The valley spirit does not die.

She is called the Mysterious Female.

Her gate is called the Connection

between Heaven and Earth.

Like down, or cotton—soft, soft—

yet strong and lasting as silken floss

Spinning, spinning, thin and long,

she continues on and on.

Use her power, and your work

Will not be hard.

— Tao Te Ching, chapter 6

(translation: Benjamin Hoff)

Illustrator, 3h.

Late last year I found out that the author of The Tao of Pooh had a new translation of the Tao Te Ching coming out. The unique selling point of this one is that he is trying to shorten the game of Telephone that any ancient text is subject to, by going back to the oldest versions he could find and looking into how the language had shifted over time. I hadn’t ever read the Tao Te Ching and this seemed like a good one to try, so I pre-ordered it, and promptly forgot about it.

This week, it showed up on my doorstep. A present from past me! Wednesday evening, I hit the bong and sat down with the book, intending to quietly read the whole text through with minimal reference to Hoff’s copious endnotes notes explaining both his decisions as a translator and something of what the short, oblique sentences are aiming at. But then I came to this chapter and, well, I have read a lot of books on magic, and I can tell when an author is saying “here is a helpful spirit associated with this work, you should chat with her”, and I am pretty sure that is one of those times. I got a brief flash of this image, and spent a couple hours with Illustrator instead of reading the rest of the Tao Te Ching.

High res and AI source on Patreon. Prints/shirts/wallscrolls/etc on Redbubble.

Earlier this year, A.C. Sobrero asked me to do a cover for the third book in their series, “The Luminous Fleet”. We ended up tossing a lot of email back and forth discussing the themes of the story, what kind of book covers we liked, and playing with ideas. Ultimately I wound up illustrating a scene where the commander of the invading Earth fleet talks to the Sorceror-General of the local furryish natives; I chose to do this in a style inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, since some part of the culture of the locals is inspired by Meiji-era Japan. Which was really not in the same stylistic place as a lot of the eighties SF covers we were initially looking at, but works for the story – culture clash is a major theme, and attempting to make the cover be from the non-human point of view felt like it tied into that.

Also it let me ask myself “how would Hokusai depict a floating hologram window” and any day where I get paid to ask questions like that is a pretty good day. :)

And for what it’s worth, Gary Ruddell’s cover for Bujold’s “Mirror Dance” was the particular inspiration for this overall composition; I had to pull back somewhat to get space to show something of the cultural differences with the outfits, and account for the extreme height differences (the lady was raised in low-gee, so is Very Tall), but this was the image that popped into my head as something to really push the “there is a conflict” theme when I was doing initial thumbnails.

And here is a screenshot of the Illustrator file with some of the reference material sprawled around the artboard. Not included: the books of Japanese prints I have on the shelves of my library that I flipped through and pondered.

Illustrator, 11.5 hours.

Earlier this year, I got commissioned to help with a redesign of the front page of Plush City, a Mastodon instance with a plush toy theme. Mawr was looking for a children’s book vibe; they sent me some excerpts from a few of their favorites, and I figured out ways to adapt my usual no-lines Illustrator process into something that felt a bit more like colored pencil and watercolor than impossibly perfect cyber-colors.

There is also a night-time version, that shows up depending on what time it is.

The orange/maroon elephant is a cameo of Mr. Elmer, who was my mother’s childhood toy. He sits atop my shelf now, keeping an eye on me for her.

Illustrator, 12h total, including the alternate version and a repeating background pattern and a couple other little bits that I didn’t show here.

“hey peggy would you be interested in drawing a scene from my RPG campaign where one of my characters is fighting a big nasty monster straight off an old pulp magazine while another one is winding up some serious Time Magic”

“sounds good”

Really this one didn’t change much from the initial sketch, aside from some experimentation at the very end with the palette for Howell (the four-armed wolf lady in the front). Originally she was bright red, which popped a lot more, but made her look a bit too much like a fox rather than a wolf in the commissioner’s eyes.

We tried a few palette variants before settling on the more representational grey.

It was fun to do something limited color like this, I’ve been kinda missing it with all the painterly stuff I’ve been doing lately. I should do it more.