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.

Suspending Stamp Saturday, Sort Of

I just found out that I got a table (actually, a half table) at the Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival in August. Yay! It's only a half day thing on a Sunday, but I have so very much to get done by then. Add to that the fact that I just started a part-time retail job, and retail is extra-exhausting for an introvert like me, and I just don't have time to do everything.

So, sadly, for now, I'm going to suspend my Stamp Saturday posts. Probably not entirely -- I am going to try to work on them a little at a time between other things, but those other things have to take priority for now. Rest assured, though, that I will get back to stamp stuff. I have all that wonderful material to play with, after all!

Just as a taste of the length of my to-do list, here are some of the main things on it:

• write 8+ reviews and articles each month for Young Adult Books site, plus site maintenance and other odds and ends, and reading the books I review
• work two or three shifts a week at video game store
• teach letter press one evening a week (until the end of June) -- this usually takes up most of the day as I also run errands and print some things of my own while I'm in the city
• make corrections to Fey chapter one digital files and re-print
• scan, touch up, and letter Fey chapter two pages for posting on the web
• lay out Fey chapter two in book form, order a proof, correct, and print
• finish as much of Fey chapter three as possible
• finish Art Nouveau satyr illustration and print as poster (and maybe other things)
• make prints of dragons (first test different sizes)
• text for Monsters mini-comic
• scan and touch up images for Monsters mini-comic
• make cover (possibly letterpress printed) for Monsters mini-comic
• make fairy stickers
• make Fey business cards and flyers
• wrangle Wordpress so Fey site looks better
• make myself a Fey t-shirt to wear at DCAF
• figure out table set up and buy/make necessary stands, etc

So yeah. Whole lot to do and no time to waste. Plus, in order to be able to do my video game store job well, I need to read video gaming news and reviews so I can better help customers. And I need to decide if I'll have my novels to sell at DCAF, too, and if so, I'll have to lay out several of them for print, get and check proofs, and order copies. Probably I'll just get a few more copies of the ones I already have available in print (though one needs a cover change to match the new e-book version cover).

I think the rest of today may very well be spent scanning. I may also drop dead before I even get to August. Heh.

The Pan-Chronic Adventurers Guild

Here's something I seem to have spent most of the day working on (and which has confirmed the fact that I really need a new computer as every little thing I did seemed to take a million years for my poor little old Macbook to process).

There are still things I'd like to tweak, but I wanted to finish it for a contest that ends tomorrow, and I was getting frustrated with how long everything was taking, and I still can't figure out where all the weird grey cloudy bits in the dropshadow are coming from, because (I thought) I got all the weird stray bits of colour out of the original image (results of a background mistake early on). But anyway, for now, it's done.

Once the files are done processing, it'll be available for purchase through Indy Planet (where you can also get issue 1 of Fey).

I do want to do another version, because I was especially happy with how the satyrs' feet turned out, but then I ended hiding them behind the text in this version. Here's just the satyrs so you can see what they look like uncluttered:

The colours are actually rather brighter in the pre-adding-to-Blogger versions, but whatever Blogger does to compress images always seems to dull and blur them a little.

Step 2: Satyrs in Colour

Just the flat colours, which is why they look, well, flat. I still have to add shadows and highlights. Plus, these aren't necessarily the final colours. I'll probably still tweak them a bit.

Work In Progress: Time-Travelling Satyrs Illustration

Satyrs, Again

I decided to tackle the colouring of my steampunk satyrs digitally (though I may also do a pen/ink and watercolour version later. Here's the cleaned-up scan of the pencils.

I have to decide now if I want to add the background elements first, then colour, or colour, do a background separately, and then drop the one on the other.

Work in Progress: Steampunk Satyrs

On the drawing board (or, rather, in the sketchbook):

Now I have to decide if I'll scan it and attempt digital colouring, or transfer it to watercolour paper and do pen and ink with watercolour. Or both.

Also, I need a background. I'm thinking a vague futuristic cityscape with neo-Victorian and Atomic Age elements. Too bad I'm worse at cityscapes than I am at clothes.

Creatures from Greek Myth

Here are the latest finished cards, from a swap on Creatures of Myth and Fantasy. First, a centaur standing guard:

Not the most exciting image, but I enjoyed drawing his hair.

Next, a hippocampus. This one seems to be the favourite of the set on ATCs for All, where I'm swapping them.

I added some tiny orange spots in a few places, which added a little pop to the image, but they don't really show up in the scan.

And finally, my personal favourite of this trio, a star-gazing satyr.

I plan to make them all available as magnets and greeting cards in my Etsy shop. If there's something you want, let me know and I'll make it happen sooner.

Satyr, Repurposed

I had a datebook page to finish up for a collaborative project (no pay, just exposure and website traffic). The dimensions were a tall 8 inches by 3 inches wide, so not much room for borders or anything. So I decided to go with the date info at the top and an image and my info at the bottom.

Yes, that's the same satyr as the ATC-in-progress image I posted yesterday. I just sent it off today, so I haven't heard back if it's appropriately sized and formatted, though I followed the instructions, so it should be.

Of course, I now can't find the URL for the project, but when I locate it, I'll update the post. I suspect they may still need pages, but the original deadline was July 1, so they'd have to be done fast.

Edit: replaced spelling-mistake image with corrected version.