Category Archives: Untitled Short story collection

Style: Aboriginal Art

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I like to use different art styles for my various different stories. Lately there is nothing better than trying to find attractive illustrations of various origins. A few months ago, I found a children’s book at a library sale, very much by accident–Enora and the Black Crane. Enora is a lovely story, and the illustrations are beautiful. Before happening upon this book, I had seen little aboriginal art.

I wanted to incorporate aboriginal designs into my in-progress short story collection. Luckily, I live near the only dedicated aboriginal art museum in the United States, The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Virginia. This was a nice resource for additional inspiration. The illustrations for the collection are black and white woodblock style (as I mentioned in my previous entry). Aboriginal design uses a lot of color. I tried to capture some of the spirit while maintaining consistency with the woodblock theme. I ended up with the featured image for this entry. I ended up knowing a bit more about aboriginal design, and my final design was richer for it.

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Maintaining my creative momentum

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This blog is now a little over a month old, and soon the Etsy store will be a month old too. I’ve made 8 journals and 4 copies of the Fairy Tales in the last month, not to mention sourcing materials, testing color profiles, etc. Bookbinding, blogging, and website maintenance takes time, time that normally would go to my creative process. Last night this blog crossed 250 views total which of course many blogs get per day, but it felt like a big achievement. It promotes the feeling that these endeavors, so different than my normal choices, are worthy ones.

My most ambitious current writing project is a collection of short stories from different planets in a planetary alliance, the Quaiin League. Some of the stories are over 7,000 words, some are quite short. All of these stories will have at least one woodblock style black-and-white illustration, like the one featured for this entry. It will be many months before this collection is complete, probably over a year. As I share my projects with people, there are more and more tasks to keep track of. But it helps to remind myself here of my goals.

It may not be easy to begin as a writer, but I feel that momentum will continue to gather. As long as I keep pushing and caring, I will accomplish these things.