Occasionally Heated Discussion

Seanan McGuire’s Middlegame, the first volume in the “Alchemical Journeys” series, is one of my favorite novels of all time, and has been since before it was published. At Emerald City Comic Con in 2019, I brought her a tribute of Diet Dr. Pepper and was rewarded with an ARC of Middlegame, which I devoured nearly instantly, and it inspired me to start a new art piece for the first time in nearly a year. Not only that, I also felt more positively about my art in the process, as well as when I was done, than I had in years. This book is magical.

Anyway, thanks to the ARC I was able to get this illustration posted online the day the novel was officially released. (Release-day fanart is one of my favorite ways to celebrate an author’s work; I was also able to create some a few years later for a friend’s second novel.) It depicts a pivotal moment in the story, when the protagonists fully take hold of the Doctrine of Ethos for the first time, and shake the foundations of the world around them.

A few years later, the sequel, Seasonal Fears was published. The idea for this art popped into my head as I was reading it, but life got in the way and I only finished it up last month, a couple years after the book came out. Unlike the above illustration, this piece depicts a moment that never happened, as the protagonists’ plans to attend the Valentine’s Day dance were interrupted by the plot…

The third book, Tidal Creatures, came out earlier this year, and I’m already thinking about the next piece I’m going to do…

Every year, the folks at LoadingReadyRun – and a large collective of other extremely dedicated people – run Desert Bus for Hope, an annual charity stream benefiting Child’s Play and children’s hospitals across the world. A major part of the Desert Bus fundraising process is the prizes – some are raffled off as giveaways to randomly chosen donors, while others are sold in both silent and live auctions. Some of the prizes are mass-produced – there’s generally a healthy quantity of Magic: the Gathering product, for example – but a lot of them are handmade for the purpose, as part of the Desert Bus Craft-Along.

A friend of mine, who goes by iris_of_ether in most places online, is a perennial contributor to the Craft-Along, painting roleplaying miniatures and building dioramas inspired by LRR and Desert Bus. In 2021, she decided to render the whole DB crew as a multiversal group of superheroes and other characters, and when she mentioned the idea of having a file of “dossiers” for the characters, I offered to illustrate them. Little did I know what I was getting into…

After a bit more brainstorming with a couple friends who were also working on the project, we arrived at the idea of representing the dossiers as MtG tokens. Iris ended up with a list of about fifty characters she wanted to create minis for, and so I went to work…

To this day I have no idea how I produced fifty-two portraits over a few months. But here they all are. Many of the characters are taken directly from various LRR and/or Desert Bus sketches; some of them are Iris riffing off various in-jokes and references.

The lunch notes I do for my kids are the vast majority of the illustration I do on physical media, but here are the last few physical fanart pieces…

In 2016, one of my favorite authors, Seanan McGuire, moved to the Seattle area; I drew a bunch of her characters to welcome her home. Clockwise from the foreground, there’s October Daye (with the hope chest that she’s not yet sure what to make of), Verity Price (from the InCryptid series), Velveteen and one her animate toys, and Georgia Mason from the Newsflesh books (written as Mira Grant).

In 2018, Catherynne M. Valente’s novel Space Opera was published, and it blew my mind. I reviewed it here immediately after reading it, and while I might wince a little now at some of the specific phrases and comparisons I used at the time, I stand by my enthusiasm for the novel and my description of its heart and soul. Valente’s vivid imagery and descriptions stuck in my head, and before long I’d started work on this piece – Decibel Jones, the novel’s protagonist, struck by stage fright in his very first performance at the Hope and Ruin. (I was fortunate to be able to present the original to Valente when she visited Seattle later that year.)

In 2021, my dear friend Amanda Cherry published her second novel, The Dragon Stone Conspiracy, set in the universe of the Strowlers television show. Having been a beta reader for the novel, I had a rare opportunity to present her with her first piece of fanart the day the novel was released. This illustration depicts the protagonist, Pepper Jones (as portrayed in the series by Lisa Coronado), contemplating the mystical artifact which she has come into possession of, and whose power she has not yet understood.

And finally, a bit of non-literary fanart, based off a silly joke my family made: it’s Professor Mariorty!

In 2015 I did a few pieces with Copic markers on bristol board, as part of a couple gift exhanges on Reddit; I scanned them before sending them off, though it must have been with my old scanner because these scans definitely have some problems…

Then, looking at my art folder, it seems like I put the markers away for a few years… but it was more that my artistic focus was elsewhere. In 2015, my oldest child started preschool, and I started drawing notes to put into her lunches for school every day. I’ve missed a few days here and there, but overall I’ve been maintaining that tradition for her, and then for my younger two children as well, for the last nine years. Sometime in 2016 I started drawing Pokemon notes, starting from the first entry in the Pokedex (Bulbasaur!) and simply going in order. I’ve been drawing them all from reference – mostly just copying the official art from the Pokemon website.

I’m into the Paldea region at this point, and I’ll hit Pokedex number 1000 (Gholdengo!) in a couple months. They’re meant to be ephemeral art, and I haven’t scanned any of them, but I’ve occasionally taken pictures as I’ve drawn them…

One thing I’ve been doing for those notes, though – and the other kids’ notes, too – is (almost) never sketching. Just ink straight onto a blank card. So that’s why some of the proportions look a little wonky sometimes. But as an exercise in developing skill, it’s actually been really useful, because I have to think about where the lines are going to go before I draw them.

My second child liked having Pokemon notes for a while too – I started back at #1 for him – but a couple years ago he decided he’d rather have Minecraft notes (I drew him various blocks for a while), and then sometime last year he started asking for Katamari Damacy notes. Those were fun, but I ran out of cousins towards the end of last school year. So this year I’m writing him mathematical axioms and formulae illustrated with the “pi creatures” from 3Blue1Brown (one of our favorite YouTube channels), because my eight-year-old is quite possibly even a bigger nerd than I am.

For my third child, I drew some cupcakes, and then various characters from her favorite shows – Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Sailor Moon, and Gabby’s Dollhouse, which then led into a series of cartoon cats. I had a lot of fun trying to mimic styles without doing any sketches to guide me…

But in among those notes, I’ve still found time for some occasional SFF fanart, as well as a truly ridiculous project. More on that next time…

We’re up to 2007 now. Eric Burns-White wrote a modern myth explaining why a curse from Fiona, Queen of the Baristas caused Starbucks’ drip coffee to taste like crotch. Living less than a mile from the original Starbucks at the time, I felt inspired to illustrate her. (The drink she is holding is, in fact, a subtle reference to the name of the site, which thankfully is still up!)

The next year I attempted to launch another webcomic, which was where this site originally got its name. I got thirty pages done over the next year and a half before running out of steam. The comics are still archived on the site. I wish I’d planned it better, but there are elements of the story making their way into the novel project I’ve been slowly working on for the last few years…

During the comic’s run I also did some guest art for Erfworld, when its author was experimenting with carrying on the webcomic as an illustrated novel:

But my failure with the comic pretty much knocked me into an art slump for a few years, and in 2010-2011 most of my creative energies were spent trying to start a game company with friends (which also failed, after the contract for which we bothered incorporating the company to begin with never materialized). Here are a couple logo designs for Flying City Interactive, though:

The next art I have in my files is from 2012. I guess we can call it “fanart” too, since I was, and am, a pretty big fan of my wife.

And on the topic of art for family, here’s an illustration I did for our friend’s baby shower:

Also around this time, I built a sword out of acrylic, but I think that’s a story for a separate post…

In 2006 I took on a challenge to create 100 pieces of fanart, based on a list of prompts that was going around LiveJournal at the time.

I finished five of them. But I do like how some of them turned out, even now.

For the “Food” prompt, I drew Vash the Stampede from Trigun; this might have been the first big piece I did with the Copic markers I’d just gotten at SakuraCon the previous month:

For “Hours”, I drew some Phantom Tollbooth art:

For “Sixth Sense”, Professor X (and a poorly yet painstakingly rendered version of his school):

For “Months”, I did a piece based on Jonathan Coulton’s song “Womb With a View”; I gave him the original lineart as well as a print of the final version (which I colored digitally since I didn’t think I was up to that level of background work with my Copics):

And for “Black”, by a friend’s request, Yuber from Suikoden III. I had to come up with my own design for the Eightfold Rune, since it doesn’t seem to have ever been shown canonically:

A couple of pieces I did for a comic called “Zebra Girl”:

Two more Schlock Mercenary pieces: an enlistment poster for Tagon’s Toughs, and an innocent game of poker.

Fanart for an old comic called Count Your Sheep (and also Sandman since the overlap entertained me).

Keith Onzeker, from Eric Burns-White’s webcomic Gossamer Commons:

I’ve realized that there’s a lot of my art that I don’t have on this site. Let’s fix that.

As a test run, here’s a few of my older fanart pieces. Cringing at your old work means you’ve grown as an artist, right?

First, some Schlock Mercenary fanart from 2004, featuring Athena, the avatar of the starship Athens, with a teddy bear that looks suspiciously similar to a koalaesque, nigh-omnipotent AI…

Next, a few portraits of the Endless, from Sandman, also dating back to 2004. It’s sickening that the author turned out to be a serial rapist, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I never finished that series of portraits, and at this point, I never will. So it goes.

And finally, since the way I drew Dream reminded me of a certain other character, here’s (mostly) the same lineart recolored to become Jareth, the Goblin King:

That’s probably enough to test out how this looks on WordPress, at least. I’ll unearth some more ancient art next time…

I finally got around to reinstalling WordPress and updating PHP. I’ve reimported all of the previous content; however, some of the formatting is a bit weird. I’ll hopefully fix that soon.

Also, hopefully I’ll get my reading list put back together at some point! I never finished my 2023 reading list and I’m not sure where my 2023 reading ended and my 2024 reading began, but I’ll figure something out.

More soon!

Previous years\’ reading lists: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

2023 Novels:

• …

2023 Novellas:

• Lost in the Moment and Found, Seanan McGuire

Non-2023 works read in 2023:

• Artifact Space, Miles Cameron
• Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire
• Illuminations, T. Kingfisher
• The Raven and the Reindeer, T. Kingfisher
• Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire
• Down Among the Sticks and Stones, Seanan McGuire
• Beneath the Sugar Sky, Seanan McGuire
• In an Absent Dream, Seanan McGuire
• Come Tumbling Down, Seanan McGuire
• Across the Green Grass Fields, Seanan McGuire
• Where the Drowned Girls Go, Seanan McGuire
• \”Percy Jackson and the Sword of Hades\”, Rick Riordan
• \”Percy Jackson and the Singer of Apollo\”, Rick Riordan
• Parasite, Mira Grant
• Symbiont, Mira Grant
• Chimera, Mira Grant
• The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher
• The Hollow Places, T. Kingfisher (in progress)