I'm trying to get "Raisins of Wrath" ready for publication but need to do the cover.

My wife usually does the cover but she's too ill to do anything at the moment. So I thought of giving it a shot myself. I have the rough drawing in place, but not sure how it'll turn out.

#Writing #Art #FediBooks #IndieAuthor
A rough sketch for a book cover…

Read an Ebook Week promo ends today! Find my entire collection at a promotional price at @Smashwords till end of the day. Find my books and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/ebookweek

If you like humorous scifi with a bit of social commentary, check out my books 🙂

#ebookweek25 #Smashwords
A promotional image for Smashwo…

Happy Read an Ebook Week! To help you find a book to celebrate, you can find my entire collection at a promotional price at @Smashwords from March 2 - March 8. Find my books and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/ebookweek #ebookweek25 #Smashwords
A promotional image for Smashwo…

Read an Ebook Week promo! To help you find a book to celebrate, you can find my entire collection at 25% off at @Smashwords from March 2 - March 8. Find my books and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/ebookweek

#ebookweek25 #Smashwords
A promotional image for Smashwo…

Wrote a submission tracker yesteerday. (Well wrote two but that's a different story).

What struck me was that most submission trackers are paid services. Is anybody interested in a free one?

If you are, let me know and I'll throw this up on my server so others can use (for free).

#Writing #Apps
A screenshot of a web app which…

I seem to be out of my coding phase and into the drawing phase 🙂

While it isn't that good, this is based on a dream about a space yatch and a space yak ... but the yak is yet to be drawn 😛

But I really want to draw more and so this is good?

Incidentally, I learnt English mostly by reading. So for a long time I pronounced "yatch" as it's written (like "latch") in my head.

So maybe that's why in my dream it was funny to have a yatch meet a yak. But now, awake, it doesn't make as much sense to me 😛

#Art
A drawing of a space yatch trav…

When I try to think of something to draw/paint, my mind goes totally blank 😛

So decided to take inspiration from something that Ira Marcks did in one of his videos and draw something similar. This is the result.

Guess I keep drawing till the wellsprings of the imagination open up?

#Art
A drawing of a yellow/orange sn…

The painting and the words came to me in a dream 🙂 I think this is the beginning to a novel that's been in the back of my mind.

--

It was the night they came for us.

The flame hair trees wafted gently in the non-existent breeze, perfectly framing Mount Coinjar like a criminal mastermind in peak-Machiavelli mode. I could almost feel the bramble bugs, their tiny pinprick eyes peering out of their black blob bodies, waiting, waiting, waiting for an unwary target to come by.

#Writing #Dreams
A digital painting based on the…

Looking at the new Instagram ML-generated accounts, all of them follow 17-18 other accounts — 6 are Meta properties (FB, Insta etc.) and the others are the other ML generated accounts.

One of them, curiously, follows a human (or at least, an account which is not labeled a bot)

Of the remaining bots, 8 are more or less female (one is a fairy) and 4 are male (one is an alien and another a robot — a robot bot 😛).

Five of these could be black, and two might be Asian.

So that's the breakdown as it stands now.

I'm still confused as to what this is in aid of though ...

#Instaverse
Screenshot showing all the acco…

Did a quick digital painting last night to serve as the icon for the reference image app that I'm building. Not happy with the image (and it needs work) but putting it up since this is the first digital art I've done in a while ...

Won't work as icon either 😛

#DigitalArt #Painting
A digital painting of a multi-c…

There are a lot of wonderful artists online and I'm inspired by just looking at their work. I also look at these images to learn from them.

I wanted an easier way to collect and look at the images I liked and so yesterday, I created a new app for that 🙂

Now I'm inspired to start doing some art again!

#Coding #Flutter #Art
A screenshot of a macOS applica…

If anybody's looking for a post-holidy light read, I'd like to offer a light sci-fi novel for your consideration 🙂

It's about a man on the run from his wife's wrath, a bunch of bounty hunter clones, and assorted other miscreants:
books2read.com/b/mB1zAM

#Reading #Author #FediBooks #Bookstodon
A book cover with the title "Ho…

I'm thrilled to announce that the audiobook version of "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" is now available on Audible 🙂

https://www.audible.com/pd/B0DL7S8Q24/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-418986&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_418986_rh_us

If you want to listen to a sample, you can do so on the Audible site.

#Audibook #Writing #Bookstodon #Fedibooks #SciFi #Humour
Audiobook cover for "Honest, th…

I call this one "Not Just Another Brick in the Wall" ... Or maybe you'll call it a "square peg in a round hole" — even though there are no holes or pegs in view 😛

I was trying to get the idea of non-conformance to the status quo in while also getting some more practice on light and shading. Done using Adobe Fresco on an iPad.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #AdobeFresco
A digital painting of a brick w…

This one feels sloppy to me 🙂 There's so much more I can improve upon but after spending three days on this one, I felt that I needed a break. So moving on ...

What I wanted to do was try my hand at doing a landscape and I learnt a lot of things that I should improve upon and a few things that would be useful. But overall, I don't feel as if I did the idea justice.

#Painting #DigitalPainting #DigitalArt
A digital painting of a river w…

This one's called "Lonely Planet" 🙂

Again, mostly playing with shapes, colours, lights, and perspective.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting
A green grassy field with rows …

I call this one "Mysterious Pyramid" 🙂

My main aim was to explore shadow, lighting and colour, but I didn't want to just do plain geometric shapes. I wanted something a litlte more interesting.

Hence, the fog shrouded pyramid.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting
A digitial painting of a stone …

I finished my third painting over the weekened. I am much happier with this one since the columns in the painting turned out like I'd hoped they would.

There are a few things I probably still would want to improve upon but I guess that's the point right? To continually strive to improve upon what you do? 🙂

I am happier at my ability to transfer images in my mind on to digital canvas and I think this is something that'll I stick with this time around.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting
A digital painting of four marb…

I finished my first digital painting a few days ago. It was a quick painting but even as I did it, I knew it had certain shortcomings 🙂

I moved on to my second painting to try to improve upon these.

The first issue I noticed with my first painting was that it was flat — it had no depth. So, with the second one I tried to introduce that. I succeeded in some cases, but feel I failed in others 😛

The other things I wanted to do was give some texture to different elements and to add a sense of light and shadow. While I did a few things to add this, I feel I did very badly at those things.

I've been watching videos on how to draw and one thing which struck me was that a lot of the videos out there tell you how to do one thing — like draw an apple — but not why you do certain things a certain way.

Now this is by no means a slam on those people who put out "how-to" videos. Any information that anybody creates, especially the free resources, to help others learn how to do something, is a great service in my opinion. But I do wish that people added a bit more of the concepts to some of these videos 😊

What I'm saying is, if you simply show how to draw an apple, then at least some people (like me) only learn how to do that one thing. But if you tell them, "this is why you do such and such a thing", then I can formulate a process (or workflow) that I can use to draw other things.

Maybe this is self-evident to a lot of folks. I don't know. But I don't get some of this straight away 🙂 For example, I do understand that you need a source of light and that an object needs to show the light and shadow in order for it to appear three-dimensional. But I don't always put it together with somebody saying "place a lighter colour splotch here and a darker shading here".

One of the best examples I saw explainig this was this free Udemy video course:
https://www.udemy.com/course/art-fundamentals-in-one-hour/

(I have no affiliation Hardy Fowler but that course was helpful in filling in some gaps and so I'm linking to it in case it helps somebody else on the same journey. Also, he has some interesting tutorials on YouTube.)

So I'm doing a lot more reading on the subject of light and shadow and how to add texture to shapes and am preparing to work on the next painting ...

#DigitalArt #Painting #DigitalOilPainting
A digitial painting showing som…

As a child I really wanted to be able to draw. I tried to teach myself drawing by tracing over artwork I liked, looking at stuff and drawing etc. but I was never very good at it.

As I grew older, I found others at school who could draw effortlessly. I joined up with them and wrote books where they did the artwork. But I still wanted to draw.

A while back on Mastodon I discovered @MichaelWhelan and his feed. I already knew Michael Whelan from his book covers but his feed made me realize the scope of how many of the book covers I remembered from over the years were by him.

The most memorable for me personally will always be "Destiny's Road". The book itself is very memorable for some reason — I remember how I felt when I read certain passages, how the sun felt on my skin that day, where I was and so on. But I picked up that book from a second-hand store over 30 years ago because of the cover and I still remember Michael's cover notes in the book describing the various elements like the fool cage.

So, seeing all the great covers that Michael has created over the years has made me want to try art in some form again. I know that I'm not very good at drawing/sketching, but I thought I might be better at painting perhaps?

So I gave it a try with digital painting and I discovered that I loved oil painting on the computer 🙂For some reason, I really like how the oil paints "feel" on the screen and how it works when you mix paints.

I created my first painting yesterday. It's not very good and I hadn't actually looked at techniques or tutorials when I did it. But I think I'm going to give this a go and see if I can get better at it.

At worst, I'll have fun trying all this out. And that's not a bad thing, right?
A digital oil painting showing …