voices in my head (or whatever)

Apropos of nothing except that my isolated at-home working process usually requires me to have some sort of white noise on in the back ground so I do not go stark raving mad, I've recently queued up TED talks on my ipod to listen to while I work (in regular rotation with varoius TV shows, news,  a variety of music, podcasts, or audio books,)

These two just have me head over heels so I just had to share.

Sarah Jones holds all the voices in her head


and

Jamila Lyiscott is articlulate.


love them. both very very much.
Okay, back to work.
(and here's a sneak peak at what that looks like:)

tentacles

saw this on io9 the other day.

flex flex twist turn.... oh swooning. how i do love cephalopods.

SFALing 2014 (NSFW)

Well, Spectrum Fantastic Art Live 3 was just the thing. No booth for me this time, I wanted the freedom to wander about about, absorbing the awesome. Which meant I came home with a lot more art this time (heheh, /WINCE). From right to left, top to bottom: Rebecca Yanovskaya, Garrett Johnson, Cynthia Sheppard, Annie Stegg (twice), Steve Argyle, Sara Richard (twice) and Wendy Martin:

SFAL 2014 art haul

Also I came home with sketchbooks from John Picacio and Bill Carmen (!!!) with WIP glimpses, notes and a little insight into all the crazy stuff that happens inside an aritst head. I'll be spending the next weeks swimming through those.

Speaking of.. here's some of what I sketched while inflight between Tucson and Kansas City:

sketchbooky pages, © galen dara 2014

Oh and late night life drawing happened, of course, (NSFW)

SFAL3 late night life drawing. © galen dara

It was just all incredibly... fantastic. Three more artists I have to make note of: Shelby Nichols with her lovely creepy darkness, Britt Snyder with his lush, buttery brush strokes, and Dan Chudzinski for his OMFG brain and bone-filled cabinet of curiosities.

One last thing: Chavant clay. Because they were handing out samples in the 3d area (where all the demo sculptors were making awesome with it). And I spent the whole flight home mushing and molding it. I need to get me some more of that.

making clay stuff on my airplane tray table. woooooo.

Making It, Locus Awards, plus other stuff

Heading off to Spectrum Fantastic Art Live this weekend and I'm really really looking forward to so many things, one of them being the Documentary Making It, about, well, making it as an illustrator. 

Then they posted their promo photo and here's what Irene Gallo noticed about it:

Post by Irene Gallo.

(A lot of really great comments on that FB thread, including mention of a lot of great women and people of color who are "making it" as successful illustrators.)

I'm still looking forward to seeing the documentary. But just, yeah.

Anyhooo... Then a few hours later the Locus Awards Finalists were announced and Congrats to all the nominees! It's a wonderful line up.

But there is this:

Dear Locus Award nominators: It’s been nine years since a female human was in the top five for Best Artist. This is, you know, nuts.
— P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) May 8, 2014

Which led Julie Dillon to spontaneously tweet a list of 14 amazing women who happen to be illustrators (she did, after all, dedicate a tumbler to the issue.)

Actually... just for my own purposes (and since it's been quite the topic today), here's Julie's tweeted list, with links:

Kirsti Wakelin
Fiona Staples
Ursula Vernon
Terese Nielsen
Lauren Bifano
Rebecca Mock
Becky Cloonan
Karla Ortiz
Victo Ngai
Tran Nguyen
Winona Nelson
Cynthia Sheppard
Audrey Benjaminsen
Lindsey Look

(And that's just scratching the surface. Just today at Tor.com new fiction went up with an illustration by Anna & Elena Balbusso. I love it when that happens. )

It's hard to know how to make note of this all and not have it come off as seeming negative about the incredible artists that are in that promo photo line-up for Making It (Andrew Bawidamann, Brian Ewing, Eric Fortune,Woodrow J. Hinton III, etc)  and nominated for the Locus Awards (Bob Eggleton, John Picacio, Shaun Tan, Charles Vess, and Michael Whelan.) They are brilliant amazing artists. It's just one of those things. That's all.

Well, I'll leave it at that. Except that I'm happy because issue 13 of Fireside Fiction went up today, including the illustration I did for Jonas David's 'Repossession', and because next week a new story by Sofia Samatar is going live over at Lackingtons, which I also got to illustrate.

illustration for Repossession, © galen dara 2014

27 things (365 days, holidays, a new year, etc...)

Oh by the way,  I had the pleasure of writing up a little bit for the 27 Good Things blog, here's my contribution (three things to read, three things to watch, three things to use.) If you are ever, ever sitting around wondering what to do with yourself, GO PERUSE THAT BLOG. It's a wealth of really cool, entertaining, and useful ideas of just really great stuff (plus, some of my dear friends Andrew Romine, Wendy N. Wagner, and Paul Weimer have also contributed and they are the coolest folk ever, put their suggestions on your list for next year and all will be well with you. I promise.)

Ah, and it's last day of 2013. There's some impulse in me to encapsulate the year neatly (one year it was 365 days of drawing) but then this morning I woke up and read my friend Gerry's post about trees breathing and now I just want to go for a hike and find beautiful trees.

not a sugar maple, but I do love a tree with some drama

However, here are a few personal highlights from 2013 (in no real order): I have run almost 900 miles this year, including a marathon with my partner and friend. One of my illustrations was accepted into the Spectrum 20 art annual. I won the Hugo in the Fan Artist category. I've made huge strides in getting a handle on record keeping and budgeting as a freelancer. As a family we have gotten a much better handle on record keeping and budgeting. In fact, for the first time in, well, quite a long time, December, usually our leanest and most difficult months, has been kind and gentle and we still have a savings.  My kid turned 10. I turned 39. A few relationships that were on the brink have made strides towards healing. I read not as many books as I was hoping, nor did I finish any personal art projects this year (2013 was the year of the client, and that has been just fine by me.) I'll keep those on the to-do list for 2014.

There's more, I'm sure, but I'll leave it at that for now, I have a few illustrations I was hoping to have finished by year's end so, yes, ducking out now to get to work.

But here, I stumbled on this by Tim Minchin yesterday and it was just what I needed. (I've struggled to like the holidays lately, this helped. Quite a bit. And all proceeds from downloads of this song for the next two months are currently being donated to the National Autism Society. Very Worthy.):



okay, that's all. See you next year.

smoke and mirrors and Vermeer

Stuck in traffic last night I happened to catch this NPR interview with illusionist Raymond Joseph Teller, where he talks the documentary Tim's Vermeer which he helped direct. It was fascinating and applicable, new discoveries about technology Vermeer may have used to achieve his almost photo-realistic paintings. (Oh all the tricks artists have up their sleeves). One excerpt that really stuck: Robert Siegel asks Teller what it said about Vermeer if he really had used these devices to aid in creating his paintings, wondering if it smacked of cheating (maybe like an athlete using steroids) and Teller responded:

"Art is not sports. Art is an activity in which one human heart communicates to the other human heart. If Vermeer used this method, which Tim believes pretty strongly he may have used, that makes Vermeer better, not worse. What this means is that Vermeer was not only someone with wonderful and beautiful ideas, and someone capable of miraculous compositions, but that he was willing to put in the incredibly intense work to translate those ideas to paint on canvas. And it's very possible that Vermeer himself may have invented this device." ~listen here

So, here's the trailer for Tim's Vermeer,

But HERE, an interview with Tim Jenison in which he goes into the process even more:

This was the quote that stuck out to me: "...too accurate to have been painted by, well, it couldn't really be seen by the human eye".  Anyways, made for a good excuse to break open my old art history books again and revisit some of these amazing paintings and still, as always, be just blow away by them. (Also made me want to re-watch Girl With a Pearl Earring.)

Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window. Johaness Vermeer, ca. 1659

horses and such

Here's what came out of my pen the other day while waiting for a doctor's appointment:

Meanwhile, Jaym Gates is on facebook posting about Clydesdales showing off their speed and ohhh I'm swooning at the massive beauties thundering away with their feathered hooves. Here's video footage (but click through the link for just some take-your-breath-away photos.)


Reminds me of the post Jaym wrote several years ago detailing specific attributes of this noble "companion and cohort in heroics."

Oh, one more nod to Jaym; a couple years ago I used a some of her prompts for my 30 character challenge. Here's my take on Storm Crow and her steed:

Meanwhile I'm working up a little something for Kevin Hearn that has me playing with horses again and I'm just giddy.

Just feeling all tender and amazed about horses lately. That's all. 

Brian & Wendy Froud

Because Brian and Wendy are the guests of honor at next year's Illustration Masters Class.  And Films such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth were huge creative inspirations growing up. Here's an excerpt from an article written about Brian his involvement in those two movies:

"'The irony of working on The Dark Crystal was that I had moved to the country to allow my work to blossom, and here I was in New York. And I thought there's something wrong with this picture!' But Brian threw himself into the project, and at the initial creative meetings he and others working on the film discussed creatures and how they might act, what their personalities would be and so on. It was during this time that Brian met Wendy, who had been hired for her skills as a doll maker. Together they refined the initial prototypes of the puppets before flying back to London to be near Jim Henson....

It was at a screening of The Dark Crystal in San Francisco that Brian and Jim Henson's vow never to make another film was forgotten. 'We were sitting in the back of a limo, having drunk a bit too much wine, and he said 'shall we do another one?'and I said 'oh, why not.' He asked if I had any ideas and I said not really so he suggested Native American Indians but I didn't really know anything about them so I said what about goblins? He liked the idea, but I said I want to put live people in it this time. Immediately I had this flash of an image of a baby surrounded by goblins.'
Jim asked Brian what the story was, but he didn't know. All he could think of was of a labyrinth, which is not only a physical conundrum but also a metaphor for many things." ~interview with Guy Cracknell

and

divergent styles etc etc etc

Two entirely different illustrations I did last month for two entirely different clients.

1)  This piece for the hard sf story "Catch a Fallen Star" by Jennifer Campbell-Hicks for Fireside Fiction Magazine:

2) This piece to accompany an essay about theodicy, "Arrayed in Silence I gave Him Nothing" by Jacob Baker for Sunstone Magazine:

To me, it looks like to totally different artists did these two pieces. What does that say about me? I don't know and I'm putting that on a back shelf to think about some other time.

Now here's a few really inspiring things cool people have shared the past week or so:

~An artist and her 4 yr old collaborate on artwork together.
~(Which reminds me of when my kid and I did this kind of stuff together.)
~ Examples of some of the best street art of 2012.
~These parents convincing their kids that their toy dinosaurs come alive at night.
~Russian graffiti body artist, Znag, and his mind blowing tattoo work.

habits and rituals.

 Just stumbled across this article wherein Oliver Burkeman simmers Daily Rituals by Mason Currey into 6 repeated themes. FASCINATING STUFF.  I must get that book.  Anyhow, I had to make a note of Oliver's distillation  because no.6, Learn To Work Anywhere, is the story of my life. I'm writing this while camped out in the corner of my local skating rink, plugged into the only available electrical outlet.

Getting work done while the kid glow skates to his heart's content.

(Why did I not come here to work on Glitter & Mayhem? Why?)

odd doooodles (must do)

The other day Wendy N. Wagner shared an essay that hit all sorts of home-runs for me.  Everybody's Free (To Wear Pyjamas) by Liz Kessler.

an excerpt:

"Enjoy the freedom and independence of being unpublished. Oh never mind; you will not 
understand the freedom and independence of being unpublished until you get a book deal. 
But trust me, in ten years you’ll look back at those early notebooks and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much autonomy you enjoyed and how many long, lazy days you were free to spending working on a single chapter.

Your handwriting is not as bad as you imagine...

 

Write one sentence every day that excites you." ~read more.

It made me miss my sketchbooks and notebooks and spending time filling pages full of odd doodles and notes and mixed media experiments  just to get the crazy stuff out of my head.  I don't keep a regular sketchbook anymore. Which makes me a bit sad. So, inspired by this post. I picked up pen and paper yesterday and for an hour I doodled crazy stuff, just like I used to. Gonna try and do this every day.  Thank you Wendy. And Liz.

sept 2013 odd doodle happened.

The haters in your head

Yes. This. All of it. 
"One voice telling me 'your not interesting enough" and another voice telling me 'you're not honest enough'...If I'm going to be honest, I haven't figured it out. At all. So I guess I'm just gonna throw this out there, see if any of you have similar experiences."

Thank you Jay. 

Amanda Palmer, on creative method and Neil's new book. etc.

Amanda Palmer wrote a bit about how her and Neil are different in their creative methods, and a whole lot of other really amazing stuff.  (Putting this here so I can find it easily in the future because it needs to be read and re-read and re-read etc).

"we start off with all these fresh ingredients, recognizable (a heart, a finger, an eyeball, a glass of wine) and we throw them in the art-blender. i only let things mix very slightly. i keep my blender on 2 or 3. you can recognize the component parts: in the final art-soup, the finger might be severed and mangled, but you can peer into your bowl and see that it’s a finger, floating there, all human and bloody and finger-y. neil puts his art-blender on 10. you wind up with a fantastic purée, but often you have no fucking idea where the experiences of his life wound up in the mix of his final product. if you see a finger, it’s not recognizable as a human one. and that’s part of what makes Neil Gaiman (capital N and G) work. and, i’d argue, my choice to dial my art-blender down from a 5 to a 2 or 3 over the past few years, as i write more and more “direct” songs…i don’t know, it may be part of what i’ve needed to do to survive as an artist (or more likely, as a human).

we do these things instinctively, i think." ~read more.

God I love her. 

Also, I've been looking at a lot of Yoshitaka Amano, trying to find some inspiration lately. LOVE this piece, 

salamander, by yoshitaka amano.

[Women in Genre, Day 26]

So, Haralambi Markov (aka Harry Markov) has been writing up a series about Women In Genre (you really should go peruse those posts, they are packed full WUNDERBAR.) I was astonished and delighted to discover today that I get a place in this series: Galen Dara and Visions from Beyond. 

Harry says the nicest things, I'll be blushing and fluttery all day.  Stuff like:

"I can best describe her work with the words stylized melancholy, because her illustrations carry an air of sadness and possess a wilting beauty with gothic undertones."

and

 "To a point, I can’t help but be reminded of Stephanie Piu-Mun Law... where Piu-Mun Law draws from nature and light, Dara seeks out the less savory and wholesome in her work, which results in captivating scenes where the outlandish and the bizarre intermingle to breed absurd worlds with wicked inhabitants." 

Thank you Harry! Many blessings from the dark ones upon your head.

*******

And now, just because,  here's some Awesomeness I stumbled on today:
[Egg] by Junko Oki:

That gives me all sorts of shivers of delight. And Junko is amazing, just check out her pintrest boards!

Okay, now, back to work, breeding absurd and wicked things... mwuahahah!

Fully Dressed Superheroines.

An exercise in character design by comic artist Mike Lundsford.

"Point of this: An exercise in character design, attempting to clothe the heroines nearly all the way and not making them painted-on, while still keeping the look of their original costumes in some way... NOT the point of this: some moral code I’m trying to push on you" ~Mike.

(check out the full line up.) 
Very Very Very applicable to things I am interested in. Speaking of which, found this one recently on pinterest:

(wish I had a source for this one, i'm not sure where she originated :-/ )

Makes me want to put on gauntlets and play with swords again, myself :)

photo session at IMC 2012

Okay, that's all for now. Back to work.

happy happy happy.

This, by Chuck Wendig, (also applicable to visual artists):

 

Chuck goes on to expand further, but here, two teaser quotes:

"It’s a cool moment where by creating art with no limits or no pressure and with jizz-buckets of fun you still managed to do something interesting. Something different. Carry that into your writing. Leap into the beyond. Fingerpaint like a boss. Remove the pressure of quality and give yourself permission to suck." 

 and

"Failure is illuminating. It reveals every broken board beneath our feet, every crack in the wall, every pothole in the road. Do not shun failure. High-five it. Hug it. Engage in lusty pawing with it. Failure means you’re doing."

Go read the rest.

Now, your entertainment, the mummified heart of Auguste Delagrance.  (!!!)

having it all. or not.

Yesterday I had a good conversation with a friend. About living the creative life, day job vs creative work, when creative work is your day job, time management, etc. What sparked the conversation was an Onion article; Find the Thing You Are Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life. The Onion did what it does best; using satire to push real buttons. This one pushed a lot of my buttons. (That's a good thing, regardless of your opinion about the article, having your buttons pushed is a good thing.)

This morning, Amy Sundberg wrote a post along the same theme. But not satire, simply real life situations and facts:  Nobody Can Have It All. An excerpt:

"It’s so much sexier to talk about priorities in terms of what you can accomplish with them, as opposed to what you have to give up. But the accomplishment and sacrifice come together... Priorities are set based on how much we want something, but they are also set based on what we’re willing to do without. You’re willing to not have much of a normal social life? Then you can be a concert pianist. You’re willing to not see your kids very often? Then you can be a high-powered CEO. Most of us don’t have choices that are quite as extreme, but the core principle remains the same." ~read more 

Finding what works. What you want. What you have control over. What you are willing (and able) to sacrifice.  Right now, in your current situation. (It's what I'm trying to do.)

Anyhow. Here are three random cool things that actually do relate to sacrifices and priorities, but mostly they made me tingle with delight just a bit. 

1) Onna-Bugeisha: Japan, 19th Century. “An onna-bugeisha (女武芸者) was a type of female warrior belonging to the Japanese upper class." (read more) 

3) Filipina actor, Marian Rivera as the Visayan warrior, Amaya welding her sword for justice. (read more) 

and 3) And the latest Star Trek trailer. (Evil evil Benedict Cumberbatch!)

pretty pinterest (plus viewer data algorthithms, plagiarism etc)

When buzz about pinterest first hit my ears it was in the form of housewives giddy over finding cool recipes, cleaning tips, crafty ideas, and exercise routines to obtain the perfect buttocks.  Not really my thing.

Then I got involved in the Geek Love anthology project and Shanna Germain invited me to begin pinning to the group boards there and Oh...! a whole new point to these pretty pins revealed itself. I joined up and jumped in and eventually began to make my own boards. (Shanna recently wrote here and here about creatives using pinterest for inspiration, collaboration, etc.) I used pinterest for collaboration again when I started work on the Glitter and Mayhem cover, Creating a joint pinterest board where John Kilma, Lynn Thomas and I could throw shiny stuff at each other as the anthology took shape.

Now let me combine that with something else that's in the back of my mind and I think it is connected: I'm thinking about the way we create. The rubbing of elbows, the sharing of ideas, the give and take (both with other artists as well as with our audiences.) We don't create in a vacuum and social media increases the white noise around your creation. I observe some illustrations I've done that I love with all my heart get very little response while others that I'm more ambivalent about get much more fanfare. It has me thinking of the way Netflix is using viewer data and algorithms to give viewers 'exactly what they want' and ereaders are tracking audience reading trends to 'help authors create even better books'. There's no judgement there, just something I think about. For someone trying to make a living at this, creating work that get's good public reactions is pretty important. On a slightly different track, here's a rather sobering and controversial foray into artistic plagiarism in the Heavy Metal art scene. Not sure how much that applies to the topic at hand, but it's on my mind quite a bit lately: I use inspiration and reference material from a wide assortment of places but want to make sure that the end creation is authentically mine and could never be accused of plagiarism.

Anyhow, back to pinterest. Yes, I do love it! All the pretty pretty things I can find there. Inspiration, new discoveries, other people's variations on similar ideas, a wider visual world all nice and neatly organized. (Sort of.) And yeah... I am even thinking of starting a board for recipies I want to try.

Meanwhile, here! Two things found just this morning on pinterest:

1) A new artist I am swooning over. Full Mano, embroiderer artist working in Paris. (More here.):

Embroidery altered photo by Full Mano

and 2) More delightful art from Ann Siems:

Messengers by Ann Siems.

Okay, that's all. Back to other stuff.

The Helsinki Bus Station Theory.

Originally theorized by photographer Arno Minkkinen in 2004, brought back to light by Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian last month.

It goes as follows:

"There are two dozen platforms, Minkkinen explains, from each of which several different bus lines depart. Thereafter, for a kilometre or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops. "Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer," Minkkinen says. You pick a career direction – maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes – and set off. Three stops later, you've got a nascent body of work. "You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn." Penn's bus, it turns out, was on the same route. Annoyed to have been following someone else's path, "you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform". Three years later, something similar happens. "This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others." What's the answer? "It's simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus." ~ read more 

I thought that was pretty interesting advice.

Now, for your entertainment, here's one of the internal illustrations I created for Stephen Carter's novel The Hand of Glory:

a job you will love

Erika tweeted this one to me the other day. Most awesome.
Thank you Gavin Aung Than for nailing it so well.
(click on the image for a larger view)