all the moving parts and LonCon prep

Kali willing, this is what my space in the LonCon3 art show will look like in about three weeks:

(Many thank to Lee Moyer and Julie Dillon for letting me pick their brilliant brains as I planned it out.)

A variety of fine art prints and stretched canvases (my first time trying the latter):

prepping for hanging.

packaged for shipping

With the arrival of new business cards, postcards and a stack of posters for the printshop and artist in residence table, most of the moving parts for this little venture have fallen into place. I may yet have a chance to catch up on some sleep before I get on the plane.

But first, I need to finish a few illustrations. Here's a glimpse:

and

LonCon Schedule

In exactly one month  I'll be setting up my artist table in London at the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention.  Here's the basic rundown of my schedule there:

Artist in Residence
Thursday 8/14 from 15:00 - 16:30
I'll be working in my sketchbook and have prints for sale in the artist alley. Come by and say hello! 

Gala Art Show Opening and Book Launch
Thursday 8/14 16:30 - 18:00
The gala opening of the Art Show is sponsored by Titan Books and features the launch of Jim Burns' Hyperluminal as well as a joint signing by all of Titan's attending artists and a chance to meet many of the other artists whose work is on show.
Chris Achilleos , Jim Burns, Chris Foss , Fred Gambino, John Harris , Ian Miller, (and me. etc)

 
The Future of Professional Artists
Thursday 8/14 19:00 - 20:00
The days of a healthy living from paperback cover commissions are gone. As professional artists sustain their careers by diversifying, selling directly through their websites, and crowdsourcing their personal projects, what does the future hold?
Jane Frank (M) , Galen Dara,  Danny Flynn, Chris Moore, Steve Crisp

Meet the Artists
Friday 8/15 12:00 - 13:30
Visit the Art Show and meet our attending artists - who will be available by their work to talk, explain and answer questions.

Exquisite Corpse
Friday 8/15 13:30 - 15:00
The successor to "Duelling Easels" as our artists draw - and then take over each other's pieces to continue the work! Who knows what they'll end up with....
Galen Dara (M) , Anke Eissmann, Smuzz

Open Sketch Class
Saturday 8/16 15:00 - 17:00
Work alongside our professional artists - or just come to watch, learn and enjoy - in this open sketch class.
Galen Dara (M), Smuzz, Eira Short

A Touch of the Macabre
Sunday 8/17 15:00 - 16:30
Somewhere between fantasy and horror lies the macabre, the eerie, the noir. What is it about certain imagery that tugs at the psyche in such a disturbing way?
Ellen Datlow (M), Les Edwards, Galen Dara , Irene Gallo


***** 

Looking forward to all of it! Hope to see you there!

 Okay, back to work and here's a glimpse of what that looks like today:

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:)

✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ Glitter & Mayhem ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧

Presenting the cover of Glitter & Mayhem!

(✧ I'll be cleaning sparkles out of my studio for a long while ✧)

Cover art and design by me :)

A little while ago Lynn M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas and John Klima asked if I might possibly be interested in doing some work for an anthology they were cooking up in partnership with Apex Publishing. My answer was OMG YES!! 

✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧

Glitter & Mayhem

"Step behind the velvet rope of these fabulous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror tales of roller rinks, nightclubs, glam aliens, party monsters, drugs, sex, glitter, and debauchery. Dance through nightclubs, roller derby with cryptids and aliens, be seduced by otherworldly creatures, and ingest cocktails that will alter your existence forever.

Over 120,000 words of brand new fiction from some of the best writers in the business are ready to bring you the most glamorous parties in the multiverse. "

✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧

Glitter & Mayhem is available for pre-order plus stay tuned for information about the launch party at WorldCon where the editors and I will be signing books.

))✧SQUEEE✧((

Meanwhile, here's some work-in-progress glimpses into creating the cover. This is the preliminary sketch we released as a sneak peak for the Kickstarter:

preliminary cover sketch, by Galen Dara

The nature of our cyboristic lead jammer's roller gear took some work. Simple skates just didn't seem right. Two pieces of reference I leaned heavily on were these (rather incredible) modern chariot skates and these (completely mind boggling) circa 1910 roller skates.

click for larger view

Her hair was also something I had to play around with quite a bit to get the right feel. I tried tentacles (couldn't help myself) and cable wires, but soon realized such elaborate coiffures distracted from the whole of the piece. A little experimenting revealed she had a taste for short red hair.

click for larger view

Etc etc etc, until the final painting (ta da!)

But enough about the cover. Here's a peek at the star-studded Table of Contents.
 ✧((zang))✧

Introduction by AmberBenson

Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster by Christopher Barzak

Apex Jump by DavidJ. Schwartz

With Her Hundred Miles to Hell by Kat Howard

Star Dancer by JenniferPelland

Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane by Cat Rambo

Sooner Than Gold by CorySkerry

Subterraneans by WilliamShunn & Laura Chavoen

The Minotaur Girls by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Unable to Reach You by Alan DeNiro

Such & Such Said to So & So by Maria Dahvana Headley

Revels in the Land of Ice by Tim Pratt

Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl by Sofia Samatar

Blood and Sequins by Diana Rowland

Two-Minute Warning by Vylar Kaftan

Inside Hides the Monster by Damien Walters Grintalis

Bad Dream Girl by SeananMcGuire

A Hollow Play by AmalEl-Mohtar

Just Another Future Song by Daryl Gregory

The Electric Spanking of the War Babies by Maurice Broaddus & Kyle S. Johnson

All That Fairy Tale Crap by Rachel Swirsky

✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧✧

If you need more shiny stuff while waiting for the book release, go peruse our pinterest board. To wrap it up, here's a little gold plated burlesque on roller skates. Just for you. (FYI, she does get down to pasties by the end. NSFW.) 

catching up: a few things I haven't blogged about yet

Each of these should have been it's own blog post. (Maybe one or two of them will be, eventually.) But here's a quick run down of what I've been doing lately (in no real order.)

First... FIRESIDE! In a breathtaking down-to-the-wire kickstarter, Fireside relaunches on July 1 as a monthly website and ebook, each with two pieces of flash fiction, one short story, one part of a 12-episode fiction experiment by Chuck Wendig. I'll be doing monthly art for them, and created this promotional piece for the kickstarter. (Here's the Q&A with me on the matter.)

Also, last month we just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter for the Glitter and Mayhem anthology. I am working on the cover art right now; here's a preview of the preliminary study:

And OZ REIMAGINED! I spent All of last October buried in emerald cities and yellow brick roads to create the cover art and individual art pieces for this John Joseph Adams anthology. Here's a bit about creating the cover art, and an interview with me on the process. (Plus...both  i09 and the Mary Sue feature glimpses at the internal art work)

Also last year I had the titillating delight to work with Shanna Germain, Jaym Gates, Janine Ashbless, Lee Moyer and Bear Weiter to bring Geek Love to life.

 

Along with finishing up the Glitter and Mayhem cover this month, I am also finalizing the cover for The Future Embodied, edited by May Empson and Jason Andrew.  Here's a glimpse at the preliminary cover sketch for that one: 

Finally, over the holidays I got the chance to get my horror on, working with Stephen Carter on his historical ghost novel, The Hand of Glory.

Okay, well now. I feel a bit more caught up. More about whatnot later.

illustrating Ghost River Red.

Ghost River Red by Aidan Doyle just went live over at lightspeed magazine. It is a stunningly rich story: when it showed up in my inbox with a request for an illustration I could hardly contain my self. Every part of the story is lush with incredible imagery and symbolism. And COLOR. Oh the color. (Read the author interview here for more about it). Many thanks to John Remy who helped me with some image reference for the story.

Here's few snapshots of how the piece came together:

I started out sketching in the forest setting and experimenting with various iaido sword fighting stance:

I really wanted to show the fact that Akamiko was elderly (an awesome aspect of the story),  so I  tried several variations with gray or white hair:

I ultimately went with a dark haired Akamiko for design purposes. And finally limited myself to one sword as well (that was also hard: the story has some pretty powerful symbolism linked to the various colored swords):

Halfway through, I realized the image would be stronger if I flipped the whole thing:

A bit further along I realized the image would be stronger still if I flipped Akamiko:

And, finally finished. 

created in Photoshop, cs3, with an intuos 4 tablet.

Process. (and things I learned from Jo and Joyce)

I just did a guest post for SF Signal spotlighting Jo Chen and Joyce Farmers (they are both amazing, go read the post).

Something I didn't touch on too much in that post but which is HIGHLY applicable to me: Their working process as artists.

Jo works very much the way I do right now: initial sketches with pencil on paper, then scanning it in and creating the rest of the piece digitally. In her panel at SDCC she talked about what that means when it comes to selling art, when the 'original' is just a sketch and the 'finished' piece is a digital file. That's something I've been coming to terms with as more and more the only physical manifestations of my art are throw-away sketches laying around my studio.

And another thing: See here, on Jo's deviant art page.. look down under the image, at her description... That absolutely amazing cover she did for Marvel's Girl Comics no.3 last year... she did it using CS2. I use CS3 and in the back of my mind I occasionally think "I need to get the most current version... then I'll be a real artist." Um, yah. apparetly, latest versions of software aren't required.


Which brings me to Joyce. Joyce created every page of Special Exits with old fashioned pen and ink, using whiteout to make corrections. The pages were never touched by a computer. Very similar to what I was doing last year when I did illustrations for Rigor Amortis and Cthulhurotica. Oh... and also, she was losing her vision. She developed macular degeneration and to combat the effects she had to wear an eye patch and work with her face about 6 to 8 inches from the page. Um, yah... the things I gripe about...




My own working process changed dramatically when a generous friend gave me his old used intuos2 wacom tablet. Whoa, whole new worlds of possibility were created with that gift. The recent cover I created for Fish was done almost entirely in the computer using that tablet. And right now I am hard at work using that tablet to finish the comic Traitors and Tyrants for Monsters and Mormons (a joint project with writer John Nakamura Remy).

Anyhooo... I keep thinking "if I lose my tablet or my laptop, I am toast" But then, I remember Joyce, with her old fashioned pens, and her eye patch. Never say die. (But also, shit, I had better take good care of this tablet and laptop!)

Meanwhile, here's sneak peak at work in progress for Traitors and Tyrants:

drawing and writing

21 of 365, originally uploaded by galendara.

an experiment...

At the beginning of this year I changed how I used this book. I stopped doing individual little drawings tucked into available space and began instead to turn these pages into work-in-progress art pieces.

And when that happened, I found I stopped writing on them.

But the fact remains that I very much depend upon these pages to be a place where I can write it all out too.

So I'm going to try writing the things I need to write on the pieces of the tracing paper I keep a stashed in the little pouch at the back of the book, [[i love you moleskin]] and then folding and gluing them into the pages here.

To become part of the larger piece of the whole page while remaining accessible for when my need to go back and obsess crops up.

We'll see.
Next month, I may totally change it up again.

drawing under drawings

(Warning:: Contains some NSFW images)

This past Christmas I collected a bunch of scrap pieces of paper (mostly white butcher paper and torn brown paper bag stuff) in order to spin out a bunch of little doodles and finish off my draw365 project.
By the end of the day, I had succeeded. But looking at that page of little doodles I knew it was not finished. I HAD to add connective tissue to those doodles, in and out and between; on top of, and under, and around all those separate scraps of paper. So I did.

Here is the page as it is now on the surface, and then as it looks as you lift each consecutive layer of doodles to see what lies beneath. (Like, undressing the drawing.)

(And, sry about the blurriness, something is wonky with my camera's lens ::grimace::)



Of course, looking these pics now I realize I simply must add drawings to the UNDERSIDE of those little doodles!! #amdrawing.

surgery in my sketchbook

Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. I keep mine in my sketchbook.
And sometimes, I perform surgery on it. Just because.
A spontaneous mixed media personal project this week. On a whim, I documented the work-in-progress. Tearing, making marks, gluing, cutting, destroying, putting back together,


I need to paint more often.