I drew this on the floor of Geek Girl Con and didn’t get around to uploading it until today. It’s another illustration to the story I wrote in the previous Vectober piece; this one is the first few lines about everything going grey when the King died.
It could use some more work if I want to actually put together that little illustrated story, but it’s done for now.
Lounging around late at night, putting off going to bed. I load up Facebook on the tablet’s browser.
Facebook wants me to be very excited that two of my friends there are having birthdays. My timeline is full of notes about that and about things people posted on their pages wishing them a happy birthday.
I cringe a bit.
And then I go to my settings there and try to make sure Facebook will never tell anyone what my birthday is. I think it won’t. I should just delete that info from there. Oh look you can’t. I think I’ll change it to the creation date of Peganthyrus on Furrymuck.
Is this a normal reaction? I dunno. Birthdays have been weird for me ever since my father died on mine.
actually now that I think about it I’m seriously tempted to change it to that on every site that does that kind of thing. I’m close to a half century old, I think I’m allowed to start lying about my past now and then. And maybe I’ll be able to think about using it as an excuse for a party; I could use one in the middle of winter.
This past weekend I did Geek Girl Con. Two day convention center con, sit there in the dealers room selling stuff and having awkward tiny conversations all day.
Usually after working a con I am drained; all I want to do is lie around in a dark room and do nothing for a day or two. I am used to this happening to the point where I build my work schedules around it.
But this morning I woke up and the prospect of doing nothing in a dark room feels kind of appalling. What the heck. Have I finally gotten good enough at Doing A Con that I can handle a two-day con without it being the major drain on my resources it normally is?
It certainly helped that I had few worries this time; it was a relatively cheap con and local to me, so it was easy to cover my costs while making a modest profit and hopefully making a bunch of new fans. I never sat there fretting that I wouldn't make a profit; to be honest I kinda went in there not quite caring if I made much of one.
I guess I am becoming an old hand at doing cons.
Must be time to make things harder, then. Which I plan to do this year at Emerald City Comic-Con, assuming they ever get around to telling me if the group I sorta run has a couple of booths or not.
When the king died, the land died with him.
All the color went out of everything.
The Queen tried her best to keep it safe
But in the end all she could do was let it lie fallow. The peasants had gone for more colorful climes long ago. The stray sheep had grown too unruly to be worth keeping.
Time passed.
Nothing much happened.
Then it didn’t happen again.
This went on for quite some time.
One day, a young dragon came to the ruins of the castle. She was looking for a place to make her lair, and she had hopes this land would be it.
Remote. Quiet. Solitary. These were all things that suited her. And that herd of feral sheep would do just fine for her meager appetite.
Soon, she had a room high in a turret all tidied up. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for her.
—-
I said I wasn’t going to draw my own stuff for this, but this morning I had an idea for a little fairy tale that’s a metaphor for how my transition involved me rebuilding my personality from the inside out. And “ruined fairy tale castle” was what came to mind when I looked at the theme I chose for today.
Will I draw the rest? Will I figure out how much more story it needs and finish it? Who knows.
Illustrator, 1:30. Lots of use of a couple of ‘brick’ art brushes and the ‘roughen’ filter so I didn’t have to draw every little detail.
A friend tweeted about “tactical espionage djinn” scenarios, with a unit logo inspired by Metal Gear 2’s fox logo. This made me giggle so I decided to draw it instead of trying to come up with something for “contrast”.
Still listening to Kobra and the Lotus’ “High Priestess” on repeat. Because it seems to be that kind of day.
This is a straight up photo trace because I didn’t wanna have to think about anything but the materials experiment. I am not entirely happy with the likeness (especially the nose, geeze) but I spent a half hour on it and that’s enough, especially given that this particular tool was drawing a little bit offset from where I expected it to.
This “pencil” is actually a bristle brush, with some effects added:
A day late.
Drawn while listening to Kobra and the Lotus’ album “High Priestess” at high volume.
Vectober 3: Pairing. Featuring Ursula’s Biting Pear of Salamancia.
I had a lot of other stuff to do today so this one is simple and stupid. And a dumb pun on the prompt I wrote myself. But it makes me laugh.
Woulda been just under the wire for getting done on the 3rd but Illustrator crashed on me when it was like 75% done and I hadn’t saved it yet. Feh.
In which I had better fucking see that castle crumble and Utena and Anthy ride flying horses, I've been promised this since day 1.
“Outlines”, I thought. “Outlines.”
What would I draw with the exact opposite of my usual Illustrator style? I didn’t know. Then I went to Morsel for breakfast and read the next story in Michael Swanwick’s collection “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”. The title story is about a couple of conmen in a Dying Earth; Surplus (a dog-man) and Darger (a guy) run a con involving an ancient modem that lets a cyberspace demon out of the now-closed-off networks from before the Vaguely-Hinted-At Apocalypse. Swanwick clearly enjoys writing them, as he’s gone on to write two novels featuring them. Which I enjoyed a lot.
But a few stories later, we come across “An Episode of Stardust”, in which a dwarf on a train encounters a con-man who tells him the story of how he paired up with a vixen, then perpetrates a daring escape and an expensive heist. It feels like another take at the same core idea of Surplus and Darger – a charming pair of cons in a fantasy world. But it’s in a fairly ordinary modernized fantasy world, and Nat Whilk and his nameless vixen companion never really quite gel as a pair. They vanish off the back of the train into a thousand other stories we’ll never hear. If Swanwick hadn’t written “Bow-Wow” I would happily read more about their cons, but he did, and I think he’s quite right to explore the crazier world and better chemistry of Surplus and Darger than to play in pretty much the same territory as “The Iron Dragon’s Daughter” and its sequel.
Still: I liked Nat Whilk and the Vixen. Or perhaps the Vixen and Nat Whilk given that she seemed to be the brains of the operation, hiding behind his pretty-boy distraction. And they were in my head after thinking about how they failed to become quite as well-developed as S&D.
So I drew them.
Fare thee well, Nat and Vixen. I hope you have a long and rougish career swindling your way through the Twilight Realms.
Illustrator, 2h, partially because it crashed near the end, partially because I started trying to do very traditional-looking “inks” on my rough before switching to this more mannered and mechanical look.