This week’s post is brief: I have 4 new notecard designs available! Tulip Trio, Back-o-dils, Spiral Shell, & Oyster. Full art is displayed in my Nature gallery (previously titled “Flora & Fruitage”), and card specs are on the For “Sail” page.
Author Archives
A Night Off the Mississippi
Last Friday, I attended the monthly meeting of the Mississippi Mud Daubers haiku group. An elder Principia friend invited me to attend, the same who treated me to the Cradle of American Haiku conference in Mineral Point, WI, last summer. She, along with two other poetically-minded (or at least interested) Principia adults, journeyed to Edwardsville, IL, for a delightful little gathering.
We met in a little cafe, about 10 poets strong–probably the biggest group they’ve had. And once again, I was the youngster. =) I just walked up to the table, and it was like I had been attending for years. Everyone was incredibly welcoming. After brief introductions, everyone shared recent news & accomplishments (eg., poems published in journals and anthologies, haiku talks given). I was asked to recite my poems in Frogpond, which were received with smiles. Then, after or over a light supper, we read and reviewed each other’s poems. Essentially, this consisted of shuffling sheets of paper along the tables without dripping water or pesto on them as you wrote comments. Lots of positive feedback and constructive criticism on all accounts, and some beautiful imagery. When the bouts of editing finished, everyone merrily dispersed.
I’d share some of the poems I took, but I plan to submit them to haiku journals, and, naturally, they will not accept previously published material, including poems posted on blogs. So stay tuned; I’ll let you know when they hit the press!
Introducing Aerth
As briefly noted last week, I’ve joined a team that is developing a board game prototype. The game, currently called Aerth: Tides of War, is a tactical conquest game; several invented cultures and civilizations compete for territory and provisions. Some of the cultures are based on historical peoples and periods, such as the Roman empire and the Northern Renaissance, while others are more mythological in their origins, based on creatures and races, such as the giants of Scandinavian folklore. Each civilization has a series of troop tiles, eg. pikemen, knights, village levy, that advance across a system of interchangeable terrain tiles rather than a board. Think of it as a world map you can rearrange.
My task is to design the various tiles. Aside from researching medieval arms, armor, attire, and architecture (the 4 A’s) to draft troop sketches, I’ve worked mostly on sketching terrains. The first batch of tiles contains 12 different terrains (6 double-sided tiles), and I’m approaching a point where I can start color images for most of the 12. Next on the roster: the first civilization troops, based on the medieval Britons.
All About August
Just for fun, I reread posts from August 2014 to see some of what artistic things I did a year ago. Some highlights: f
inishing the Alice Moran (tugboat) painting (framed & delivered Sept. 2014), planning Pandagrams, and starting an illustration commission for Do You Have a Pebble in Your Pocket?
If you’d like to revisit those posts, too, just type a keyword such as “panda” in the search bar (top left, just under the colorful Racing Pajamas header). The results page shows several posts & pages; scroll down & click “older posts” (at the bottom of the list) to see more results.
Having looked a year back, you might wonder what new things I’m doing now. First off, I’m painting a series of shells in watercolor, and I’ll likely print a couple of them as notecards. (Previews peppered about this post.) Second, I’m celebrating that we’ve gained a blog subscriber this week–hooray! Third, I’ve been recruited to do art for a board game–fun! More on that next time.
Back to the Drawing Board
Literally. After several weeks of travel and pet-sitting, I’m getting back to business (and the many artistic & literary adventures waiting asymptotically forever). And I’m in a pretty good place to resume. Formatting Cartage is much closer to completion. Though I still have several pages to revise, story text to format, & covers to design, I can anticipate the finish line. Detective Butler has gone through beta-testing & some debugging, & the initial chapters are being divided into smaller segments for release (which I expect will occur not long into August, but no guarantees). And Frogpond accepted another one of my senryu (vol. 38:2, spring/summer 2015):
