Joy

This is a photo of Jet Li, and it shows more of the true person he is, rather than the martial arts hero/anti-hero he portrays in his movies.  He is a Buddhist and you wonder how martial arts can coincide with such a peaceful interior. Many people are under the impression martial arts like the Wushu Kung Fu he practices, is based on violence. That could not be further than the truth.  Martial arts teach discipline, self confidence and get you in the best shape of your life.
When I was much younger, I took Karate and it is an experience I will always treasure.  But, I digress. This isn't about me, nor is it really about Jet Li. He was just the subject for another art piece.

I wanted a photo showing utter joy and peace, and I think this one qualifies.  Teeth can be tough to draw. They can look like a picket fence, so I seriously considered NOT doing this piece, but then the challenge MADE me reconsider.  I love challenges. I'm always choosing reference photos where the person is deep in shadow. They are so much harder to capture, hence, the challenge.  I welcome any non-flaming crits.  If you're interested, more of my art is on deviantart.com under jagespages.

File 13

Every artist has one:  the dreaded FILE THIRTEEN!  Where you get an idea in your head and you try to transfer it to that awful empty white page of drawing paper. As you can see from the drawing above.  See where it was folded and tossed into File 13?  I was working on just the initial concept, and, as often happens, when you draw freehand, something goes amiss. Look at the guy's head behind the injured front guy.  His head is too BIG!  This was a concept of a guardian angle catching someone and holding them up, but went awry and ended up in FILE 13. Sigh.  For every art piece that actually makes it past the toughest critic in the Universe:  ME, there are pieces like this one that get crumpled into a little ball and, hopefully, I get two points as I toss it in the trash. Uh-oh. I gave away the secret. File 13 is the trash can in my room.

But, take heart, all you beginning artists out there. Masterpieces await!  You just have to keep on trying and giving it your all. And the artist Muse will reward you.

I love when the Universe gives you a smack to the back of your head and brings you back to reality.  I consider myself a good artist, but, after viewing the art of some of the artists on deviantart.com, I have been humbled.  But this doesn't mean I'm quitting. No, I just came to the realization that I need to draw, paint and learn how to do amazing graphics more.  Instead of being depressed by the talent, I want to improve mine. So, thanks to all the artists on this site and out there in the artistic world who are so much better than I am. You give me goals to set and reach. You give me aspirations as well as inspirations!  Funny how that works! 

I may never achieve their quality, but I know I can improve as long as I don't give up.  And I WILL NOT GIVE UP!  I am returning to my roots since the first portraits I did were in charcoal. I love to combine charcoal's stark blacks, grays and whites with colored pencil just for the eyes of my subject.  I will submit one next time. Until then, this is Dean Winchester and Castiel, the "angel of the Lord" done by .5 mechanical pencil.  I liked the deep shadow since it was a challenge to still find the face underneath.

Last post I wanted to show the image of the “before” cover to the first book, A Siruis Condition. I have since downloaded Irfanview to help with the jpegs and hope to accomplish it this time.  I guess this will be a learning process for me in how things work, since this is my first blog.

To see the “after” cover, you can go to amazon.com and look up the book Swagger Vasa Chronicles under the Kindle selections.  As to how it changed?  I started out with an original piece of art.  I used colored pencils and tried to make Swagger look as if he is looking up into the night sky.  Actually, creating the cover, proved relatively easy. I have Printshop graphics program. I scanned in the original art, used the cropping tool to outline Swagger’s head, but I wanted him to blend better and not have the look of a picture placed on top of a starscape, so I applied the special effect called “water”.  It does remove part of the picture but allows the background to bleed through, so it looked like it was IN the stars.  I searched the web and found a copyright free photo of the constellation Orion, where Sirius is located.  With a series of layering, I scanned in the RAV ship, applying “radiant glow” to the engines.  The lettering was put on last.  So, I call my cover a mixture of original artwork combined with digital enhancement.

I liked the results, but I have a co-author who did not like it, hence the change in the original art of Swagger.  I have to admit, the second version is better.  Sigh.  You find out, when you’re an artist, you have to learn to let go of pieces you’ve spent hours creating.  There might be just a small “something” wrong, but that piece gets deleted or sent to File 13.  Art, especially for book covers like ours, is an on-going process. Someday, I’m going to upgrade to Photoshop and then the learning curve will extend to infinity and beyond!

This is my first post of 2012. I won't be able to provide photos to serve as visual aids since I am still figuring out the logistics of my new Acer computer.  Swagger Vasa covers consist of original drawings of the characters and then I add digital effects and backgrounds.  In book one, A Siruis Condition, he started out as a guy glancing up supposedly at the stars since he is in a field of stars with the constellation Orion featured, but he evolved into an entirely different person. I get input from Karen, the co-author and she didn't like the first draft of Swagger. On the cover are Flynn, the loveable yet deadly salvager and Colby Tamerlane, the military colonel, two people who become important cogs in Swagger's life.  Each book cover features one or more of the other central characters.

Karen and I found that if we write the books in sequence, it's like when they film a movie series.  You can maintain continuity and insert foreshadowing.  It works quite well. We don't go by outlines as I find them stifling, but we do take copious notes and bounce ideas off each other.

Karen is the more intuitive and logical side of the team, whereas I take off into flights of fancy and have to be reeled in.  I handle most of the fighting scenes since I have background in martial arts such as karate and kung fu.  We keep the martial arts as a sideline.  Swagger is a bounty hunter after all, but it is his personality and the people he influences and that influence him that make up most of the stories. Plus the trouble the man gets into no matter where he goes.

We try to create characters the readers care about and we can really mess with their heads by convoluting the plots in that people you might think are the bad guys aren't and people you think are on the good side turn out not to be.  We pride outselves on being tricksters when it comes to mixing plot ideas so that it never gets boring.

Good news!  Our first book is selling on amazon.com, a modest beginning, but we have a really good feeling it will take off this year.  When it does, one of the things I want to buy with my share of the royalties is Photoshop.  That will help me tremendously and also I want to take lessons on how to download photos.  I thought I had it worked out, but, alas, I still cannot provide photos.

Stay tuned for more about the creating process.  Oh...I feel the Muse returning and that means I need to go edit book three.

The Birth of Swagger Vasa

Okay, so I always thought having a blog might be pretentious, but that was before I came to the realization I actually have something to say.  I am an artist and writer.  I have seen my dream of publishing my first book come true. It came about by an insidious means.  I started out writing fan fiction on fanfiction.net.  I chose Star Wars, to me the most fearsome media, because Star Wars fans are sticklers for details. Frankly, the tech frightened me and then I started reading other stories and I found out, a good story embodies a good story with characters the reader cares about and you can have all the technology and battles with lightsabers and blasters you want and it still doesn’t net you reviews.  I was lucky and honored to receive positive reviews.

I created an original character called Swagger Vasa—actually a pretty nasty individual, a bounty hunter that took the heads of his prey and had no friends other than one called Kit Flynn.  I found reviews coming my way that begged me to have more stories about Swagger and I obliged until I had a cult following—small, but avid.  And then, when it looked like Swagger had seen his day because I just could not think of anymore stories to write for Star Wars that could include him, people gave me the idea of taking him mainstream.  Thus, by a stroke of fate, Swagger Vasa was born.

I now can proudly say Swagger Vase Chronicles Book One A Sirius Condition, co-written by Karen Howard who is my roommate and BFF has been published on amazon.com kindle.  How many will there be?  Well, we have enough material right now for books two and three which we are in the process of doing final edits and book four which is already close to one hundred pages.  EIGHT?!  Possible. Probable.

The process of changing Swagger to mainstream, changing his world from Star Wars to another from our own imaginations and creating a whole crew, background and twisting, convoluted plots, has been the biggest challenge, but I think we have succeeded. Amazon.com is featuring the first five chapters for free so I urge anybody reading this to take a peek.

And this is it for my first posting.  In my next, I will discuss how the art for the covers changed as well as the character and my other fan fiction endeavors.