Or All About Making Your Mark
One of the best ways to go on about yourself, albeit obliquely, is to proffer advice.
So, when given the opportunity, especially with a 150-word cap on each snippet, the challenge of condensing something quite nebulous and complicated into a very few words, there was no passing it up. (The opportunity to babble on, but briefly, is the siren call of those who can’t really manage a coherent stringing together of thoughts, mine generally being rather like when the necklace string breaks and the beads cascade everywhere.)
I used to consider sketching a means to an end. I still do, except I’ve revised my definition of what the end should be. I used to dash my thoughts down on paper with great energy. (We all fell victim, in art school, to that standard siren song: that a line had to be unique and be somewhere, that one note in pen and ink was more eloquent than a symphony in pencil.) Now I still dash my thoughts down on paper, but I’ve learned to take my time as well. I used to think a sketch had to be “useful”, the prelude to something serious to be undertaken in colour; now I’ve learned to love their incidental nature, their unexpected turnings and indefinite ends.
Or perhaps I’ve simply unlearned many things. (Time is the great teacher, the only disadvantage being of course, that time takes its time.) At any rate, here they are. In a nutshell. Well, several nutshells. Let’s call it a mixed bag.
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It’s all in the February issue of ImagineFX. (There’s even a Dinotopia poster AND a 2012 wall calendar to boot, not to mention a CD-ROM.)
So, buy a copy. Even better, subscribe. ImagineFX is about the best cross-genre fantasy-oriented publication around.
IN OTHER WORDS…
Things being as busy as they are, am still unable to manage a regular newsletter, despite tremendous help from a few good friends. Postponed but not abandoned, though, until such time as I can. Thank you for being so patient.
