Signature

 I'm Thinking of Getting Clip Studio Paint     So far I've just been sketching my characters on a drawing pad and scanning them. I have photoshop but it's not designed for illustration. Every rough graphite speck is picked up and it can be difficult to fill in between the lines. I need software professionals use and it seems to be fairly cheep.     For now, here's the character with two greatswords I sketched. It was a busy drawing so I shaded it. Although it turned out alright, the pose is a bit weak. I did it without any reference. It's hard to manage not one but two massive weapons. I might come back to this character.     This is Nighmarika; she's the admiral of the Legion of Sypter.

 Working on Character Concept Art     I'm still working on sketching out the characters for my book. It's hard to draw unique characters with no references. As I go on I'll sketch the same characters again and they'll get easier to draw.      Unfortunately my sketch pad is not at home so I can't upload my art today. I'll have it soon.

 Creating Fictional Cultures     In sci-fi and fantasy a large part of the experience is how different races behave and interact. Some speak with accents, others wear exotic clothes and have different religions. When creating alien races one must know them culturally.      My universe has several starfaring species. The oldest and most advanced, dragons, are creatures of science and logic. They choose isolationism rather than engaging with other species but also act as protectors of the universe.     The human alliance formed when all humans of different countries united to protect against alien invasion. They are the most recent to learn interstellar travel and less advanced than other great empires. Human society consists of cultural salads in large cities as the population of Earth is much greater in the future. There are ads everywhere and a lot of alcohol use in such crowed areas. Each country has its own culture but all are un...

 Art as Inspiration for Fictional Worlds     A hobby of mine is making dreamscapes on photoshop. Surreal environments that are interesting and unique. Many of these end up in my writing. I want my story to be consistently creative and witty right down to the setting. Of course this can be a difficult thing to accomplish with the written word. It's much easier to describe a setting that already exists, a beach etc, than to create fictional alien worlds. As such I try to used examples people can relate to.      Here's one such example that will appear in my second book: the Consumed Etropolis. A silicon city consumed by electric plants. When writing about it I'll relate it to real world things like a city, flowers and a jungle but then expand into floating building and lightning coursing through plants. Expect many such settings in my books.

 Name Ideas     I've been working a lot on the outline for my sequel and that's coming along well. When I exercise I'll think about scenes and characters for it.       I've also pondered names for my first book. The working title was 'Signature Rainbows Wane' but that didn't have enough description that it's a sci-fi book. I looked over some other book titles and remembered 'The Chronicles of Amber'- equally poetic yet it gets across the nature of the series. Taking inspiration from this my title will be 'The Signature Chronicles Rainbows Wane'. This does a much better job advertising the content.     Just for fun, here's a photo of an Abert's Squirrel.

 Choosing A Name For Your Book     I've been doing a lot of research on marketing my upcoming book and it starts right there on the front cover. For the longest time the working title for my book has been Rainbows Wane. But how marketable is that? Would people pick it up who were interested in sci-fi? I don't think so.     Of course I'd have to change my blog and web domain too. It's a lot of work so I need to be sure. The best way to do that is some research; asking people! That's the next step.     The book was called Rainbows Wane because in it god was split into several beings by an alien force; like light being refracted by a prism. It's fitting and poetic but not from a marketing standpoint. This will require a lot of thought. I'll keep you posted.

  Reworking Old Photoshop Projects     I have a plethora of creative ideas yet realizing them is not always easy. Many are the times I've make an interesting dreamscape in concept but it ends up a mess in execution. This is very much like sketching original monsters where it needs a rough draft made first. Only then can the final version be properly planned and designed.      The Weeping Clogway is a good example of this. I had the idea of willows weeping a great labyrinth of rivers held aloft by wooden pipes. This was inspired by a dream and will be featured as a location in my book Signature Ghate. You can see here how it turned out:     I'm quite pleased with this; it was a lot of work to cutout wooden pipes and layer willow leaves over them. It is a "clogway" after all. Here's the original version I mentioned:     Great idea but poorly executed. The pieces were all there but fell into a jumble. Fortunately I was a...

 Weak Poses VS Strong Poses     When drawing without a reference finding the right pose can prove difficult. I'll often have to sketch the same character over and over to finally get it right. This applies to monsters too. The Snakoth is a monster from my novel, which I posted a sketch of earlier. Although it wasn't bad it could be improved in both pose and proportions. Here is a better version: Sadly a little bit of it couldn't fit on the paper. For comparison here is the earlier version: You can see the pose is generally weaker with it standing still unlike the action pose of the former. The arms don't make work of foreshortening as well either. But it was a good jumping off point. Practice makes perfect.

 Planning A Book     I've been doing a lot to plan the sequel to my book while waiting for people to read my first one for impressions. I always think of it in scenes and organize them in an outline. That way I can come up with interesting ideas, locations and scenarios and add them where they best fit. When I'm walking or hiking, which I try to do 2 miles a day, I'll think about my book.     Signature Rainbows Wane's outline was over 15 pages long. I figured out a lot of what works or not through writing and did 2 rewrites before the final product. With the sequel, Signature Ghate, I hope to have learned from the first and plan better. Many of the ideas that couldn't fit in RW can be applied to Ghate. So far I have five pages of planning.     Ghate btw, is sort of like purgatory; it's the place souls go when transitioning from one life to the next. The story will revolve around the villain spinning a web through it in attempt to find hi...

 The Problem With Printers     If you worked in an office during the 90s you probably remember the behemoths that were office printers. They occupied the same space as a table and rarely worked. It was infuriating. In fact, the movie Office Space had a whole scene where disgruntled workers were trashing that kind of equipment with bats.      We've come a long way since then; instead of raging over massive paper jams in the office or printing store, we can do that from the comfort of our own homes. Yep, I finally finished editing my book and tried to print it out only to be met with three separate error messages. The cyber apple doesn't fall far from the silicon tree.      Fortunately I got the printer open and tore the jammed paper out with pliers. Apparently a 251 page document was too much for my printer to handle. Now I've got a fully printed manuscript to give to close family and friends to read and give impressions for. Th...

 What Will the Future Look Like?     Although not a requirement, most science fiction takes place in the future. As a sci-fi writer, a large portion of what I do is based around my envisioning of the future. My novel takes place in the year 2324.     So why 2324? The year is a very important part of defining how the future will look. If you start too close to the current year you'll end up with situations like George Orwell's 1984, a dystopian social science fiction novel who's time is already long past. I wouldn't want to write a book that can easily be disproved in a few decades. A couple hundred years in the future sets a good time frame; there's a lot of time for technology and our pioneering of the universe to grow but it's not long enough that everything will change. We'll still have Earth and some semblance of modern technology.      After that's been established we decide the mood. In the same time frame a dystopian future w...

 Applying Science to Science Fiction      Fun fact about the color blue in animals: blue is not caused by pigments. Most pigments that animals exhibit on their fur etc are caused by the food they eat. Blue however is very rare in nature and more often caused by the structure of molecules and the way they reflect light. The blue morpho butterfly for example is that color because its wing scales are shaped in ridges that causes sunlight to bend in such a way that blue light, at just the right wavelength, is reflected. Blue jays' feathers are made up of light-scattering, microscopic beads spaced in a way that everything except blue light is cancelled out.The only natural blue pigments belong to obrina olivewing butterflies.     So how do we apply this to science fiction? You've probably seen blue hair in fictional works and anime. It's common yet never explained. We are left to assume the character dyed their hair. But what if it was natural?  ...

 Investing In Getting Your Book Published      I'm nearing the finish line of completing my book with 215 of 250 pages edited and have looked into publishing. There's a lot of things that need to be done and investments to be made.     First off, you need to hire an editor. A manuscript with grammatical and spelling errors is dead on arrival. It's important to get outside help; we each have biases pertaining to our own work that can blind us.     You need someone to design cover art for the book. As an artist I'm tempted to do this myself but cover artists know what sells. There are specific things that attract people to reading a book. People can and do judge a book by its cover.      Finally you need an agent to have a chance to sign on with a major publishing company. All these things take money and it's unlikely a first book will sell very well until the author is established. Most authors don't see returns u...

 Fixing Rough Drafts     At the time of writing this I am on page 202 of 250 in editing my story. I'd like to share a paragraph and how I improve it. Rough drafts are by nature clunky, repetitious and poor quality but serve the important purpose of laying the bones. Now it's time to flesh them out.       " Azalyske unveiled them in the desert bramble but now of withered brown, dry, dead vines. The sun entered the final leg of its daily toil, illuminating the sky in pink and orange. Not a cloud was to be seen. Long shadows began to creep across the thorny vines in eerily shifting nets. The air still burned from the midday sun."    Several changes need to be made. "withered brown, dry, dead vines" is redundant and causes the sentence to run on. "illuminating the sky in pink and orange" is well and good but it could be better. A clever metaphor or simile would improve it. "The air still burned from the midday sun" echos the word "sun...

 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 rock...

 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...

 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 ha...

 Introduction (Why I'm Here)     Hi, I'm Matthew. I've written a sci-fi book "Rainbows Wane", the first in my "Signature" series. It's coming along great. I have the bones laid and am in the process of fleshing out and publishing it. There's much work to be done.       You've probably heard horror stories about trying to get published like how "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole wasn't published until eleven years after his suicide in a tragic tale. Writing is filled with uncertainty and putting your heart, your work for thousands of hours, on the line. Even if you get published you're far from guaranteed to make money. But fret not, due to the age of information, times are changing. Self publishing and selling on platforms like Kindle and Amazon are viable options. There are many ways to promote your book and yourself as a writer. Such are in my process of exploration.      I am taking an advanced approach to en...