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 Sketching an Airship      Continuing from my last post, now we are ready to sketch an airship. I'm partially doing this to push outside my comfort zone as an artist.      Airships should be drawn in perspective like buildings. Drawing curvy, complex shapes in perspective is hard. Fortunately we can break it down into simple shapes. Here's the planning for sketching the ship's hull in a shape that curves up to a point in the front:     Next I added more shapes in perspective including fins and the bridge. The squares on the side will become cannons.     Finally I round out the corners, add details and cannons. Not bad for my first airship. Be sure to join me for more projects like this in the future.   

 Designing a Fictional Airship      I'm at a point in my book where an airship is needed but at a loss for how it will appear. It's my intent to browse through other fictional airships for inspiration and design my own.      Apparently real life airships are lighter than air crafts filled with lifting gas. Helium is preferred as it is nonflammable. We're going to deviate to more fantasy designs which give the freedom to be whimsical and not worry about practicality. When searching on the internet I had to add "fictional" to find what I was after.     There are many styles I could go for. From a steam punk machine with gears and smoke to an elegant, colorful machine like the ship used in Final Fantasy X. Final Fantasy games frequently feature airships and are a great place to go for inspiration. There are many factors to consider. Is it a grungy weapon of war? Appealing commercial flight? Does it use propellers, balloons or rocket engines? Or wings even? How large

 Arwen!     I have to give credit to my coauthor Arwen, who always jumps up on my lap to "help" me write.       She's my baby.

 Science Fantasy      Some sci-fi books, shows etc. are strictly creating a scientific fictional environment. Think Ringworld by Larry Niven or Star Trek and I must give kudos to the Trek writers for doing their homework. The show is as close to real science as the concepts can be. But sci-fi and fantasy needn't be separate genres walled off from each other. I prefer some whimsy in my sci-fi.     The best examples of this type of hybrid are The Chronicles of Amber book series by Roger Zelazny and Final Fantasy video game series. They combine things like machines with monsters and sword fighting. To make these settings plausible you need some sort of explanation as to how magic works. There's often a scientific one like FFVII's materia. In the future I plan to have my own Signature series.     One pet peeve of mine though is why use swords when guns are superior on so many levels? Guns exert more force with less effort, greater range, speed and take up less space than swords

 The Journey of Personal Growth      Remember that rough draft sketch (March 16, 2021)? Here it is filled out:     This is Spiral, another guardian dragon. By posting these images I hope to track my growth as an artist. I've come a long way but still feel there is much that can be improved.     I'm always growing as a writer too. My book went through two rewrites; each with significant changes. Originally Sayth was not the main character but I found him to be the focus of all the action and changed that. In the second draft he and Spiral had a son but that character did nothing but muddy the water by getting in the way while serving no plot purpose. He was removed but the entire book had to be rewritten. Now Sayth and Spiral are sharing an early romance.     It's just as well. My writing has improved significantly since I began in my high school days. I don't know how people can write a novel in a month; mine took years of planning. Maybe as I mature as a writer I'

 Art in the Age of Computers      My last post was a bit critical of relying too heavily on computers for art so today I'm going to talk about how incredible they are at aiding it. Computers allow us to generate much more complex works with seemingly endless resources and entirely new mediums in 3D art and animation.      In the past, when my grandfather was an artist, he kept a stash of magazines and photos to use as references and inspiration. Now all that is easily organized digitally and we have internet access to find whatever we want instantly. Not only that but guides, forums and education about any given topic are ever at our fingertips.      By delegating tasks to programs like photoshop and illustrator, we are able to take art further and with more efficiency than ever before as well as experiment without consequences as we can simply undo mistakes. Want to adjust the contrast? Go to levels. Distort an image to elongate it, spiral it and so much more? Use the distortion f

 M.C.Escher and Photoshop     M.C.Escher is, by far, my favorite artist and did his work well before the age of computers. I strongly recommend you look at his art at mcescher.com. Why he was amazing is he would mathematically plan out things like tessellations or distortions to make impossible landscapes. I've seen this type of planning simplified by using a grid but with the lines distorted like a sphere is pushing them out. As an artist I can tell you this sort of thing is extremely difficult to do and make it look natural.     The reason I mentioned computers is that programs can easily replicate his methods. I've seen tools that create tessellations and personally use a legal copy of photoshop. Photoshop has filters like "spherize" that automatically produce the distortions the name suggests. It's an amazing program.     The issues that arise revolve around artistic integrity. Are you creating art or is the computer doing the work for you? Technology aids the

 Sketching Original Characters      Artistic character creation has its own rough draft stages. It's considerably harder to not work from a model. Like inventing the light bulb, you find many more ways that don't work before discovering the magic formula that does.      I'll invest a good amount of time figuring out the pose. Poses are hard, especially action poses. You need the proper proportions and foreshortening alongside an interesting and balanced position. This applies not only to humans but creatures and machines as well. Often times I'll not know what to do with the back arm.     Fleshing out and adding interesting clothing can be challenging as well. The face is always the worst so I try to add it first thing after the figure. Inventing new styles of clothing for futuristic and fantasy races involves a lot of knowledge and planning. Are they warriors, merchants, nobles? Are they loose with the rules and have one arm not in their coat sleeve or do they have it

 Creating Characters     I have a very visual imagination. Often times when I'm walking I'll be thinking up cool characters. You want them to be interesting and larger than life, especially for fantasy. Character design should say a lot about their personality just from looking at them. Here's my main character, Sayth, as an example: He's a guardian dragon and someone who can freely transform into a dragon. As such, he often uses his tail blade to fight. In human form he wears a scale armor trench coat engineered from his dragon scales.     After coming up with a cool concept and design, I'll create scenes involving the character to see how they react. Often these will go into my story outline to later be ordered and added upon. Characters are living organisms that grow and evolve with your writing. You need to get to know them. Sometimes when reading or watching another work of fiction I'll insert my own character(s) in to see how they'll react to the given

 Hopes and Homonyms     Through this blog I'm hoping to reach out and connect with other writers, artists, nerds and gamers. Please comment if you are interested. I'm ever growing as an artist, writer and intellectual.      As a writer I have many enemies. Distraction, malaise, writer's block, writer's cramp, writer's urges to revamp. But today I want to talk about one particularly perturbing one: homonyms, specifically words with the same spelling.     I am no stranger to metaphor and similes but in fantasy and fictitious genres you have to be careful not to confuse the reader. I invent all manors of otherworldly creatures, concepts and environments; metaphors could easily be taken literally if utilized improperly. "The ravenous wildcat man" could mean an anthropomorphic feline race in fiction if taken literally. Homonyms further confuse the issue.       Although context helps alleviate such problems I'd hate to break the flow of writing for word