K.M. Carroll's Blog, page 11

End of November art

I tried to a bit more artwork this week, so let’s see what got made:

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Fanart for a character in Destiny 2. I’ve waited for this character’s storyline for two years, and now that it’s starting up, I am very happy.

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Giftart for a writer in my Discord. This is her steampunk cowboy dude.

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“I did, and I’m so sorry,” Kari said. “You deserve better. I see that, now. I hope you can forgive me, because I don’t want this to end. You’re too wonderful.”

“I forgive you,” Jayesh said softly. He cupped her face in both hands and stroked her cheeks. Healing magic still poured from his touch. He pressed his forehead against hers and closed his eyes. “I’ve been an idiot,” he whispered. “I let you suffer. I’m so sorry.”

“Kiss me, then, you big idiot,” she whispered back. “I’m giving you permission.”

His eyes opened, inches from hers. He smiled, a little nervously, then touched her lips with his own.

Bit of a story excerpt from the next After Atlantis book. Not Mercurion, the one after it, which I’m already writing it. Maybe I should get Mercurion finished and published, huh?

[image error] A girl falls in love with a dead man’s soul trapped in a gun. Based on the game Transistor.

I wanted to try to paint a pic in this particular style, so I went with one of my Destiny characters. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly do the concept art style I was trying for, so it wound up being my own thing.

That’s it for this week! Been writing a lot and not drawing quite so much. Hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving! We’re now rocketing toward Christmas.

November art and books

Man, where did the last few weeks go? I feel like I just woke up and it was mid-November. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been working on.

Guardian’s Awakening and Guardian’s Vow are both available in paperback, finally! I’ve spent a whole week fighting with the formatting and cover art. I just need to get the third book formatted, and that’ll be the first After Atlantis trilogy. Then I can start on Vid:ilantes. I’m going to have to rebrand the series name as After Atlantis, since they’re technically books 4-7. I’ve also been putting book 7 through final edits, hopefully to catch a January release. I’ve been bouncing back and forth with my editor and beta reader, and they’re holding my feet to the fire, like usual.

Inktober 2020 wrap-up

Welp, it’s November now, and Inktober is over for this year. I just love Inktober and I’m sad that it’s done. Anyway, here’s my scribbles for the past week:

[image error] Look out behind you!



[image error] Don’t break a guy’s heart when he has a dragon.



[image error] Rejected book cover design that I repurposed.



[image error] That moment when you black out, Lovecraft-style, when looking at the giant evil pyramid.

I’m trying out a new coloring style this week, so I’ll hopefully have that to show off next time.

More Inktober – Destiny and kissing

It’s Friday, so it’s time to show what nonsense I’ve drawn this week.

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Here’s my characters Max and Sorrel. Max has lost the ability to use magic, so Sorrel is going to do it for him.

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A quick drawing of a friend’s character.

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Cute couple that I drew in 45 minutes and therefore didn’t have time to fix the mistakes. I want to go back and refine this later.

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I went, “I wonder if I can draw Batman?”

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Firefight back to back. I want to finish this one and do cool lighting effects and stuff.

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Visual-note taking for an idea I want to put in a story. Probably another Vid:ilantes book.

And that’s it for this week. I was able to draw pretty consistently, and each day was trying out some new thing that I’m learning, so I’m satisfied.

Brews like coffee, tastes like hot chocolate (Crio Bru)

I’m starting this off by saying that Crio Bru has no idea who I am and I am not being paid to endorse them. This is all just my opinion.

That said, I’ve spent a lot of time on Pinterest lately, just scrolling dismally through my feed late at night while trying to rock the baby to sleep. I’ve seen a lot of those video ads. But the only one I ever clicked on was for some company that sells ground cacao that you brew like coffee.

Turns out they’re called Crio Bru, this little company that sell organic, fair trade cacao. It’s roasted and ground like coffee. There’s lots of different roasts and varieties, and they’re branching out into flavors like hazelnut and caramel. I stared and stared at that ad, then I went to their website and stared at their pictures. And I knew what I wanted for my birthday.

[image error] Roasted cacao beans from Wikimedia Commons

Trouble is, you can’t make it in a coffee pot with paper filters. Well, you can, but it won’t be as good. So I asked my husband for a little French press coffee pot and some of this cacao for my birthday. I just wanted to try it out and see what it was like.

My birthday arrived and so did the coffee pot and cacao. My hubby had ordered me a sampler pack with a bunch of different flavors in it. So far I’ve tried the Venezuela one and the Double Chocolate one.

Oh my goodness. This is the best hot chocolate you’ve ever tasted. It has this rich depth of flavor that hot chocolate mixes or cocoa powder can only hope to attain. It’s satisfyingly bitter, and adding sugar and cream just kicks it over the top. I’ve gotten to where chocolate candy is just too overpoweringly sweet, so being able to have chocolate where I control the sugar content is perfect. I make mine with honey, so it’s only semi-sweet.

[image error] Hot chocolate from Wikimedia Commons

The kids and my hubby love this stuff, too. We’re currently experimenting with how many times you can re-brew the same grounds before it loses its flavor. We’re up to three times. My coffee pot only holds three cups, and there’s nine of us, so we go through it pretty fast. I think I’ll be upgrading to a larger pot soon.

I’ve read that the Aztecs used cacao as an aphrodisiac, because it’s supposed to enhance your mood. Commercial chocolate never did that for me. Too many additives, too little actual cacao, I guess. Well, this cacao drink actually does boost my mood. I feel very good inside after drinking it, and it leaves me cheerful. The only other thing that does that to me is my calcium supplement, which has MSM in it. (MSM does similar things and makes you feel really good.) Apparently cacao is high in magnesium and antioxidants, so it’s very good for you.

I don’t eat a lot of luxury foods, so this has been very fun to experiment with. I’m also happy to support a cacao company that doesn’t use slave labor to harvest the cacao, like the big candy companies do. If you’d like to treat yourself, especially as the weather cools off, head over to Crio Bru and order a sampler pack. The cacao is about the same price as coffee, so if you can afford one, you can afford the other. Hit up their website and treat yourself!

More Inktober2020

Welp, it’s the end of the first week of Inktober. I started off trying to do some prompts, but I can never seem to stay on track. I just go off into the weeds and draw whatever I feel like. XD

[image error] Off duty

I didn’t have much time to do this, so I cheated all over the place with stamps and stuff. Still took me two days. :-p

[image error] I have a mission for you.
Sure, as soon as I can get the old tub running.

I thought that tracing over a spaceship model would be easy. I was wrong.

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This dumb little comic came about from watching a Destiny stream one night. One of the guys accidentally started the boss fight by whacking it from the next room. Nobody knew he could throw a hammer that far. My hubby gave this to the streamer the next day and he thought it was great.

The beginning of Inktober2020

Hooray for Inktober! It’s starting to cool off, if this pesky high pressure system would ever budge off the western US. In the meantime, it’s time to draw like mad! In ink, so you can’t erase your mistakes! That’s one of the things I enjoy most about it.

Anyway, I spent an entire week writing and not drawing a bit, so I don’t have much to show in the way of arts. Here’s my scribbles, such as they are.

[image error]“Please take off your helmet? Just once?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Please. For me.”
“All right.”
*gasp*
That feeling when you’ve been dating the villain.

[image error]Destiny arts!

Not much to show, really. By next week, I will have done a lot more stuff. Trying to get faster at these ink scribbles. I’m all rusty at speed art and I have to work back up to it.

On fanfiction and publishing

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and books on writing lately that are changing my perspective a bit.

It started with Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You. This book was eye-opening for me. But it also gave me resolve to go on writing the sort of entertainment I’ve been writing. You know, fun, fantastical escapes. People need that more than ever.

Then I picked up The Pulp Mindset, which explores how pulp writers of past decades wrote fun, entertaining books that sold like hotcakes. James Bond, Conan the Barbarian, Doc Savage, and other heroes are from this era. With the advent of ebooks, we’re back in the era of cheap, fun entertainment for the masses.

I finished the first draft of Mercurion on Saturday, and immediately started writing a couple of fanfics I’ve had waiting in the wings. As I did, I got to thinking about those books I’d just read. Fanfic is just another form of publishing. People read them by the truckload. Here’s some of my stats from May, which is the last time I published a story:

[image error]Stats for May, when I published a new fanfic

That is a lot of hits. That is a significant amount of people reading my stories. We’re talking over a thousand unique visitors who came back every day or two to read the new chapter. Some reread the old chapters while they waited for new ones.

Fanfiction is the unsung pulp fiction of today. It makes no money, but people read it for the same reason they read anything–for escape, for entertainment, to have an experience.

It made me sit up and realize that if I write for this hungry audience, they deserve the best content I can produce, the same as my paying readers. I don’t know why I never thought of it that way before. I guess I don’t think of fanfiction as “real” writing because it doesn’t go through a publisher. For me, fanfic is play or practice, kind of like the sketches I’m always posting on this blog. But those are serious readers. A lot of them. So I’m going to work on giving them what they want. And I’m going to try very hard not to do what other writers have done to me and drive off my own readers by chasing the almighty buck.

Figure practice makes for hot bods

A friend gave me George Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy, so I’ve added that to my study alongside Andrew Loomis’s Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth. Now I really feel like I’m taking an extremely challenging art class. Here’s what I’ve done this week:

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I left the construction lines in the sketch, so you can see all the detail. I did my yuppie armor treatment (all black figure, three values in basic shapes for the armor, a few details here and there) and it turned out looking great.

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This was when I started working on Bridgman’s book. He builds figures a bit differently than Loomis, concentrating on the masses. Lots of twisting figures, so I tried to draw some. Then I tried to figure what in the heck a real person would be doing to get into some of these poses. Looking over their shoulders, obviously.

[image error]Jayesh and Tane from Vid:ilantes

I figured I’d draw a scene from what I was writing this morning, so here are Jayesh and Tane. Tane is a really huge guy, and Jayesh is average, so there’s quite a disparity in their sizes. My grasp of anatomy isn’t great, but I’m working on it. Wish I could say I only had one problem area, but at this point, everything is a problem area. More practice needed!

Artwork: Dresses and guns

It’s been a few weeks since I did an art post, so here’s what I’ve done lately:

[image error]Fall fashions

A hastily-painted character in a sweater and scarf, just to show off some possible fall fashions.

[image error]Max and Zero sketch



[image error]Max and Zero, colored



[image error]My hubby’s character from Phantasy Star Online 2. He had this cool dress on her and I was like, dude, can I draw that?



[image error]Jadyn and Marcus. They hate each other except when they don’t. They belong to a friend on my Discord server.



[image error]Sorrel and Max

This last one took me two days to get the perspective working. You don’t want to know how many layers of discarded sketches this file has. I’ve been trying not to use my 3D reference models, but in this case I had to cave in and use them. Argh. I’d like to color this one eventually.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Different styles and angles and experiments. I love drawing other people’s characters for the challenge it offers. If you have a character you’d like a sketch of, let me know. I always need more fodder.