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January 25, 2012

A Plague of Ladybirds: The Butcher’s Tale

Filed under: MAS — Martian Art Slave @ 12:37 pm

Story Number 6: The Butcher’s Tale

I completed the sixth story in my series of nine last night.  Writing the last third of a story really happens quickly, perhaps as most of these tales have a crescendo towards the end of them that requires for fast paced action.  Perhaps because I get into the vibe of them and the ideas flow a lot quicker; earlier in the story I’m carefully setting the groundwork.

Well this story has quite a few references in it to a particular “historical figure”.  I was disappointed not to be able to have the final clue slip into the story however, this may see the light of day if I complete the footnote feature of the story.  What’s the point of referencing real-life historical figures???  Well it’s so the author can have a giggle whilst writing…or so that the reader can spin out when they find out about something they didn’t know before .  It’s fun for us all.

Of course the main historical figure I reference is a creation of my own.  Apart from the volumes of editing I’ll need to complete to have a publisher even turn a page of my manuscript, now I’ve got to re-write my old short story to bring it up to scratch.  I really thought it was already scratch-worthy (isn’t a scratch a depression in something, therefore up to scratch implies the scratch is higher?  Or if you scratch build something then it’s just the prototype, the first draft…therefore, up to scratch should be a pretty shit quality.  I hope this arghuement holds up when I’m begging for someone to put this into print!) amazing what a few years away can do for making my best bit of writing look like a turd.  Hopefully this means that when these stories look crap, I should be a lot better.

I have also started to leak the title of the book, “A Plague of Ladybirds”.  It feels ok to do this as the finishing line is so close.  So far the feedback has been good that the title is delicious.  I’ve also been told that he collective noun for ladybirds is a loveliness…I think that still makes it all work so well.  We shall see…

I noticed lots of sloppy habits coming out in this last story which again tweaks the anxieties over whether I’ll ever be able to get the stories edited up to a quality worth publishing.  Take any paragraph and give it half an hour – it pops out sooo much better!!!  But half an hour for EVERY paragraph!!!  Bloody hell!!  What have I created!

Anyway, TBT has lots more tips of the hat to the “real” Greysham.  Francis’ house can be found on Google maps – but I never knew it as a child.  The bonfire scene was fun and very nostalgic to write..lots of things from my childhood came to life like the boxes of Standard fireworks you could buy (not that I was ever old enough to be allowed!!)

So the excitement of doing number 7 is next and then the BIG finale: #8 and #9.  I’m almost nervous about writing them!!

December 9, 2011

Whittle and Redferne: Arch House

Filed under: MAS — Martian Art Slave @ 10:37 pm

Story Number 5: Arch House

I completed the first draft of ‘Arch House’ today…mostly at work!  The writing of this one came in two parts, the pause in the middle was supplied a little by a sudden lack of confidence to go forward and a little by me working on Dust’s new site.  It’s entirely my fault I got distracted.  Up until then I’d been reasonably well disciplined with “writing nights” but it instantly became a great procrastination point to wander of into the world of webbing.

So this story is like a major milestone in the series.  It hooks in some nice elements from the past which will hopefully provide a few “Ohhhhhh!” moments and it lays down a heap of elements for the future.

The house this story is about is ACTUALLY a house I wandered around as a kid.  We all thought it was haunted then and inside it was broken down dusty and shit scary.  I think my cousin Helen was with me when we ventured in.  If you do a bit of hunting on Google maps, I won’t do it for you, one can actually find this house today!!  It’s been done up apparently and seems to be being lived in.  Little do these folk know what lies within!!!

During the writing of this story we received some sad news that one of my cousins in England had committed suicide.  His name was Roland.  As a tip of the hat to a cousin I certainly had a connection with, as he was part of our generation, but a guy that I didn’t really know, I named the missing boy, Roland.  It put some sadness into the boy’s plight as I wrote it…for me at least.

There’s a few science elements in this story which I didn’t want to get wrong/wanted to make interesting/still be cool.  I don’t know if they’re right yet.  Trying to get the exposition and the poetry combo-right is pretty difficult at times.  I’m a bit afraid of the editing process ahead…not only because of the size of the job but because I fear that instead of cutting it down, I’ll get more florid and adjective-ize up the series and wreck it!!

Hopefully, my test-reader-focus-group people will tell me when I suck!

Oh and the series has a name!!!  But should I say just yet…hmmmm I dunno!?  There is a story behind it involving my car and a sappy bush in the car park at work…that should be enough intrigue for now huh!?  I have also rejigged the running order and content of the stories so that there will only be nine stories in this first series.  Of course if it goes well, there’s bags of room between these stories for lots more Whittle and Redferne adventures…plus other character POV stories and the like.  I could write in this village for the rest of my days if I choose…

As I write this the original draft is stuck in between my work e-mail and my home e-mail (Bigpond has frozen up).  I made some editing changes already on a hardcopy and can’t send it out until I get the draft and do the alterations.  Bahhh delays…I’m busting to hear what people think of this one!

Story SIX….coming soon!!!

October 30, 2011

Whittle and Redferne: The Protean Mind

Filed under: MAS — Martian Art Slave @ 10:37 pm

Completed story four today, ‘The Protean Mind’.

Fuck me…what an ordeal.  The first three stories felt like commentary on actual events and the next story I’m all excited about as well, but this one…it was tricky.  What also doesn’t help is that I’ve had a horrible ‘Panadeine Forte Resistant’ toothache throughout the writing of this story as well as doing a selection criteria for another job, I completed an intense three day training course last week AND I started a new senior role at work.

…I can see it being my best work in the end.

So I’m kinda glad this one is behind me.  It was also the first story I did two different plot lines for.  I think the one I chose is far superior, although it would have been nice to have some of the positive elements like Poppy and the lads having an enjoyable pint with the locals down at the pub.  But Whittle and Redferne ain’t about joyous times at the pub now is it?  Maybe later…

This story I formulated a questionnaire for my test readers too…I don’t know whether to dumb the story down or leave some of the subplots hanging, leaving the reader to join the dots.  I do hate it when movies join the dots for you too much.  Oh and on pet peeves this story has two of mine: Alien landscapes and dream sequences.  What the fuck was I thinking…?

Best work ever…

October 11, 2011

Introducing: ‘Whittle and Redferne’

Filed under: MAS — Martian Art Slave @ 8:57 am

Ok – update time.  My PC shat itself…don’t all modern excuses start like this?  We got it fixed…sort of, what we got back was a wizz-bang CPU that refused to talk to the rest of the machine in a polite manner.  As a result, the graphics tablet, that Dust had given me on loan, completely turned its back on everything to do with my PC and will now only work at Dust’s house.  So no more digital art for me…until I’m rich and can afford a PC and a graphics tablet.

So I’m back to writing.  Writing is cheaper!!  Although this time I’ve decided to put in more of an effort…or is it that I’ve over complicated things, trying to paint the whole battle scene instead of rendering the captain’s medals really nicely?  Hmmm….  The consequence of this extra effort is that I’m not posting the stories here because I’m gunning to get them published.  Once that fails, they’ll be proudly displayed here amongst the other art-vomits I contribute…like Rimmer’s Diary compared to Napolean’s War Diaries.

So why write this pointless blog?  Its for me!  Yes, selfishly…it’s all about me.  I wanted to record my progress writing the project up!

The plan is to have a foreword introducing 10 short stories that contain an overall story arc.  The foreword was done on the weekend of the 20th/21st of August 2011 and I started the first story, ’Hide on the Head’, on the 22nd.  It seemed like quite an effort to get going at first but the weight of research I’d done sort of momentumised me forward (that’s a proper word!).  Since that time I have completed three stories titled:

  1. Hide on the Head
  2. God Spines
  3. The Fusilier

I’ll endeavour to write a bit about each story once I’ve finished it so that it can serve as something as a kick in the pants for “future-me” who’s always got a bad attitude and needs the right motivation, a little bit of advice or even just a friendly word to remember what I did right.

The overall project has no name at this stage so I’ll uncreatively call it: ‘Whittle and Redferne’
If I were to be a true knob about it I’d call them the ‘Whittle and Redferne Chronicles’ or…”Journals’ or something self-important and cliched. 

As I begin this thread of blogs I’m starting the research for story four of the series.  I’m deciding between two existing story plots or even considering having a brainstorm and developing a few more.  The decision which one to go with will rely on how best I can squeeze the longitudinal plot points in.  I have a plot idea for a story called, ‘The Archhouse’ or something like that but I think this will be best as story five or six as it’s quite crucial to what happens later…also I’m a little scared of screwing the science up in it so the research is frightening!!

Thanks must go to Iris and Dust who are my Focus Group, test readers at this stage.  Their feedback has already been invaluable.  Plus a nod of the military cap to Justin who helped me figure out what the bloody hell a Fusilier is and where he might be on one day in January 1900.  Up, up, up the ziggurat, lickety split!!!

January 30, 2011

Nosferatu

Filed under: Dust — Dust @ 8:08 am

This was a drawing I did over christmas whilst in sunny Adelaide.  I created it too big and was without my scanner so had a lot of shading to do, in the end that got too tiresome so I added a background in PS and called it done.  Pleased that I got the feeling I wanted out of it though.

Some people have commented that it is not very christmassy – but if you know ur original Kris Kringle fairy tales you’ll know it couldn’t be more Seasonal.

“You better watch out, you better not cry…… he knows when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake…. you better not cry”

October 28, 2010

Angels & Dragons

Filed under: Art,Dust — Dust @ 2:53 pm

Well I haven’t painted digitally since July but here’s one from the archives. I found myself looking at some of Anne Stokes work a few months ago and thinking I would try and put my own take on a Dragon. This was the result.

I painted the face and horns before deciding that compositionally it needed smoke. That was a difficult decision to make because it meant covering up so much of what I had just painted, which had taken many hours.

“Whenever Smaug’s roving eye, seeking for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled, and an accountable desire seized hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug. In fact he was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell.”

October 19, 2010

H.P.Lovecraft’s The Statement of Randolph Carter: Webcomic

Filed under: Dust,MAS,webcomic — Martian Art Slave @ 8:00 pm

Well here we are with the over due pages 2 and 3.  A bit of a hiccup in the scheduling of this release but hopefully everything will be more fluent from here on in.  As this is an exercise in learning how to pump out a webcomic these delays are actually great learning points.  As for story telling points in these two pages we really had to decide on what the important messages were.  As Dust said to me mid-week, I may be veering away from the “comic” format and still depending on the readers absorbing loads of text.  Hopefully, I can remedy this over the next few pages as they lend themselves to being less text heavy.  Additionally, this story is in itself a “statement” therefore, there’s not a lot of dialogue between characters (if any).

So page two has Randolph reading one of volumes of many books that Harley owns and identifies him as the guy who smokes.  I screwed up here in many ways as I should have shown his face to start continuity, the same with Harley’s character.  I’d decided that Randolph will smoke and Harley wears the tall hat.  Subsequently, I didn’t show Harley in his hat.  Still…I’m learning the art here, right :)   Page three was a bit more of a venture into the artistic to try and show macabre, horrific studies without being obvious.  It hopes to show ingredients being added together which incongruously end up with something disgusting happening and a frog jumping out of whatever the ingredients were being sprinkled on.  I always think horror is best implied rather than shown…but I’m not convinced I hit the mark with this page.

Well I hope it opens up the Statement of Randolph Carter a bit more to people.  I’m excited about the next frames and promise to get more comic-book about them.  Thanks to Dust and Dylan.

September 26th: Launch Date

Welcome to the launch of a new room in the shunned house.  In keeping with our Lovecraftian theme of late we’ve started to illustrate a graphic novella/webcomic interpretation of H.P Lovecraft’s ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’.  This was the first story I ever read of HPL’s and therefore, holds a special place for me.  It was also reasonably short and therefore, something we considered realistic to finish, amongst all of life’s distractions.  The initial posting launches the webcomic link from the main page, the title screen for TSORC and the first page of the story.  I have in fact completed page four already but you’re gonna have to sit tight before that gets a birth. Dust banged out the cover and the lettering for the story, so big thanks to D for that!  I plan to get out a page every week to a fortnight.

This production also serves as a bit of a practise run for an original webcomic idea I have.  It really seems to be all about the speed at which the pages can be pumped out at a reasonable standard.  Again, I cite work as the evil force that prevents the stream of art hitting the shunned house walls.  Well I hope you like it and stay tuned as the story unfolds whether you’ve read the story before or not.

October 10, 2010

She’s a memory now.

Filed under: Art,MAS — Martian Art Slave @ 2:20 am

During the week I’d found myself re-working an old sketch idea.  I sketch a lot in meetings and I’d done this sketch several years ago.  I was able to find it in one of my old notepads and mixed it up with some of the new sketch ideas.  I originally had the whole body in, he has eyes, hands, bony landmarks etc.  But during one of the layer on/off moments I decided it looked better without these features in and this kinda emphasised a memory fading somewhat.  The scratchy background came about as I wanted the rough paper look of an old document, in conjunction with the anatomy vibe I think this gives it a coldness which contrasts with the emotion the entity is feeling.

The dragon-fly wings (what dragon-fly wings??) – well a friend asked me to listen to Karnivool’s Themata.  Whilst I was painting this pic I loaded the song up on youtube.  There’s a fly buzzing around and well hey, there’s another textbooky type thing – pictures of dragon-fly wings – so in they went.  This whole picture was done in less than a day (just for my own timing records); I’m overdue and I’ve done all my preparation for the next Randolph Carter frame or two so I couldn’t work on this any longer than I have without neglecting the graphic novel/comic.  For any anatomy buffs I have taken considerable license with this picture so don’t nobody mark me on my lernin’.  I’m always drawing characters like this so it’s nice to see one get to the digital form.

October 3, 2010

My Hellboy

Filed under: Art,MAS — Martian Art Slave @ 12:40 pm

I woke up yesterday morning and I this image was the first thing in my head.  So I jumped to it.  I told my son I wanted him to model as reference for me, which he loved; especially when I told him I’d give him horns and bad nails.  I was especially enthused as I’d been struggling with how to paint hair reasonably quickly and since my son has a bundle of that, here was an opportunity to work on a process.  I’ve been doing more frames from the HPL story and the characters have hair, something I haven’t ever really worked on before.  I came up with a few problem solving ideas whilst I worked on this picture so hopefully that will hold me in good stead as the HPL graphic novella streams out.

Once again, it’s hard not to point out all the things that I did wrong but today they are at least just drawing faults and not technical faults.  I did try colourising this picture but I was either over it, wanted to move on and was rushing it, or I was just plain crap at it.  So that got shelved.  I had gained an affinity with the b&w version though.  “An affinity” this is my usual excuse for finishing a picture out of laziness.  Anyway, b&w is what gets posted.  I’m glad this idea just came to me, it’s fun, it makes me laugh.  My son loves it…well he LOL anyway.

September 21, 2010

Full Throttle

Filed under: Art,MAS — Martian Art Slave @ 2:02 pm

Ok, so there’s been a dry spell of “product” coming to the walls of Shunned House recently and it’s not for lack of action behind the scenes. In my own right I have done two pages for the forthcoming graphic novella of H.P Lovecraft’s ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ which in their own right consisted of six mini-frames. We’ll be posting that under our new comics link from the front page. I have also spent time on two incomplete pictures one of which is, “Full Throttle”. This picture was NEVER destined to be posted in the gallery. It was a project born out of I NEED TO PAINT SOMETHING one afternoon.
I started with the figure…as I habitually do in nearly all my art and opened it up from there.  With so much HPL stuff floating around my head the obvious next step was…”Oh, he’s fighting tentacles!” I then realised he looked like a bit of a sailor so I moaned at the prospect of having to draw a boat and sea and….oh crap…loads of stuff!
For the first time I was experimenting with the idea of painting up the contrasts in dark blues to light blues (as you can see in the unfinished picture) and colourising it all later. I’ve been watching a few time lapse videos by proper artists (such as this one by Henning Ludvigsen) and it seemed that it’s a popular technique.  I can’t say how exciting it was to finally add colour after hours of painting.

As I wanted the early days of Shunned House to show my progress whilst I was learning how to use Photoshop I thought this perceived drought was covering up some of my developments.  This pic also features my new signature as my old one was a thirty second piece of crap…the new one being a coupla hours pice of crap ;)   So just as a a pic on this post and not a picture on the galleries, here’s the pun-titled and incomplete ‘Full Throttle’.

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