afternoon I decided to scan it for a better image than the one I posted last night on Instagram, and then, well, I couldn't resist dropping it into Photoshop to play with. I knew I wanted to keep anything else I did to it subtle, so to start I just plopped in an old foxed book paper texture, then made the texture on the fish itself less opaque, which gave me this

Even this little bit of work makes it look more finished, though I still have niggling thoughts about adding some other little touch. Bubbles, maybe? Then I thought how much fun it would be to have this fish on a coffee mug, so I made a version I can use on deviantArt (where you'll find me as feynico) and other places that do POD mugs, with a white background (I might take out the signature glyph, but I also kind of like it).

In this case, I made the paper texture 100% opacity on the fish to show up better. I'm half thinking I might add some muted reds and oranges to the scales, but I'm not sure...

Writing Wednesday: Dealing

So, there's been a certain amount of crap going on in my life lately. Things mostly beyond my control, but things I still have to deal with. Eventually, maybe, I'll write about what those things are, but for now I'll just say they're making it really hard for me to focus or get much more done beyond the absolute basics I need to do for my various jobs.

But not all is doom and gloom. Even though I'm worn out with the crap-dealing-with, and my brain is a little scattered, I've actually written a little. Not a lot, and I still have a ways to go to get back on track. But I did manage to start a new story -- maybe a long short story, maybe a novella. It's probably not a novel, but I'm not really far enough into it yet to know.

It's a story, or one of a series of stories, that I've been thinking about for a while. It'll most likely appear under my "Nic Silver" pen name, not because it has lots of sex like my other Nic Silver books, but because it feels more like a Nic Silver story. Which is to say, dark and weird. Probably.

I also managed, finally, to get started on the next "Others" novel (also written as Nic Silver). It's only half a chapter, but it's a start and it gives me a vague direction to head in. I think I have less of an idea where this book is going than I did for the previous books, which might be why it's taken so long to get to it.

And, not writing, but related, because it's for a book I'm working on (which I will also write the text for), I've managed to finish some more dragon illustrations and get started on a couple others, which is why there are dragon pictures decorating this post. I'll make the finished ones (well, mostly finished -- they will eventually have hand-written text on them) available as prints in a few places online soon.

So yeah. Dealing with crap, but still dragging one foot after the other. I'm too damn stubborn to ever give up.

Goals and Such

I don't really like New Year's resolutions. I always figure if you want to do something, resolve to do it right there and then. Don't save up all your promises-of-things-you'll-do for one big day. That seems like a recipe for failure to me (though there can be success in failure, too). However, this arbitrary counting of time we call a year (OK, not entirely arbitrary, but how many people really think about what it is we base the length of a year on?) can be useful for stopping to take stock.

Last year, I didn't do as well as I hoped with my goals. I had planned to have a lot more writing done and available for people to read, but I got derailed pretty early on, and I'm not even sure why. I did manage to write (or finish) three novels (two shortish YAs and one somewhat longer adult novel), so really that's not so bad. And I drew some dragons, made some books, got a die-cutter and expanded my card-making repertoire.

But this year, I'm not going to focus on what I didn't get done last year. Well, I am, sort of, but not really. Actually, I'm going to work on some much older things in addition to trying to write more new things.

Old Things to Work On

(Note that I didn't say "Old Things to Finish." I hope to finish them, but if I don't, that's OK. At least I will have more done than I did before).

This Blog. I'm going to aim for a regular weekly post again this year. This is the first one. I won't give myself any soft of word count goal. Just one post a week, even if it's just a picture or a favourite quote.

My Comic. A million years ago, I started an urban fantasy comic -- a webcomic in the sense that I intended to first make it available on the web, though except for lettering, it's all drawn the old-fashioned way and ultimately I want it in print. I worked on it off and on over the years, a little here, a little there. It takes me a really really long time to draw.

Then, in 2004, just before I moved to Nova Scotia, I decided to re-draw everything I had already done to fix it. And I did. Every week a new page, and I even kept going after I finished re-drawing. I made it to the middle of issue 3 (around 50-something pages) and then, for reasons I no longer recall, I stopped. I even still had a few more pages planned out.

So now, ten years later, I'm going to have another go at it. I still love my characters, and it's still a story I want to get to the end of. But I'm not going to re-draw it again, even though it's old art and I might be able to draw it better (and looking back, I really shouldn't have bothered re-drawing it last time; I should have put the energy into making new pages). If I still have all my old files, and I can figure out WordPress well enough to make it do what I need, I might even have the first page up today. I'm going to start from the very beginning, one page a week to start, and while old pages are going up, I'll work on new ones. We'll see how far I get this time. I'd like to at least get to the end of the current storyline.

My Serials. I've have two serial novels on JukePop Serials, both of which have been neglected, due to the mysterious derailment of 2013. One of them -- the one I write as Calliope Strange -- is actually finished. I just haven't posted it all. For that one, I'll put up at least one chapter a week until it's done. The other one, Reindeer Girl, is not finished, but it will be. It was meant to be a way of finishing a book I started a while back, and a way to get me writing regularly. It can still be those things. Maybe I'll manage once a week, but if I can at least get going on it again, however slowly, I'll be pleased.

Other. I'm sure there are other old things I'll revisit through the year, but for now, these will do.

New Things Ahead

Dragons. This isn't entirely new, of course, as it's something I started working on on 2013, but this year I want to make it a major focus. A couple of days ago, I made a Scrivener file for it so I can start working on the text, and yesterday I had another stab at a dragon illustration that's been kicking my butt. I still didn't get it, but I got closer. This is my fun thing, the thing I'm making entirely for myself, but I'll share it, and maybe others will like it, too.

Fiction. There are always too many novels in my head, but this year I'd like to see if I can write one or two more Others novels (as Nic Silver). There are two more I know I need to write for sure. One is what happens to Evgeny while Su is in Germany, and the other is the continuation of Su's quest to find out what happened to her little sister. Also, I'd like to get working on the next Kentaurs novel, which I had intended to write over the summer. And eventually, though perhaps not this year, we'll have to find out what the heck is going to happen to Dubhghall and Maddy after the events of Dark Stranger.

Publishing. I need to get White Raven Press back on track, starting with a new website. I have a handful of novels and collections to get into print, and one to put up digital. Maybe two, but Deer Mouse is an experiment in submitting to a traditional publisher, so I'll have to wait till I hear back.

Painting. Last year I bought some exciting new art supplies, and promptly had no time to play with them. So this year, that's what I'll do. Play. Learn some things. I have a selection of casein paints, and I've already prepped a whole pile of boards to paint on. Maybe something will come of it, or maybe I'll just have fun. Either is good.

Craft. My goals here are just to keep on making stuff, and make more of an effort to market and get work into stores. I hope to do more hand-papermaking, so likely I'll have more cards printed on my own paper, and probably more linocuts rather than polymer letterpress. But again, we'll see how it goes. Also, I plan to play around with more 3D sculptures using die-cut elements. My first batch of dragons came out well, and were well-received. Also, they were great fun to design.

Photography. Some of you may know I studied photography (as well as printmaking, design, and book arts) in art school. I haven't done a lot of photo recently, asked from snaps to sort of visually journal things I see. I have some ideas for projects tumbling around in my head, but I just upgraded my iPhone, and I got a set of Olloclip macro lenses for Christmas (I had their 3-in-1 macro/wide angle/fish eye for my old phone, and will probably pick up the one for my current phone eventually), so I think I'm going to focus on shooting iPhone pictures. No pressure on myself to make great pictures, just something fun. And if they start turning out well, maybe I'll get more serious.

More…

I'm sure there were more things I was going to say, but I've gone on way longer than I meant to, so I'll stop. Basically, I plan to have fun this year, and finish more things -- some old, some new. The only way I can fail is if I stop writing/drawing/crafting completely, and that's pretty unlikely.

Jackalope

I'm feeling wintery, so here's a jackalope in the snow.

Thanks and One More Original Art Piece for the Pay-What-You-Want Sale

So, thanks to the generous people who bought things from my pay-what-you-want sale (details here)! You guys are fantastic. The immediate oh-crap-ness has been remedied, but I'm going to keep the sale running a while longer because I know a few people were still making up their minds, and I still haven't  received that cheque for that big job that I was waiting for, so I'm not quite out of the woods yet (and then there's that tax bill, which I think I can pay in instalments...)

But I didn't start writing this post to whine, I did it to say thanks. A huge, huge thanks.

Once again: Thank you.

But also, there is one other thing, a bit of art I'd forgotten all about until I was flipping through my sketchbook just now: the original pen&ink and watercolour cover illustration for Reindeer Girl:

It's on acid free medium-weight sketchbook paper, and it measures about 9.5 inches wide by 14 inches high. I get nervous about selling original pieces (I'm both a huge packrat, and a worry-wart about what if I didn't scan it at a high enough resolution in case I need it later), so I don't do it often, but while I'm cleaning older work out of the house, I might as well add it to the pay-what-you-want sale.

So yeah. And apparently my next post will be my 1000th on this blog. That's a whole lot of babbling. I feel like I should probably make it something significant. I just can't think what. I know I need to do another writing update, but is that 1000th-post worthy?

Pay-What-You-Want Jewellery and Original Art (or Commission Me!)

For all the info you need to take part is this rare and unusual giant sale of pretty much all my work, please see this post.

Copper Printing Plate Jewellery
These pieces are all hand cut with a jeweller's saw out of recycled copper intaglio plates from my own designs. Most of the skulls are about an inch wide or a wee bit more, so you can kind of judge the size from there. If you need more photos or info, just ask. The feathers are cut from a fairly light copper plate, while the others are much heavier (I don't know the gauge but I can try to figure it out if you need to know).

Usually these retail for $30 for feathers and $35 for skulls. The two scarabs are $75 and $95. I almost never mark them down, so you have a chance to get them as cheap as you'd like.

As shown, the copper is starting to age and tarnish a little. It's really easy to brighten it up to a super shine, or you can let it age and take on different hues as it gets older. I can spray on a clear matte finish if you like, but usually I just put a little renaissance wax on.

Here's what they are (click the image to make it bigger):
1. finch feather
2. white tail deer
3.great horned owl
4. pileated woodpecker
5. mountain goat
6. peacock feather
7. scarab beetle
8. fancy spiral scarab
9. red fox
10. bottlenose dolphin
11. snowshoe hare
12. american badger
13. domestic cat
14. north american porcupine
15. striped skunk
16. harbour seal
17. platypus
18. horse
19. black bear

Miniature Book Jewellery

Yes, these really are tiny books with actual turnable pages. The larger books are just over an inch tall, so that should give you an idea of their size. They retail for $20 for a Japanese stab-stitch necklace, $25 for Japanese earrings or European leather-and-marbled-paper hardcover necklace, and $35 for European-style earrings. Again, I almost never put these on sale, so now's your chance. (They make good gifts!)

European-style earrings (click the image to make it bigger):

European-style pendants (click the image to make it bigger):

Japanese-style earrings (click the image to make it bigger):

Japanese-style pendants (click the image to make it bigger):

Original Art

I don't have a whole lot of original art sitting around, that isn't in the form of prints or books, but I do have a couple of things. If I happen across more, I'll add it, but I think this is really it at the moment. I can however, do something new just for you, but see below for that.

This piece was made to go on the cover of my YA novel A Madness of Kentaurs, hence the centaur on it. Shipping on it could be higher than on the prints, because it's cut/torn paper adhered to fairly heavy card and can't be rolled. It measures 12 by 15 inches.

Then there's this little raven skull pen & ink with watercolour. It's 4 by 6 inches on watercolour paper and was going to be the first of a series showing a raven skull from various angles. I'll finish the series eventually. I'm tempted to just keep it, but...

Commission Me (or Otherwise Hire Me)

I'm not offering commissions on a pay-what-you-want basis, but if you ask for something now I'll charge less than I usually would. Plus I hardly ever offer to do commissions (I'm always open to being asked, I just rarely have time what with all my own projects).

Aside from various sorts of illustration, I also do digital re-touch and custom letterpress, as well as editing of both fiction and non-fiction. If you have something in mind, get in touch, and we'll see about agreeing on a cost and a timeframe. For this kind of job, I will require partial payment up front, with the balance due when the job is completed.

Card Sale

If you've managed to read this far, I have one more thing to add to this sale. Again, it's not pay-what-want, and I'm too headachey right now to post pictures, but all of my die-cut and letterpress cards -- normally selling for $6 or 5 for $25 -- will be 5 for $20 if you buy them directly from me. I'm not sure how long I'll keep them on sale. Maybe a week or two. I'll see about posting images of what I currently have in stock later on so anyone who doesn't know my work can see what I have.

Finally, if there was something you were hoping to see but didn't, please leave a comment or send me an email (anagramforink at gmail) -- I might have missed a few things.

Natural History Sketches: Skunk

One night after teaching letterpress in Halifax I was driving home on our rural highway and had to stop and let a skunk (Mephitis mephitis -- striped skunk) cross the road. It's not uncommon for skunks to be out in the dark hours (porcupines and raccoons are also very common, so I tend to drive slower than most people do in the dark on that road).

What was interesting, though, it that this particular skunk has such wide stripes that it was more white than black. It was so pale I even wondered if my "knowledge" that skunks don't change colour in the winter might be wrong.

Well, skunks don't change colour (like hares do), but it turns out it's actually not that unusual for striped skunks to be nearly white. A quite look through Google images showed that while the usual black and white pattern was the most common, a lot of skunks have stripes either thicker or narrower than the norm, so they vary from nearly all white to nearly all black. There's also a fairly rare paler colour phase in which the usually black parts of the animal are a pale brown.

Anyway, the next day I attempted to remember what I saw well enough to sketch it.

Image © Niko Silvester. Please do not use without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Shrew and Mouse

I live in a rural area in a somewhat unfinished house that hasn't been maintained as well as it might have been. Consequently, we have mice in the walls. They're actually quite lovely little creatures: deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus). They're also native to Nova Scotia, so I feel a bit bad setting traps for them, even when they get cheeky enough to watch me from the top of a bookcase.

Every now and then my cat, who never goes outside, will catch one. Usually somewhere in the still-dark hours of the early morning. Then she lets them go in the bedroom, which has a sill on the door, so they run around and around the room while she chases them. Eventually she gets bored and they escape, or they go into shock so I have to scoop them up in the morning and release them into the woods. Every now and then she actually kills one.

(I know, I am a monster for not intervening. But at three a.m. I am pretty much a zombie and capable only of groaning and burying my head under the pillow.)

Once, I discovered the tiny body in the morning and instead of a mouse, it was a shrew (probably a masked shrew, Sorex cinereus). I still don't know how it ended up inside, because as far as I can tell, shrews are not usually house-dwellers. I can only guess that perhaps it got lost in the tunnels under the snow (there was a lot of snow on the ground at the time) and followed a mouse hole, or the dryer vent, into the house. Only to be captured by a housecat.

Shrews, if you're not up on your mammalian classification, are not rodents (which, of course, mice are). Though they do resemble mice somewhat, they're actually more closely related to moles. Masked shrews are very, very tiny. Even smaller than deer mice. Sadly, this dead little beast is the only shrew I've actually seen (though I did spy a living vole -- a mouse-like rodent -- a couple of times in one of our rock walls).

Image © Niko Silvester. Please do not use without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Squirrels

You can tell what I think of these drawings in the comment I wrote next to them. Oh well. One of the points of keeping this journal is to get more drawing practice, which will -- I certainly hope -- help me improve.

North American Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus)

These little guys are almost unbearably cute, but they're also accomplished thieves. Unless you buy special (rather pricey) bird feeders, they'll steal all the seeds. Fortunately, they're not too bad most of the year, and most of our birds aren't bothered by them (and we only have two regulars). I once saw a crow chase a red squirrel away when it got too close.They do get very gluttonous in the winter when they're stockpiling, and they'll leave the seed pile with their cheeks stuffed so full their heads look two or three times normal size.

In some parts of Canada, red squirrels have been driven out by invasive grey squirrels, but that hasn't happened here in NS (at least, not yet).

All images © Niko Silvester. Please don't use them without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Pheasant

It seems it's been a while since I posted. I guess I'm not doing so well on my New Year's resolutions. Oh well. Here are some of the sketches from my big giant natural history notebook (which I also haven't been keeping up with as much as I'd like).

Pheasants (Ring-necked or Common Pheasant, Phasianus colchicus)

These lovely, big birds aren't native to Nova Scotia, and were actually introduced a number of times by people wanting to establish them as game birds. They're still relatively uncommon over a lot of the province, but somewhat common where I live. I've actually seen six or more birds, male and female, foraging together in the same field, but more often I'll see one on its own -- usually a male, as the females are much better camouflaged and therefore harder to spot.

There used to be one male that regularly came for the seeds we put out every day, but he hasn't been around for a year or two (or else he waits until no one's looking). Here he is in 2010.

All images © Niko Silvester. Please don't use them without permission. Thanks.

Corvus corax Sketch

Yesterday's entry in my new, giant natural history journal was the usual weather report and list of beasties in the yard. We had a new visitor, though: a raven.

Although we have a lot of ravens in the area, the closest they usually get to the yard is flying high overhead. For a few weeks in the fall they would gather in the evening in the woods just beyond out property line -- I could hear them gossiping and saw them fly over, but that was it.

But yesterday one stopped by to check out the seeds I put out and stayed long enough to pick some of them out of the snow with her enormous beak. She didn't stay long, though, because our resident crows, which are much, much more skittish than city crows, saw me watching from the window and flew off in a flurry of wings. That made the raven nervous enough to fly away, though she hadn't seemed concerned herself that I was watching.

This sketch isn't from life. I ran to get my camera, but when I came back was when the crows decided to cause a fuss, so I didn't manage a photo. Instead, I found a picture online that matched more or less the raven I saw. It's a pretty rough, quick sketch, but I think I succeeded in capturing, at least a little bit, the range of textures in the bird's feathers.

And, as promised, here's what the book looked like in its original  installation. Not very good photographs, I'm afraid, but I hope you get the idea.

Natural History Journal: Days 1 & 2

I don't really have much to show for my new natural history journal in a giant blank book project yet, but a few people have expressed interest, so here you go.

Here's the book itself, which some of you have already seen on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It's big. Next time I think of it, I'll dig out a photo of the project I originally made it for, which was an installation for a wood type letterpress class I took in 2007 I think.

Here's a shot of page one. It doesn't say a whole lot. Just some comments on the weather (cold and snowy) and a list of birds spotted in the yard.

And here's a close-up of the blue jay feather drawing. As you can see, I need a lot of drawing practice. But that's one of the points of this exercise.

A Quick Thing About Dragons

Recently I got out a drawing I had started to do on my watercolour pad and decided I might as well finish it. So I started by re-inking what I had already done with a pen using a brush instead. Then I added details with a pen (a dip pen with a Hunt 102 "crowquill" nib, which not only has a cool name, but is my favourite nib for drawing with).

Once the inks were done, I painted it with watercolours. And the whole time I was painting it, I was thinking about text I could add to it, and how it could be part of a book project (because everything I do seems to end up connected to books somehow). I won't say much more about that here, as I'm going to do the book under my Calliope Strange pen name, but it'll be a sort of travel journal by my mad scientist character Sophia Shallowgrave. But more on that later...

Reindeer Girl Cover

If you're a Facebook friend or you follow me on Twitter, you'll have seen pretty much everything in this post, but I thought I'd bring all the work-in-progress shots for this book cover together in one place.

First, a bit of background. I've been working off and on to write a novel about a character called Maring Darkberry, who belongs to a culture called the Reindeer Herders (or just Herders)--a genetically mixed people who live on the barrens of my imaginary island/continent of Frisland (also the setting for many of my short stories, and for the Aeryn Daring stories I write as Calliope Strange).

The story started out as a short story called "White Foxes, Full Moon," but I soon realized there was a lot more to Maring's tale. But for some reason I never got farther than perhaps two-thirds finished.

So recently, I saw a call for submissions from a place called JukePop Serials which had an interesting business model. And I thought maybe by serializing the thing, so there were people waiting for the next chapter, I might actually finish it. And the editors at JukePop liked it. So now the title is Reindeer Girl, and it'll be serialized starting in September. And it needs a cover.

Maring

First I needed a reference for Maring. It didn't have to look like her, exactly, as long as the pose was right. So digging through a box of old pictures, I found this one of my beautiful mother with my sister and me (I'm the chubby one on the left) in her lap.

I did a sketch I was pleased with, changing her features to make her look less like my mom and more like the character in my story. Though in the story Maring has fair skin and blue eyes to go with her black hair, I wanted it to be clear from looking at her that not all her ancestry is European. Her people have intermarried all over the place, and they currently live quite close to a people they refer to as the Snow People (who are, of course, Inuit). So I wanted Maring to look like some of her recent ancestors were Inuit or perhaps Siberian or even Mongolian.

I could already tell that I probably hadn't really left enough room for the rest of the picture, but I was thinking about scanning the inked drawing and colouring digitally, so I went ahead and inked the drawing on the sketchbook paper, rather than transferring it to watercolour paper.

Text

 I spent a long time looking at type, and found what I thought was the perfect typeface for the title. It was Celtic, but rough-looking; calligraphic but loose. Unfortunately, none of the links on the designer's website worked. So I kept looking and eventually decided that what I really wanted to do was hand-letter, a la Walter Crane, or more recently, Charles Vess.

Of course, I then decided I also wanted to hand-colour, so I had to figure out a way to squeeze everything onto the page.

Background

I had in mind a particular photograph, taken on the barrens of the southern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, which just happened to have caribou in the shot (for the curious, caribou and reindeer are the same animal, Rangifer tarandus, the first usually used in North America and the second in Europe). Alas, there must be another box of my photographs still in storage at my mother's house in BC, because I couldn't find it. So instead I used this one, taken somewhere between Cape Ray and Gros Morne, Newfoundland.

I started with a blue wash, and quickly began to wish I'd taken the time to transfer the drawing to watercolour paper before inking.

Then I added green and yellow. You can see the paper getting more and more wrinkled with each colour I add.

Then some brown and grey, and a little red and purple.

Finally, I brightened up some of the colours and added a few details with pencil crayon.

Then I had to flatten the thing so I could get a good scan. I did this by thoroughly spritzing it with water from the back, until the paper relaxed and it lay flat. Then I put it between sheets of printmaking rag (I used some old proofs) and newsprint, and put it under a goodly amount of weight to dry. And the next day it was perfectly flat.

I had to scan it in two pieces, because it's too big for my scanner--thanks to Photoshop's "photomerge" function, putting the two pieces together was a snap.

And if anyone's interested, I've made it available as a print through Zazzle (if you order, make sure to let the preview load for the size you select--some sizes will cut off the top and bottom of the image). I may do my own prints at some point, on my very nice super-deluxe photo inkjet printer on digital photo rag paper. If enough people ask, that is.