#wanted to make this one simple but with fun patchy placements...

[readingwarriorsdesigns]

Reena is a bright[4] ginger[3]-and-white she-cat.[5]

reena request!

[msotherworldly]

The Blue Door: Chapter One

While this was originally the second book in my Children of Pandora series, I’ve decided it will do better as book four. The adventures of Insula don’t yet have a direct affect on the main protagonist, Eradica, making the placement of her book in the early timeline fairly flexible. 

Reading this book without reading the others would be like reading The Horse and His Boy without touching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. While there’s a deeper appreciation if you’ve read Lion, Horse still makes sense if you haven’t. 

Insula’s adventure remains a self contained story, connecting to Eradica’s stories but not yet in a direct capacity. It should be noted that The Blue Door hasn’t been as heavily edited as The Cracked Mirror (or book one). Therefore, this should be treated as a rough chapter. Pieces of it will likely be cut in the future. Below is the first chapter of Insula’s journey:

CHAPTER ONE: THE ISLAND

Alternate dimensions played a large role in our daily lives, though we had known little about them for the first eight years or so of staying on the archipelago. That was the fancy word Grandpa liked to use: it was meant to describe a collection of islands, and we lived on only one of them.

    Life was simple and perfect and idyllic, and that made me crazy. I had explored every inch of our little island. I gazed across the sea. What were you supposed to do when everything was handed to you, and you weren’t allowed to do anything?

    Perfect. I was growing sick of that one little word, and I was only eight. Still, I had to admit that perfect was...pretty perfect. The water, a tropical blue, washed up on a sandy pink shore. Palm trees, their leaves unusually bright and green, waved in the breeze. It was never too cold here. It was always hot, hot enough to make your clothes stick to you while you tried to sleep or your head spin if you stood out in the sun too long. Mom’s skin had actually cooked once; she had stopped sun tanning after that.

    I walked along the beach. It was pleasant...but boring as heck to write about. I kept my little journal in my bag, which I wore slung across my soft body. Despite running around constantly, I was chubby.

    I plucked a small package from my bag: it was a little chocolate bar...or a big one, according to Mom. Grandpa had brought a bunch...and donuts.

    I went to the only interesting spot on the island: the ruins were large and shaded by maple trees. Palms weren’t the only native plants; they blended with northern firs and oaks and willows and other trees I didn’t know the names of. The island, despite it’s temperature, couldn’t make up it’s mind what it was.

    The ruins were the part I loved best. I ran my hand over the stone. It was rough, and patchy with moss in places. I liked to imagine kings and queens.

    “You shouldn’t be here,” a voice grumbled. Mutari approached me. Having a twin brother should have been fun, but there was nothing fun about Mutari.

    “Don’t you ever wonder who built this? We’ve never met anybody else here before!”

    “I’ll tell Mom.” Mutari crossed his arms. He looked identical to me, except that he was skinny. He had impish features, a pointed snub nose, thin lips, and a slim face. His ears had only the slightest point, and his hair was so blond as to appear almost white. We also shared weird eyes: they were like a Wolf’s, but a deep sea foam colour, and our eyelids were black.

    “Don’t you like learning?”

    “Risking death is not learning.” Mutari peered between a crack in the wall. “This structure could tumble down and crush us.”

    “Oh, don’t be a sour blanket. Somebody must have built this.”

    “Yes. Then the roof caved in and killed them.” Mutari glared around. The wind sighed through the trees, and the grass was lush underfoot.

    “There would be skeletons.” A rush of excitement went through me. “Oh, but they might have been buried!”

    “No, Insula-”

    I rushed through the none existent doors to what would have been the courtyard. There was a long hall, shrouded in shade and dappled sun. There was a raised stone dais. In addition to sprinklings of grass, daisies grew from between the cracks.

    I paused to gaze around, enthralled. Characters and stories raced through my head. I had killed Dragons here, and given Vampires Knighthood. In my mind, I had danced with princes and banners had fluttered on the walls in the glow of many golden candles.

    I could imagine it as it had been, brilliant and bright. I had been a princess in this court...and a knight. I spent my life in dreams.

    “Ugh. What’s so fun about just standing here?” Mutari plodded up to me. He looked out of place in his tight dress shirt and long slacks. Even his shoes were polished, his long hair gelled back.

    “Aren’t you hot in all that?”

    “At least I’m fit to be seen.”

    “Don’t be dumb. There’s nobody here to see us...except our squires!” I giggled. “Lord Mark is over there, and all the ladies are goggling at him. He has beautiful golden hair, but he’s too stubborn to cut it.”

    Mutari made a gagging noise. “Don’t draw another picture of him, please. The house is filled with them.”

    My face burned. “It is not!”

    “Are so. You’re in love with a made up guy!”

    “I don’t want to fall in love! That gets in the way. King Mark is just...nice.” I ran to the end of the hall. “There must be a door somewhere.”

    “What are you doing, Issy? Mom will kill us!”

    “There’s got to be a mausoleum.”

    “A what?”

    “A tomb?” I rolled my eyes. “You haven’t read the word in any of those fat, boring books of yours?”

    “I don’t spend all day reading about castles and fantastic nonsense.” Mutari spat in the grass. He looked washed out in this light. He looked…

    “You’ve got Zombie sickness! Or maybe Vampirism. Your skin has such little colour. Lady Zania must have bitten you.”

    Mutari groaned. “No more of your games. I’m going to tell Mom you were here again.”

    “No, don’t do that! I have to find the graveyard.” I ran up a set of stairs.

    There was a sharp intake of breath. “Issy, get down from there!”

    “Why?” I put my hands on my hips, and stared down at my brother from above. I imagined that I looked tough. “Are you worried about me?”

    “You’re...being stupid.” Mutari blushed. “Get down!”

    “I’m not afraid of any-” The ground beneath me cracked, and I screamed. A piece of the parapet crumbled away, and I fell.

    “Issy!”

    I seized a clump of growing vines. I dangled in the breeze, pulled like a strand of hair. I whimpered.

    “Issy, don’t move! I’ll get Mom!”

    “No, I can’t—I can’t hold on!” My grasp slipped. My arms ached. My whole body was dead weight. The vines slid further between my fingers. I screamed.

    “Oh, Genitrix, Genitrix above!” Mutari sank to his knees. He prayed, his lips moving quickly.

    “That’s not going to do anything!” I slid further. The ends of the vines were skinnier. The one I held thinned and…

    With a snap, I fell. There was nothing to grab. The ground rushed up to meet me, and then it didn’t.

    It was falling away, but everything looked bigger. Wind whistled in my ears, but I couldn’t feel the air on them. I was going around and around in circles. I was dizzy.

    “Insula!”

    I could feel the breeze rippling through my hair, but I seemed to be covered entirely in it. I could feel the hair rippling along my arms and legs.

    I tried to move my hands, but I didn’t seem to have hands anymore. I opened my mouth to shout, and a shrieking sound came out. It sounded like a hawk.

    I angled down towards the ground. Air brushed my feet, but my toes were numb. I tilted to the left. A draft shoved me, and a wall rushed up to meet me.

    I batted my arms, but it was too late: the wall smacked me, hard. I fell to the ground. I heard the plop, like a sound from far off. My head felt like mush. I stared up at the blue sky. Mutari towered above me, a giant. He was blurry. I tried to speak, to move, but I couldn’t. My vision darkened at the edges.

    “Insula.” That was the last word I heard before the darkness swallowed me.

[mysticsparklewings]

Bug Girl

My WIP Wednesday! piece is all finished!   (Warning: LOOOOOOONG description about the art process ahead!  ) I don't think it's terribly obvious for a number of reasons (at least not at first), but this piece is actually a bit of fan art/inspired by How to make Friends with the Dark by Kathleen Glasgow, which I finished reading Monday night--Though I actually started this piece a couple of days before   There's a concept that gets brought up a few different times in the book of the main character Tiger imagining a "bug-girl" in a jar, usually to help visualize her emotions to us, the audience. This concept really resonates and stuck with me even before I finished the book, and thus I was compelled to draw it. Technically the way I see that concept in my head looks different from what I've done here, so sometime in the future I may take another stab at it, but for this time I wanted to strengthen the connection between the bug-girl concept and the book, so visually I modeled the overall aesthetic largely off of the book's cover; white lines and white dots on a dark blue background that has a slight gradient at the bottom. The gradient on the cover is more subtle and is more on the lines than the background itself, but I took artistic liberty on that to make my life a little easier. My original plan was to do the background with watercolor, do the lines digitally and print them out (since I had some kinks in the sketch I wanted to experiment with digitally instead of doing a lot of additional drawing and erasing) and then use my lightbox and a white gel pen to trace directly on top of the watercolor, then splatter away with some white ink. But of course, things can never be that simple. The way I see it in my head, the bug-girl has, well, bug eyes, but for this piece, I didn't want to lean too heavily into the "creepy" factor, given it doesn't really fit with the content of the book (which is a great read if you like realistically heavy YA novels, by the way) so I angled her head down and her hair covering her face to keep from having to make the decision on whether or not I wanted to go with that look. And additionally to do proper bug eyes (at least the kind I was imagining) would've involved a lot of tiny circle/cell shapes, and I imagine that would've made things feel too crowded or would have blended into the splatters/background in an uncomfortable way. Additionally, I was going to have her wings raised behind her, but after playing around with a few different references and positions in Photoshop (knowing full well I was not happy with the original wings from the sketch that I completely free-handed), I felt like this more asymmetrical, lowered position and dragonfly-type structure just looked better and fits better with some of the movements of the wings described in the book (using them to cover her eyes, etc.) which in most cases aren't technically plausible with normal bug wings. My first real problem was with the jar. Realistically, it needed to be tall enough for the girl to stand at full height at least. And in theory, probably a little bit higher so it would be more comfortable overall and so that in theory she wouldn't just stand up and be able to push the lid off. But I was having issues with the sizing because the jar could only be so big so that A. it would fit comfortably on my paper and B. if it was too tall, the empty space between the top of the jar and the girl would noticeably awkward. So I fiddled with that for way too long and ultimately, it's probably too short, but the size balanced is more comfortable to the eyes, I think. (I also added the cross-hatching to the lid to make it more obvious there was a lid since originally it just kind of looked like the jar had a very wide lip.) I also gave her a set of antennae, and after trying the concept of segmenting her whole body to be more bug-like (which was way too many lines everywhere) I decided to add some plates on the front of her forearms and calves. It's not much at all, but I didn't want to stick solely to traditionally "fairy" imagery since she's a bug-girl, not a fairy, but in this lines-only format, there was only so much I could do and still get the proper impact I was looking for. Speaking of which... I did a lot of swatching and testing of my various watercolors that I have on hand to A. get the colors I wanted right, B. practice my blending of two colors with more paint than water since I wanted very dark, opaque colors, and C. test if my lightbox would even work under the thick watercolor paper and the actual watercolor. However, I made two errors in judgment during the testing: 1. The areas I swatched to test were considerably smaller than the actual size of the area I wanted to cover and even with my biggest brush when I went to do a practice go I very quickly realized that was going to take an absurd amount of paint, time, effort, and I was very likely to run into some blending problems with the gradient. (So, in summary, half-pan-sized watercolors and mostly small brushes are not great for very large areas) 2. Once I realized the above, (and I had already done two very quick tests with alcohol markers and that idea almost immediately went out the window for the same issue) I had to switch course and ended up using some water-soluble pencils (one Arteza Woodless Watercolor Pencil for the dark blue and one Derwent Inktense pencil for the dark teal at the bottom) to lay down the color for the background and then wet them down to smooth out the color. Which turned out pretty nicely, especially once they dried. (I was a little worried at first since while still wet it was looking kind of patchy and weird ) The problem with number 2 is that after it had fully dried (aside from the paper curling pretty badly since it was in a sketchbook and I didn't think to tape the edges of the page down before taking water to it, which was mostly fixed pretty easily by wetting down the back of the page and sitting a very heavy box on it while it dried overnight) when I went to use the lightbox, the pigment from the water-soluble pencils was noticeably more opaque than the straight watercolor tests/swatched I had looked at previously. It wasn't so opaque that I couldn't see my lines underneath at all but it was opaque enough that a lot of the smaller details wear really hard to see. And thus I had a pretty big problem on my hands. What I should have done was trace the lines in black on the blank paper first so they would be more likely to show through the pigment in the first place and there's a good chance that would've fixed the problem, even if I still needed the lightbox to see those lines perfectly. But hindsight is always 20/20 so that knowledge didn't really fix the matter at hand. I knew pretty instantly that I didn't want to try tracing the lines onto another piece of watercolor paper and trying to color matter since I seem to always have majorly noticeable issues with that, especially when there's a gradient involved, and also because I knew when I scanned it in it would be fairly obviously there were two layers of paper instead of one because of how thick watercolor paper is. I also knew alcohol markers were out because, again, color matching issues with the selection available to me, and also from some of my much earlier testing with trying to get the specific gradient that I wanted. That left me with colored pencils. And thus I went through the five different sets I use enough to keep where I can easily access them (I have others I don't like as much that would've just been a waste of time) and started swatching colors on a piece of the same paper I had the lines on and then held them up to the background to color match as closely as possible. I ended up picking one dark blue and one dark teal each from both my Prismacolor and Polychromos sets since the blue from the Prismacolor was closer but the teal from the Polychromos was closer but they were both slightly off, so to keep the texture consistent I mixed both together for both colors. This ended up being a very good idea in hindsight because I finished off with a final layer of the Polychromos and that kept my white gel pen from having the problems it would normally have over straight-Prismacolor pigment. (Since Prismacolors are wax-based the wax usually clogs the pen tip very easily; the Polychromos are oil-based, so the oil created a slicker layer between the wax and the pen). And all I did was use my lightbox to see the black printed lines through the colored pencil as easily as possible and went back over them with my white Sakura Gelly Roll, then I went back and outlined the jar and the lid specifically with my white Uni-Ball Signo, since the ink is slightly brighter and the nib is larger. Once that was all done to my satisfaction, I cut out the girl in her jar and placed it on the watercolor background with some double-sided tape I picked up the day before from DollarTree, clipping a few edges so they'd be as flush with the edges of the paper as possible. And I figured that would be a better idea than glue because the glue had a very good potential of being very messy and leaving notable marks. The tape was just a safer bet. And fortunately, the paper laid pretty flat, save for a couple of spots I either missed because I applied the tape by lifting up the edges so I wouldn't totally lose my placement or up by some of the nooks and crannies that make up the ridges at the top of the jar that were just too small to do individually. And there is one spot where that tape wrinkled on me, but it's fortunately not terribly noticeable in the final product. Then I made a paper mask for the girl inside the jar and got to move on to the slightly more fun part; I dipped a paintbrush in some white ink (white ink as opposed to white watercolor because I was concerned the water part might cause some reaction to the existing watercolor background that I didn't want and I was a little concerned it would make the non-watercolor paper that the girl and the jar were drawn on warp) and started tapped it against another paint brush to get splatters everywhere. I masked the girl since I was pretty sure she'd blend in too much if she got splattered too. After the ink was dry, I removed the mask and went in with the white Gelly Roll again to make some stars here and there; mostly just because I wanted to since the original book cover only has dots. I left it at that for the night since it was almost 3 and I was tired, but I came back to it the next day and racked my brain for a bit since it felt like it was missing something. I ultimately ended up putting the mask back on the girl and used my pastel blue PanPastel to create a glow effect around her. After that, I scanned it and did make some minor adjustments in Photoshop (mostly color correction, but there were a couple of black lines of shadow around the edge of the jar since it was still a separate piece of paper on top of the other one at the end of the day. And here we are. It's still not perfection, but I am ultimately happy with it since I think I got the look I was after in the end. Plus, I think I capture the spirit of the original book cover's style pretty well ____ Artwork (c) me, MysticSparkleWings I do not own How to make Friends with the Dark or the cover art ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram