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Part IV

On May 26, Liiga Smilshkalne supplied me with two concept sketches.  The first was this blue one.  It looked nothing like I’d imagined from the face to the posture to the colors.

Preliminary Concept Art by Liiga Smilshkalne

But I hardly noticed that, for something amazing happened…I knew the moment I saw the green one, I was looking at the ghost of my character.  A promise of what he could be. Too green, blocky, a little intensely eyeless…but he was in there, like a ghost haunting just below the surface.

And we have a winner! Preliminary Concept Art by Liiga Smilshkalne.

Part III

Finding a piece of art you like is still a long way from hiring an artist. I did my homework, I read her FAQs (phew, she does commissions—oh-oh, only if her schedule allows). I reviewed her gallery. Absolutely wonderful imaginative stuff, but…Sunlight was the only picture of its type. And only one portrait was of a man. It is gorgeous and creative (click the title link to see how she addressed depicting this character), but in a different style than I was looking for.

Leanan Sidhe by Liiga Smilshkalne

So you remember that doubt I expressed in Diary of a Shroedinger’s Manuscript? Well it wandered over into this project. What if she couldn’t really do the kind of male portrait I wanted? What if I couldn’t get across what I liked? I learned from the FAQs, she’s in Latvia, what if language were an issue? Did I dare even bother her with asking how much?

Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. Liiga was professional and friendly. She asked what I was looking for, and I told her I wanted a bust-style portrait to hang next to her Sunlight portrait that I’d bought. I gave her this brief character sketch:

Falion is a half elf, half human. He has grey eyes and dark hair (brown black or black). He has a roman, or aquiline, nose. He is tall but slight. Should look about 35 years old and serious. He’s a broody kinda guy who is trying to keep his life under control. He’s been pseudo-banished to be a commander at an outpost village, so no shiny glorious plate or chain armor. He can wear clothes or leather jacket or cuirass or armor. I’m not sure, just want it to look cool for my inspiration when I hang it.

For those of you interested in the process, here is how she outlined hers:

That sounds like an interesting character to follow the adventures of and depict…The sort of portrait you’re looking for would be USD 250. If that sounds acceptable, here is how I normally handle the commission process. My preferred payment method is PayPal, with 50% payment made up front…I will send the client back several concept sketches to select from. If none of those are deemed suitable, I will draw new ones until the client picks a concept to go with. From that point on, no substantial changes are to be made to the overall composition. I will send wip images to the client either when their input is welcome or upon request. When everything is done, I will send the client a watermarked version of the final image, and if things look good, then the remaining 50% of the payment are to be sent in exchange for the finished, unwatermarked image.

Sounded acceptable to me! Truth was she had me at complimenting my character—what author wouldn’t like that? Plus, Melissa Snark was right about the prices. This I could do.

So I did.

See more art by  Liiga Smilshkalne on her Deviant Art Gallery.

Meeting Your Own Characters Series
Part I, Falion
Part II, Let’s Make a Movie
Part IV, Falion’s Ghost
Part V, Face to Face

Part II

I started playing that game some authors play, who would you get to play your characters in the movie of you book. I crawled the internet for photos.  I searched on artists sites like Elfwood and Deviant Art. I found a Teara, but I never found my Falion. I liked Matt Hiddlestone’s Loki (who doesn’t?), Hugo Weaving’s Elrond, Lee Pace’s Thrandruil (oh heck, I just like Lee Pace!).  I found interesting drawings and styles, but none that spoke to me like the Teara picture.

I was playing the movie game with two other writer friends, Melissa Snark and Sheryl Hayes, and I showed them the Teara pict on my smart phone.  I said, “I love this. I’d like to get the artist to do Falion in a style that coordinates so I can hang them together.”  But I had two problems with that: (1) from being in the publishing biz with big companies, I knew how expensive covers and art were, and (2) I had no idea where I got it (Lesson one in the process of meeting your characters, always include the Web site in your filing of the picts you find).

Turns out I was dining with the perfect companions.  Melissa Snark hires her own covers for her novels, and she let me know what the new financial landscape for art was in the age of the internet.  More indie covers and more artists available from around the world meant lower prices. Sheryl Hayes knew how to search the internet for images.  “You can do that?” I asked incredulous.

So I went home and I searched.  I found my Teara: I found Sunlight.

I also found a name…

                                                                           Liiga Smilshkalne.

See more art by  Liiga Smilshkalne on her Deviant Art Gallery.

Meeting Your Own Characters Series
Part I, Falion
Part III, Finding Liiga
Part IV, Falion’s Ghost
Part V, Face to Face

Part I

I’ve been working on my novel, In a Mortal Shadow, for a very long time now.  I’ve know many characters longer than my husband. One was even a childhood friend.  I had a 7:30 bed time, even in the summer.  Outside it was still light, and I would hear the poing-poing as the cheap and colorful balls that every local grocery store carried bounced on the pavement.  As my friends played Around the World, I lay in bed, jealous and alone, not remotely sleepy.  I started inventing characters to play with inside my head when I couldn’t be outside. Venea was the first one to keep me company.

But Falion was my first love.  I invented him in high school when I realized my story, Venae’s story, couldn’t be told by her.  She needed a companion, and that transformed the story. I read that one of my favorite novels started out similarly. Carol Berg’s Transformation was originally about the prince, Aleksander, but she needed more of an everyman to tell the story.  I did too.  Thus were her Seyonne and my Falion born.

In the decades that I’ve known Falion, we’ve travelled the breadth of my imagination.  I know so much about him, how he thinks, what he wants, where and how he grew up, who his friends and family are (and aren’t), what he eats, and how he dresses.  But I didn’t know one very simple thing, the first thing we learn about every person we meet with—what he looked like, not the superficial description of tall, dark hair and grey eyes, but what he really looked like.

And I wanted to meet this man who I’ve spent thirty years of my life with.

See more art by  Liiga Smilshkalne on her Deviant Art Gallery.

Meeting Your Own Characters Series
Part II, Let’s Make a Movie
Part III, Finding Liiga
Part IV, Falion’s Ghost
Part V, Face to Face

A quick follow up to my Halloween Unleashed post.  Halloween 2013 was nearly rained out.  It poured terribly in the afternoon and shorted out our system (even though we had it off).  We traced the short and were back up running just in time. We had a slow start but it picked up, despite the rain from earlier, despite having lost four anchor houses on the street this year.  For the first time, though, the number of trick or treaters we had went down.  Still it was a respectable 1262 (from just over 1300 last year).  Believe it or not, this too relates to writing.  For 22 years I’ve put out a front year haunt, and I’ve calculated I’ve spent over three years putting up and taking down Halloween stuff.  This year, I cut back the number of things I put up dramatically, relying on lights and the large blow ups so that I might have more time to focus on my writing.  While Halloween is a creative endeavor, it is also a distraction from my writing.  So now, back to it!

A very nice neighbor took these pictures of our house and shared them.

He put a bunch of photos of our street up.  Thanks, neighbor!