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EmmaMaree.com

Scottish Writer of Fantasy & Sci-Fi

Art

NaNo NaNo NaNo NaNo BATTTMAAAAANNNN

SqlgNyK - Imgur

It’s Writing Wednesday! In at the last minute, to nobody’s surprise.

What I’m Writing

My last goal was: focus on outlines, which I had a lot of fun with, but other than that the past weeks haven’t been so productive. Time to change that!

1. Finish the latest ATBT polish and send it out to betas.
2. Work on the NaNoWriMo project! Aiming for 14k words total by this time next week. I’m doing a modified NaNo across multiple projects, without too much stress about hitting 50k, but I’m still going to do my best to beat my usual monthly wordcount.
3. I’m getting really behind with my year’s reading challenge, so going to try and finish 3 books this week.

What I’m Reading

A DARKER SHADE OF MAGIC was my favourite read of October. Wow, that book had *everything* I love it it. Stellar world-building, great characterisation, a really fresh, exciting plot… it was so much fun from start to finish.

My reading’s a bit more unfocussed this month: I’m reading James Oswald’s NATURAL CAUSES, which is a crime novel with a touch of the supernatural, and a nice change from my usual genres. After that I’m going to tryyy and get through RAGING STAR (Blood Red Roads series), and then THE HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS.

It’s going to be a bit of a struggle to meet my reading goal for this year, I think. I’m already past 53 books, which beats last year’s total, but I’m falling behind for my planned target of 70.

Still, at least I’m reading plenty!

Meanwhile, in articles around the web, I really enjoyed Chuck Wendig’s guide to how he writes 50k almost every month.

The Guardian had a great article about unlikeable YA protagonists,  Stacked posted about the lack of diverse YA covers, and Christa wrote an amazing blog about the writerly fear of disappearing.

Kameron Hurley delivers another of her trademark honest posts, this time about why writers give up, and why they don’t.

And there were some great posts about anxiety: Lance Rubin’s post about blocking out the noise about book sale worries, his wife Katie’s post about her anxiety while he’s on his book tour, and this post about 7 little things you didn’t realize cause anxiety.

 

What Else I’ve Been Up To

Some bits and bobs drawn during October. Wasn’t a hugely productive art month but more productive than October.

 

I’ve also been hooked on the game UNDERTALE, an RPG where you can choose to befriend and spare the monsters you face instead of fighting and killing them. It’s quite a challenging gameplay mechanic — I’m trying to spare everyone, which means the monsters are getting stronger while I hang around at level one — and the storyline is fantastic.

I won’t spoil it, but I’ll give you a few funny screenshots.

Right, back to work. NaNo waits for no one!

How are you doing? Are you taking part in NaNoWriMo this year, or just writing to your own beat?

Filed Under: Art

Late Night Art O’Clock

It’s time for another art post, because I’ve been procrastinating on writing by drawing instead. As I do.

Tonight’s objective: playing with colours, shading, and simple messy inks.

IonaandSmokeOrange
Iona (full time cat wrangler, part time witch) and Smoke (full time cat).
CaitlinandScar
Scar (fearsome battlecat, strikes fear into the heart of all her enemies) and Caitlin (rookie demon, strikes fear into no one, friend to felines).

(Iona and Caitlin are both characters from my current writing project.)

GGARRichard
Richard from the GO GET A ROOMIE webcomic. The original style experiment that sparked this colourful evening.

 

All of the above was done in Manga Studio, using a graphics tablet and Frenden’s brushes.

Filed Under: Art

My 2014 in Art!

2015 involved some really fun level-ups in my art style: experimenting with new tools, finding out what worked for me and what didn’t. Lots and lots of fun.

A lot of the time my art progress feels slow, because it’s not my ‘main’ hobby, but this was a good year for it and I’m looking forward to developing my style further in 2015!

Time for the annual improvement meme! Art Improvement Meme template is from Kamaniki.

IMPROVEMENT_MEME2014

Strange to think that as of next year, I’ll have been doing this doodling thing as a hobby for 10 years. I better kick things up a notch in the new year!

More Robot Doodles

Bacchus

Redesigned my HOWND robot (previously seen here) to fit more with his red skeleton buddy MANAHA. His fur is full of secrets. And guns.

ManahaConcept

Meanwhile, the MANAHA stands guard overly military bases and definitely doesn’t think about murder ever

don’t

be

ridiculous.

 

Turns out I really like designing robots. I should write more books with robots in them.

Inktober Robots

After my last Inktober sketch dump, guess which daftie forgot to update with the rest of her Inktober sketches? THIS DAFTIE.

I didn’t get too far with Inktober because the house move kicked into high gear half-way through, but I got a couple of cool pieces out of it. My last sketches were from ALL THE BROKEN THINGS.

All in all, this was a really fun challenge that brought out some fun aspects of my style. I hope to get more art done before the end of the year.

 

annaatbt

This piece was an experient with lineless art. Pose is entirely from a piece by Cubewatermelon, I used her tutorial too.

This lady is Anna Macfarlane, a Scottish-Indian mecha engineer. Anna and her mum both have have CMT disease, but Anna wears a powered exoskeleton to help compensate for her failing legs. She likes all night anime marathons, late night cheese on toast, and taking down monsters.

atbtmanaha

This thing’s a Manaha mecha, a military scarecrow built to look and move like a big human. It draws the enemies attacks away from the other mechs in the fleet.

The “Red Skeleton” is still in the “uncanny valley” stage of robot design, with movements that are too fast, or too jerky, or both at once.

It was originally planned to be AI-controlled, but design flaws mean that it requires a single human pilot who wears it like a suit. A weird, fleshy suit with squishy artificial muscle lining. Manahas have guns built into their forearms, and occasionally carry bigass blast shields.

I did a massive detailed sketch for this, then decided I liked the simple silhouette better.

atbthound

A much quicker, messier piece to go with my Manaha — the HOWND doggie doombot. I really need to redraw this one in a more simple style like the Manaha, I haven’t quite got it down right yet.

With the cyan Celtic spirals off, the HOWND is armed and ready for quick, stealthy scouting missions in the dark. With lights on, it’s a fancy military showpiece that looks good out on parade.

It has guns on its hackles. I tried to draw them. I TRIED.

Inktober Art: 1st — 5th October (Plus Character Design Babbling)

I’ve started the #Inktober challenge this year, an art challenge to try and complete a piece of inked art every day in October.

I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to stay on-track for this challenge with a house move on the horizon, but so far, so good!

For the first few days of the challenged, I focussed on a relatively simple character design to get used to the tools.
Anderstrappedinksonly Anderstrapped

Piece No.1: Anders the Imp

This guy is Anders, an imp who’s not convinced he’s up to the challenge of saving the world.

He’s from one of my writing projects, a middle grade (primary school/chapter novel) story where kids are trained to summon and tame demons to fight other, wilder, scarier demons trying to break their way into our world.

Do they have a choice? Not really.

Why can only kids be summoners? Reasons.

It’s terrible, awful, no good reasons, isn’t it? M-maayybe how did you guess.

(Materials used: Manga Studio art software with Frenden brushes.)

 

diegoinksweb

Piece No.2:Diego

And this is Diego, from my DIVIDE THE SKY project. I had fun nailing down this guy’s design and hairstyle, but I’d like to try colouring this piece some time.

(Materials used: Uniball Eye Rollerball pen.)

andersmewtwo_web

Piece No.3: Anders with Brush (Mewtwo Pose)/strong>

This isn’t a great piece, but I was getting used to inking with brushes again for the first time in years.

(Materials used: Indian Ink and brush.)

anderscreeping_web

Piece No.4: Anders with Brush 2

Still not great with the brushes, but stronger than before.

(Materials used: Indian Ink and brush, Uniball for the finer facial details.)

anderslines

Piece No. 5: Anders with Bandana (Line Weight Practice)

Went back to the Uniball pen, my favourite tool for the job, but figured out that I wasn’t varying my lines enough and started working on that.

(Materials used: Uniball Eye Rollerball pen.)

anderscarfweb

Piece No. 6: Anders with Scarf

Getting much more of a feel for this dude’s design now, though I’m still uncertain on his final colour scheme. Started incorporating some thicker-nibbed pens into my inks as well here.

He got the scarf as a present from his summoner, and he’s damn proud of it

(Materials used: Uniball Eye Rollerball pen, Steadler pigment pens for stronger lines.)

andersposing

Piece No. 7: Anders, Sassy Pose

One last shot at this guy before moving on to other characters. It was fun to see his design evolve through this challenge.

(Materials used: Uniball Eye Rollerball pen, Steadler pigment pens for stronger lines.)

Bonus doodle:

andersthumbsup

Character Design Ramblings

To give you an idea of how much this guy’s look has changed, here’s some original concept sketches for him.
andersoriginalconcept

The original concept: a little too spiky and unfriendly, a little too human. I spent a while trying to work out how to soften his design while bringing it closer to a horned, demonic look more fitting for an imp.

I still like how roughed-up he looks, though.

andersandkingratconcept

Anders and his ‘ascended’ (tougher, scarier, more dangerous) form King Rat. Pinning down how his design could transform into something darker was a big part of finding an Anders design I liked.

AndersconceptAndersBerserk

It also meant I could mess around digitally and find a colour scheme that linked them both, but also implied a change (and personality conflict).

This guy’s a lot of fun to work with. His story’s on the backburner just now, but I hope to get back to it soon — fiery tempered, fighty imps are tons of fun to write.

So, with that 500 words of babbling done, this is an inked-out Emma signing off.