Is This All There Is? (An Easter Short Comic)

I created this piece a few years ago. The inspiration behind it began with our dog dying suddenly, and me contemplating the wretchedness of death in general. I ended up focusing on the passage in John 11, where, as Jesus is about to bring Lazarus back to life, it says ‘He groaned in the spirit and was troubled’, and He wept. He saw the suffering death had caused to the people He loved, and I believe it hurt Him to see them hurting.

     Easter is my favorite holiday. It’s a celebration of the single greatest hope of mankind: Jesus Christ defeated death.

Continuous Creativity

Every difficulty is an invitation to creativity.

I’ve said this to myself before, but I often have to be reminded of how true it is.

     When your familiar options are taken away, you’re left to either give up or press on with new inventions. If you’re willing to accept these challenges, they may jumpstart your creativity, shooting new life into everything you do.

At a recent meeting of the community arts group I’m a part of, our president gave us the activity of drawing a picture that was one continuous line—we were not allowed to lift our pencils or use an eraser. I’ll admit that I “cheated” a little. A life-long habit of constantly lifting and repositioning my drawing tool was hard to break all at once, but I always put it right back where it had been—including when I just had to touch something up after I had been looking at it for a few minutes.

It’s an inflatable orca, one of many oddball items the president set out for us to draw. I rather liked how it turned out, but the truly inspiring thing was how something in my mind snapped to life and accepted the challenge with relish. It was the most fun I’d had drawing in a long while.

     One of the other artists said that when he went to art school, the first thing they did was take away their erasers. They either had to work with their mistakes or start over. I kind of like that idea.

     Another thing our president talked about was setting “30 Day Challenges”, where you do something—for us artists, probably something related to art—for 30 days straight. That’s about the time it takes to really learn a thing and make it a habit. I know I need to learn to loosen up my style and use more innovation, so I think a good challenge for me might be doing a continuous line drawing every day for 30 days.

     I’ll keep you posted!

What I'm Up To

I want to be consistent in posting every two weeks, but I also believe it’s more important to be doing stuff than writing about it. So, I’m going to try from now on to either write something, or prove I was busy doing something. This post is a “proof” one.

Thumbnail sketches for Tales of Rhohin: The Calling illustrations

Pencil drawings for Americat Volume One

Rewriting the beginning of Tales of Rhohin: The Mountain-Lands for about the fifth time (that doesn’t count many, many, many smaller edits and revisions)

     I’ve determined to revise the story by taking what I’ve learned about who the characters are and what they’re most likely to do, and let the plot follow a natural progression based on their actions. That’s the long-winded way of saying I want to write a character-driven story, and not be the pushy author forcibly maneuvering them from A to B.

     Part of the character development right now is focused on building a realistic male lead, no light task for a female author—and a lead who’s a warrior, no less. I’ve currently been reading some books by men about warriors, in order to get into that world…and it is indeed another world.

     My previous two books made me fall in love with writing, but this book is really making a writer out of me. I find myself often exhausted and frustrated, but with a growing sense of rock-hard determination that I’m going to stick with this thing until I do it right.

Working on my final story for Abolition Now (an anti-sex-trafficking organization)

     This story is about a wonderful ministry called Divine Threads that offers restoration to women.

Cleaning and wrapping up 15 paintings to be taken and photographed

And, just-because-it’s-fun:

Turning an old doorknob into a toadstool