What are you writing about now?

I've tested out an idea on how to turn the B&W heraldic badge illustrations into coloured ones. I used coloured pencils and placed the paper on a slightly woodgrain-textured surface. What do you think?

david_wendelken said:

I've tested out an idea on how to turn the B&W heraldic badge illustrations into coloured ones. I used coloured pencils and placed the paper on a slightly woodgrain-textured surface. What do you think?

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For myself, I think each could work well depending on the context and what they represent. Seriously, I love their colors and the patterns chosen. Makes it very hard to decide which I like best. 😂

Converted my digital illustrations to color by printing them out, using colored pencils, then scanning them back in and turning the backgrounds transparent. I'm getting the hang of a number of basic photoshop techniques. All the repetitive work on one image file after another is really helping me to lock in the skills.

I'll post photos of some of the pages in the morning.

Here are some photos of some pages with coloured digital illustrations on them. The individual heraldic badges are used throughout the book as chapter headers and partial page fillers.

I've also included the planned list of (not yet done but planned) hand-printed illustrations to be tipped into the book.

Hope you enjoy them!

I've got to go through the copy I already printed out on good paper and make sure there aren't any boo-boos in it. Then I'll print two new copies with the coloured illustrations in them to take to my bookbinding class next week.

Once that's done, I'll go back to the enameling for the book cover!

My favorites of these are the Rohirrim banner, the Elven phrases list and the conversation between apparently Sauron and one of his henchmen. "What?!"
🤣
Killed me.

WatcherWraith said:

My favorites of these are the Rohirrim banner, the Elven phrases list and the conversation between apparently Sauron and one of his henchmen. "What?!"
🤣
Killed me.

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That would be funny! It's not Sauron, it's a Sauronic spymaster interrogating an agent. Placement of banners above one another was an important marker of status, so he would find that exceptionally surprising. Especially as he didn't think she was in charge of any realm in the first place. (She's not, it's a ruse.)

PS, the elven phrase list illustration actually means "Words in my Tongue (I..e, Language)"

Some examples of my work so far(most recent work, I mean):

That's a lot of building blocks for making a story out of! My only caution is that few people really know what their breaking point is until they are faced with it. A lot more think they do, but they may well be wrong.

I know, but the (unstated) does not actually mean "unstated and kept to myself", but "unstated and unknown". Thank you, though! :]
The "stated" represents ideas and beliefs the characters hold, while the other represents what they hold most deeply and may not know or do not know the extent of until the time comes.

WatcherWraith said:

Some examples of my work so far(most recent work, I mean):


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I really like this stated vs unstated concept. I find that what a character says and does, vs what they actually believe, are often completely different things.

Same here. Especially in Silm, where this resulted in many miscommunications and later tragedies.

Maedhros_Nelyafinwë said:

I really like this stated vs unstated concept. I find that what a character says and does, vs what they actually believe, are often completely different things.

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Thank you :]
Our natures are very complicated, and this will play into my story enormously.

Tyelkormo the Fair said:

Same here. Especially in Silm, where this resulted in many miscommunications and later tragedies.

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*Sniffs a lot at all the memories* 😭

WatcherWraith said:

*Sniffs a lot at all the memories* 😭

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The Silmarillion: The one where no one went to therapy.

Printing out copy one of the color image version of my book. I'll get the second one done in the next two days. Tomorrow I'll be enamelling.

Thanks to some down time at work, I'm opening up my book for the first time since... January 11th, yikes! I hope to make a bit of progress at least before my summer class starts up in May. But that means I basically have to reread all my lore and recent developments because I forget it all if it's been a long time.

Maedhros_Nelyafinwë said:

Thanks to some down time at work, I'm opening up my book for the first time since... January 11th, yikes! I hope to make a bit of progress at least before my summer class starts up in May. But that means I basically have to reread all my lore and recent developments because I forget it all if it's been a long time.

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One of the nifty things about using the method I learned from FabulaDeck.com is that it turns my unstructured ideas into a list of "specific things to write". That's really helpful when I have to set my work aside for a while or am at a loss for what to work on next. I just quickly scan my to-do list and write what comes to mind. I don't have to remember everything to write something I'll want to keep.

david_wendelken said:

One of the nifty things about using the method I learned from FabulaDeck.com is that it turns my unstructured ideas into a list of "specific things to write". That's really helpful when I have to set my work aside for a while or am at a loss for what to work on next. I just quickly scan my to-do list and write what comes to mind. I don't have to remember everything to write something I'll want to keep.

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That's kind of what I do already; I tend to write nonlinearly, just writing whatever scenes are most interesting to me first. But this is an original fantasy, and whenever I work on it I'm adding to and refining my world's history and magic system. So with over 3 months of not working on my book, I forget all the newer lore additions, and I need to have it fresh in my memory to keep it all consistent as I'm working.

I'm starting the composition for one of the planned hand-drawn, hand-printed illustrations. I'm not skilled or quick at drawing, so I try to work to my strengths when deciding how to compose a drawing. I make a collage from photos or digital drawings to decide "what elements go where?".

Once I'm ready with the composition, I work out the details I want to include in the hand-drawn elements. These might include lighting, decorative design elements on the fabric, the type of leaves or bark, or board wood grain or decorative carvings, jewelry, etc. Then I do the painfully hard (for me at my current level of skill) hand-drawing.

In this illustration, I'll be working with the following (with mandatory elements starting with an asterisk and in bold):

• *bare-backed elven maid, a warrior, facing away. She's just removed her hauberk and padded gambeson in preparation to don a more comfortable garment. In this case, she's stretching some muscles between garments.
• *nasty, evil-looking scars. The scars are not randomly placed. They are created in an intentional pattern illustrating the lineage and names of the 4 Mumakani warriors and 2 dark priests she killed in the process of her subjugation, along with some emblems appropriate to a dark religion. Ground-up dust from the bodies of the undead kings of the Mumakani is ritually worked into the scars to serve 3 purposes: it darkens the scars, it raises them up from the normal surface of the skin, and (along with some dread sorcery) it prevents them from fading away as part of an elf's normal healing process.
• a wooden talan, or flet (i.e., a platform) in a mallorn tree. It could be illustrated with boards, or just an outline showing the edge, or just left for the reader to imagine (given the scene described in the book).
• A mallorn tree trunk or major branch with leaves in the foreground.
• Mallorn trees in the background.
• The night sky.
• *A lantern or cooking fire (or just the light from it off-camera, as it were).

It would be great to have an actual model pose for me, but sadly, the beautiful maiden I married has no interest in posing for hours.
In this case, I found an awesome photo that I can use as an anatomy reference in place of a live model posing for me. I don't have the skill to draw someone "just from my imagination." Maybe one day, but not this day! It took a year and a half to find a suitable photo to use as a reference. The bonus is that it's better than I imagined.

I tried 6 different placements for the figure. 5 had the figure much smaller, only taking up about 1/4th of the available space (6" wide by 8.25" tall). I tried the figure in each of the 4 corners and also the center of the drawing. The sixth attempt enlarged the figure to fill the available space.

I chose to go with the large figure option filling the available space. In fact, I decided to have the lady's hair extend past the allotted space on the page. The drawing will be printed on a separate piece of paper and glued along the top edge to the book page reserved for it. The gluing-in process is referred to as "tipping in" the image.

Narratively, the focus is on this lady, her personality, and her very scarred back. She and two others have just left the border and stopped overnight at a talan halfway to Caras Galadhon. They are changing out of their armour into something more comfortable for the evening since they are now in the Naith of Lorien, and thus they are in a reasonably secure place.

I liked this pose because it's athletic instead of static, which better fits the lady's personality. She *wants* the man she views as a potential mate to find out about her scars early on - there's no desire on her part to find out it's a deal breaker after a courtship. To her mind, that's an all-too-likely scenario, in fact, an almost certain one. So her stretching serves a purpose; it is to catch his eye, in addition to stretching muscles to relax them after wearing armour all day on a long march. She's facing away from him. She does not want to see disgust on his face and does not wish to embarrass him by witnessing such a reaction.

The lighting source on the reference photo will work; I'll just need to accentuate it a bit. I think I'll just use the suggestion of boards on the talan surface rather than draw them in detail. She can be positioned at the edge of the talan so they'll drop out of the picture just past her knees.

It's nighttime, so the detail on nearby trees can be very sparse and out of focus. I don't think I'll need a night sky at all or any tree parts in the foreground in this composition.

I just made six copies of the image. I'm going to sketch the edge of the talan and make the suggestion of the boards. I need to decide in which direction I want the boards to run lengthwise. Pure horizontal would be neutral. Pure vertical is the 2nd option. The other 4 options would be at 33 or 66 degree angles upwards to the left or to the right. If I drew in the boards in detail I think it might matter a lot. It's possible that with just the suggestion of the board structure it won't. But this is a quick way for me to find out.

I'm working on two other illustrations at the moment. One will be a high-level map of NW Middle-earth marked with places mentioned in the text. It will be 6" wide by 8 1/4" tall. The other is a fold-out map of Lorien and environs. It will be 16 1/2" wide by 12" tall. I plan to cover the Redhorn pass to the east bank of the Anduin and however far north and south I need to go to maintain proper proportions. I love the ICE map of Lorien but it's actually wrong as far as the book goes, it's too far north, so back to the Professor's map and description I have to go.

I had to drop the resolution of the photo by a massive amount and cut the size of the photo to 25% scale to fit within the size limitations on this site, so rest assured I have a better detailed reference photo to work from. I like the contrast of the hand-printed illustration paper being a different colour than the book pages. It pops off the page a bit.

It sounds so involved! I applaud the amount of thought going into this illustration and hope its significance will be understood by the readers! :]