Watercolor and gouache scene … I call it my event horizon … painted by Rita de Heer
I’m late posting the next installment of Avatar Remaindered due to complications publishing Half Shaman.
Who knew that the very big publisher owns Royal Road? I didn’t, and so blithely posted up my second draft of Half Shaman on RR, thinking to use it as a sort of sandbox for getting critiques.
That didn’t happen and after ten weeks of silence from the most voracious readers in the online reading universe … well, so I was told by various people who have managed to get what they needed … I gave up and started a Blogspot blog. Leaving the ten chapters behind on RR and even forgetting them, I admit.
So last week I tried to publish and was told the big publisher does not accept new iterations of things that are available for free anywhere else, and especially not on its own platforms.
I had to take rearguard actions deleting the ten early chapters on Royal Road, and even deleting the chapters I published on my old blog that were transferred to this blog. And I hope, can’t remember, that there’s nothing sitting in the G+ archives. Having another go of course.
This time last year, being under the mistaken apprehension that if I painted every day for thirty days that would then be a habit, and I would continue to paint every day.
But as we all know when the pressure is off, we tend to relax. I seem to recall I achieved an unbroken 24 day run of painting, followed by some patchy efforts thereafter.
During the time I painted for #huevember2019, I used postcard-sized paper and I’d have up to four scenes on the go at the same time. For that size paintings I need 2 or 3 passes with drying times in between.
On a particular day I’d take a look at what I had in hand, and decide which one to finish for that day. Above is the claustrophobic push through tall shrubbery to the beach. Of course, by the time ten surfers have pushed their way through, there is quite a well-delineated path.
I’m still such a beginner, that I’m always testing something. I think I was using the sepia for the first time that Sharon at the art shop talked me into. A greenish-olivey tint that she said she got more mileage out of than true sepia.
Mixed feelings about it then and now. Not that I’ve done any painting for the last six months. My paints are packed up with all the rest of my chattels, in storage.
Watercolour: we spent summers travelling to the beach.
My interest in time travel began when my birth-family arrived in Australia as immigrants from the Netherlands. The first place where we lived was a migrant hostel outside Sydney. We children mostly noticed differences. The English language of course. The food. What the hell is this orange stuff? Pumpkin? But that’s cattle food. And what is vegemite? it’s horrible. Nothing like apple butter.
And the bush. Walking along the dirt road to our house block at midday, there was no shade. The thin vegetation let the sunlight burnish right through it. The only living creature we saw that day was a snake sunning itself on a sandstone slab protruding above the road’s surface. A venomous brown, in suburbia. My father said to stamp on the ground to scare it away. The landscape seemed very alien.
Adults noticed the seeming backwardness of the new country. There was not a decent cup of coffee to be had, for instance. Schooling was 30 years behind European education, many parents thought when they took their kids to the migrant hostel’s school. Most of the breadwinners, having their European qualifications downgraded, could only get laboring work.
A common complaint was that we had traveled back in time.
But the primitive building code enabled a lot of families to live on a house block and build their own accommodation. Many children saved shoe leather by going to school on bare feet. And if you lived in the outer suburbs, it was cheaper to buy a week’s supply of fruit and vegetables at Paddy’s Produce Markets in central Sydney and carry them home in a hessian sack, than getting stuff piecemeal at the local shops.
The existence of tropes as a category of themes tells you there’s nothing new in fiction. But I’m cruisy about using a conventional theme, if I can do something new with it, time travel as an immigrant having prepped me.
Though I’ll tell you right now that I won’t be sitting through the 700+ movies that apparently use time travel as their theme. Wikipedia has a nice page on Time Travel in Fiction listing the main sub-tropes of time travel generating a manageable list of things to read/watch.
From all the above, and without having to watch anything, I gather that what I’ve been writing into is the time-slip sub-trope.
As well as tripping over imagery while researching online, I use photos and any images I may have produced in the past and present, as inspiration for my writing.
Though inspiration may not be the exact word.
Often I need to describe something so that it resembles reality. Landscapes are easy. Find a photo of a landscape and describe how your MC operates in it. Old calendars are great, although they do get cliched, almost always using the same Disney-esque castle in Bavaria, for example. Travel photos, my own and anyone else’s, are my next resource. But, of course, sometimes I’ll want a landscape not on Earth.
And this year I tripped over #huevember. “Make one painting every day of the week, using the appropriate color on the color wheel as the main color for that day.”
I could do that, I thought. If I was painting. [I hadn’t painted for over 6 months when I thought that.]
But, once you do start thinking that way, it’s hard not to get excited by something like #huevember. So. I fell for the dark orange dedicated to November 7, got my paints out and continued the journey of learning to paint with watercolors.
Main color is dark orange, November 7
Here I painted over the top of an uninteresting yellow scene. Turned out pretty impressive and got me over my initial will-I-won’t-I-commit doubts.
Burnt orange mediated by grainy paper, November 8
I painted this one over an uninteresting pink scene and didn’t get the desired burn-orange hue. May do it again sometime …
Scarlet for November 9
Scarlet … I don’t have a cool red tubepaint, or watercolor crayon. Had to dig out some old aquarelle pencils. This is an experimental animal-look pattern that might work for a shaman’s cloak.
Rita de Heer 