#also I’m OBSESSED with every character having their own style of font for their names

[hatchetmode]

Silly Hotel Pod oc time

[crowleyanthonys]

Content creator 2021 wrapped tag game

Cut this into what works for you. Want to do only one instead of five? Do it. Tag 2 people? Do it. This game is not your mum or the Apple App store to tell you what to do. But there are a couple of rules:

RULE 1: Review your creations over 2021. Tag some gifmakers/creators, friends and strangers to get them to do the same.

RULE 2: Link to the content, commentary optional.

5 (or more!) creations from others that made you smash the reblog button hard, closely followed by your ‘insp’ tag or ‘fave tag’. Link to sets that started conversations, outstanding composition, coloring, etc.

4 creations of which you’re proud. These are goals you scored. Nothing to do with notes.

3 creations others loved. Include the one that got most notes, great comments, or the classic ‘how dare you!’

2 creations that stretched you as a creator: style, coloring, blending, text, etc. include the one that should have got more notes.

1 creation of yours that you find most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and self AND 1 creation that broke and (maybe remade you) as a creator – we all have that one.

0 the creation that never was because nothing was working that day.

No need to be tagged to do this. Share what you all liked and made this year!!!

Overall comment on your creativity year 2021 ->

I saw so many others participating in this, so I decided to do the same!

5 (or more!) creations from others that made you smash the reblog button

@ghiblisdaily okay tagging your main so that you see this but the way that you color animation on your @animeshojo blog??? is so pretty!  I love this Kimi no na wa Your Name gifset especially!  I find animation so hard to color, but the gifset is so crisp, the colors are so vibrant, and you make the sunlight shine even brighter???  Gorgeous, my dear Annie!!! 😍

@maria7potter I’m so obsessed with your blog???  Good Omens and Broadway? 😍  I think you make some of the prettiest gifsets in the gomens fandom, tbh!  I absolutely love your an angel that looks very much in love with a demon gifset, not only for making me want to cry, but also for how you colored it?  Those scenes you chose are some of the hardest scenes to color, imo, but the whole gifset looks so beautiful!!  Amazing work! 👏  (also I want to shout out your gomens + great comet set for the sole reason that it made me scream when I saw it--great comet is my favorite musical and combining my two favorite things in one post gave me a moment 😭 )

@bidoctor I have always admired your gifs, Jelena, and remember going through your own wwditsedits tag when I first got into the show!  I especially love your Nadja + favorite moments pt 1 post!  I hope to start making gifs of this show at some point, but am sort of intimidated by how darkly lit all of the sets are lol but this gifset in particular is so bright and rich in color, I’m really impressed! 👏  Also, I want to shout out your nature series, which contains 30 gorgeous posts!!! You have always had a talent with vibrant color in your content ❤        

@meliorn I have admired your work for such a long time, and it was really hard to choose just one gifset to shout out, but your GTKM Meme: Family Dynamics: The Rose Family gifset is just perfect! 😍👏  This set is a wonderful summary of the show and the Roses’ growth of not just a family, but as characters too, and I absolutely love the quotes that you chose! 🥺 I cannot imagine how long this took you to make, but it is always impresses me every time I see it!  The colors are outstanding as well! (I also really love your Crowley + colours series, btw!)

@lady-arryn I remember being so stunned when I first saw your Austen but with wlw gifset!  I’m still obsessed with this set almost a year later 😍 The soft colors, the layering, the fonts!!!  It’s beautiful and romantic! 🥰  We cannot have enough wlw content in the Austen fandom, so thank you for contributing more to our favorite ships that don’t always receive content or recognition!!    

4 creations of which you’re proud.

Anathema + red & purple--probably my favorite gifset that I created this year, tbh!  I wanted to create something fall/Halloween inspired, and I think I did a pretty good job of creating that aesthetic with the colors?  Compared to another Anathema gifset from earlier in the year, I think I definitely developed a better handle for manipulating colors.  I just love the vibrancy of the colors that I was able to achieve in this gifset!

Aziraphale + heart eyes-- Okay, I know that it’s a simple looking gifset, but I did something small with it that I think is neat lol  I changed the color of the trees behind Aziraphale from green to red to match the red that is featured in the background in Crowley’s gif.  Every time I look at this gifset I am so proud of myself???  Such a small change made a huge difference in my opinion.  I feel like it gives the gifset a more consistent look.  Also, you know, it symbolizes that they’re in love. 😏  

the ineffable husbands + 😍 series, part 2 because this scene??? I can  never color for some reason???  Arguably the most famous scene from s1 and I can never color it properly lol  Also whenever I gif this scene, I can never color it the same way as I did the previous time.  So here, I went a different route--purple.  And it looks okay!!  I think now that I’ve grown a lot more in terms of coloring, I see other things I could have differently, but I’m still really proud of how this gifset turned out, especially for a scene that has always been challenging for me to color!  

Emma + pink--Similar to the Anathema gifset mentioned above, I’m just very proud of how I’ve stretched my abilities in terms of coloring this year!  This is a drastic improvement from this Emma gifset I made earlier in the year (which I’ll talk about in a second), and I’m so proud of how rich the colors look!    

3 creations others loved.

Aziraphale + heart eyes--although it’s a simple gifset, I’m glad people really enjoy this one!  As I mentioned above, I’m proud of the slight coloring trick I added here, and who doesn’t love this moment between A/C anyway? 🥰

Future husband meme, Crowley version--my meme sets are always super popular, so I’m not surprised that this one gained so many notes in comparison to other sets that I have spent much more time on lol  It’s okay though, I love making meme gifsets, I enjoy making people laugh!   

Future husband meme, Aziraphale version--same comment as above (although imo, this set is funnier than the Crowley version lol)

2 creations that stretched you as a creator:

knighthouse + colors--this was not the first time I had played around with colors in a gifset, but this was probably my first ambitious gifset with manipulating colors to this extent.  I think I have definitely learned a lot from creating this set, and it’s really interesting to compare this post to my most recent Emma gifset that I mentioned earlier.  Despite having to take a huge break once I started grad school this fall (and just starting to make gifs again this month), I am pretty pleased with how much I’ve grown this year in terms of coloring/manipulating color!

the ineffable husbands + 😍 series, part one in particular because I have always had difficulty gifing various scenes and making the coloring look consistent lol  I’m so used to gifing one particular moment/scenes/series of facial expressions and that is it.  Dealing with multiple scenes that may have different lighting and color schemes is something I’m still learning.  I’m still not 100% pleased with the coloring in this set, tbh, but, I’ll keep working at it!        

1 creation of yours that you find most aesthetically pleasing

I already talked about it, but the Anathema + red and purple gifset!

1 creation that broke and (maybe remade you) as a creator

Hmm, not sure how to answer this one!  Not sure if any creation really “broke” me this time (a few did in 2020, I think, though).  As you can tell, experimenting with manipulating color was the theme for my creations this year.  I think the my two posts that got me the most excited to continue exploring that within the GO fandom were my Anathema + pink and purple gifset and my Crowley + pink gifset?  I still get really sweet comments/tags on these posts, and it’s been almost a year since I posted the Crowley gifset!

0 the creation that never was because nothing was working that day.

I had a few other ineffable husbands memes planned out, as well as an angsty parallel post planned, but never had time due to grad school.  I won’t give much away in case I find the time later, so we’ll see!  

Overall comment on your creativity year 2021 ->

Looking back on 2021, I made quite a few gifsets, but probably not as much as I had in previous years due to school, which makes me sad.  I do feel a bit disconnected from the fandom at times, but this first semester made me realize that I need to create a better work/life balance for myself, so maybe I’ll do a better job at creating time for hobbies starting this upcoming semester.

Tagging (but only if you want to, of course!): @ghiblisdaily @maria7potter @bidoctor @meliorn @lady-arryn and anyone else who would like to participate!

[letterboxd]

The Package.

As the bonkers genre thrill-ride Shadow in the Cloud blasts into the new year, writer and director Roseanne Liang unpacks her love of Terminator 2, watching Chloë Grace Moretz’s face for hours, and the life lesson she learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-Pei.

Roseanne Liang’s TIFF Midnight Madness winner Shadow in the Cloud landed with a blast of fresh genre energy on VOD platforms on New Year’s Day. It’s A-class action in a B-grade body, cramming plenty into its taut 83 minutes, including: a top-secret package, a freakish gremlin, a hostile bunch of Air Force dudes, outrageous stunts, dogfights and a fake wartime PSA that feels remarkably real.

Throughout, the camera is focused mostly on one face—Chloë Grace Moretz’s, playing British flight officer Maude Garrett—as she tackles all of the above from a claustrophobic ball turret hanging under a B-17 Flying Fortress, on a classified mission over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

While the film’s tonal swings are confusing to some, schlock enthusiasts and genre lovers on Letterboxd have embraced the film’s intentionally outlandish sensibility, which “makes excellent use of its genre mash to create an unpredictable, guilty pleasure,” says Mirza. Fajar writes that “it felt like the people involved in this project knew how ridiculous it is and gave a hundred and ten percent to make it work. Someday, it will become a cult classic.” Mawbey agrees: “It really goes off the rails in all the best ways during the final third, and the last couple of shots are just perfect.”

Chloë Grace Moretz and her top-secret package in ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

To most of the world, Liang is a so-called “emerging” director, when in fact, the mother-of-two, born in New Zealand to Chinese parents, has been at this game for the past two decades. She has helmed a documentary and a romantic drama, both based on her own marriage; a 2008 short called Take 3, which preceded Hollywood’s current conversation about representation and harassment; and Do No Harm, the splatter-tastic 2017 short in which her technical chops and fluid feel for action were on full display, and, as recorded in multiple Letterboxd reviews, established her as one to watch.

Do No Harm scored Liang valuable Hollywood representation, whereupon producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones brought Shadow in the Cloud to her, thinking she might connect with the material. “It did connect with me on a level that is very personal,” Liang tells me. “As a woman of color, as a mother who juggles a lot.” She says Kavanaugh-Jones then went through the process of removing original writer Max Landis from the project. “He felt that Max was not a good fit for this project, or for how we like to run things. We like to be respectful and courteous and kind to each other…”

In several interviews, Liang has said she’s comfortable with film lovers choosing not to watch Shadow in the Cloud based on Landis’s early involvement. What she’s not comfortable with is her own contribution—and that of her cast and crew—being erased. While WGA rules have his name attached firmly to the project, the credit belies the reality: his thin script, reportedly stretched out to 70 pages by using a larger-than-usual font, was expanded and deepened by Liang and her collaborators.

Writer-director Roseanne Liang. / Photo by Dean O’Gorman

That team includes editor Tom Eagles, Oscar nominated for Jojo Rabbit, actor Nick Robinson (the titular Simon in Love, Simon) and Beulah Koale, a star of the Hawaii Five-Oh series. The opening newsreel was created by award-winning New Zealand animation studio Mukpuddy, after a small test audience got weirded out by the sight of a gremlin in a war film, despite well-documented WWI and WWII gremlin mythology. It’s an unnecessary but happy addition. The cartoon style was inspired by Private Snafu, a series of WWII educational cartoons scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss and directed by Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones.

But the film ultimately hangs on Chloë Grace Moretz, who overcame cabin fever to drive home an adrenaline rush of screen craft, in which the very limits of what’s humanly possible in mid-air are tested (in ways, it must be said, that wouldn’t be questioned if it were Tom Cruise in the role). Liang would often send directions to Moretz’s ball turret via text, while her cast members delivered live dialogue from an off-set shipping container rigged with microphones. “I just never got sick of Chloë’s face and I’ve watched her hundreds, if not thousands of times. You feel her, you are her, she just engages you in a way that a huge fighting scene might not, if it’s not designed well. Giant empty spectacle is less interesting than one person in one spot, sometimes.”

Ambitious and nerdy about film in equal measure, it’s clear there’s much more to come from Liang, and I’m interested in what her most valuable lesson has been so far. Turns out, it’s a great story involving Chinese veteran Cheng Pei-Pei (Come Drink With Me’s Golden Swallow, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Jade Fox), whose film training includes a tradition of remaining on set throughout filming.

Roseanne Liang on the set of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

That meant that, during filming of Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, Cheng would stay on set when she wasn’t required. “In New Zealand, trailers are a luxury,” Liang explains. “I said ‘Don’t you want to go to the trailer that we arranged for you?’ ‘No, I just want to sit and watch.’ ‘Why do you want to watch it, you’ve seen it hundreds of times!’ And she said ‘I learn something new every time’. To Pei-Pei, the secret of life is constant education and curiosity and learning. Movies are her work and her craft and her life, and she never gets bored. If I can be like her, that’s the life, right?”

Speaking of which, it’s time we put Liang through our Life in Film interrogation.

What’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the movie that is at the top of the mountain that I’m climbing. To me it’s the perfect blend of spectacle, action design, smarts and heart. It poses the theory that if a robot can learn the value of humanity then maybe there’s hope for the ships that are us. That’s perennial, and possibly even more pertinent today. It holds a very special place in my heart, along with Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

What’s your earliest memory of watching a film? I have a cassette tape that my dad made for my grandma in 1981 (he’d send tapes back to his mother in Hong Kong). I was three years old and he had just taken us to see The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. And he can’t talk to my grandma because I’m just going on and on about R2-D2. I will not shut up about R2-D2 and he’s like, “Yes, yes I’m trying to talk to your grandmother,” and I’m like, “But Dad! Dad! R2-D2!” So it’s actually an archive, but it’s become my memory.

What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not the sexiest, but it’s the most romantic. That last scene, those last words where she goes “But you’re gonna be like this forever and I’m gonna be like this forever…” and he just goes “okay”. That to me is one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen. It is a perfect movie.

And the scariest? If it’s a horror movie, the most scared I’ve been is The Ring. I was watching it on a VHS and I was lying on a beanbag on the floor and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, because I felt that if I moved she’d see me! Also, American Psycho just came to me this year. I caught the twentieth anniversary of that movie, which is a terrifying film, and again, possibly more relevant now than when it was made. The scariest film that’s not a horror is Joker. It scared me how much I liked it. When I came out of the movie, I was like, “I’m scared because I kind of love it, but it’s horrible. It’s so irresponsible. I don’t wanna like this movie but goddamn, I feel it.” Like, I wanted to go on the streets and rage. In a way we’re all the Joker, we’re all the Batman. That duality, that yin and yang, is inside everyone of us. It’s universal.

What is the film that slays you every time, leaving you in a heap of tears? This is a classic one, the opening sequence of Up. The first ten minutes of Up just destroy me every time. I also saw Soul a couple of days ago and I was with the whole family and I, just, if I wasn’t with the whole family I would have been ugly-sobbing. I had a real ache in my throat after the movie because I was trying to stop [myself] from sobbing.

Tell me your favorite coming-of-age film, the film that first gave you ‘teenage feelings’? Pump Up the Volume. Christian Slater! Off the back of Pump Up the Volume, I fancied myself as a prophet and wrote a theater piece called Lemmings. Obviously the main character was a person who could see through the façade, and everyone else was following norms. “No one understands me, I’m a prophet!” So clearly I have this shitty, Joker-style megalomaniac inside of me. It was the worst play, and I don’t know why my teachers agreed for us to do a staging of it!

Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis in ‘Pump Up the Volume’ (1990).

Is there a film that you and your family love to rewatch? We’ve tried to impose our taste on our children, but they’re too young. We showed them The Princess Bride—they didn’t get it. We literally showed our babies Star Wars in their cribs. That’s how obsessive Star Wars fans we were.

Name a director and/or writer that you deeply admire for their use of the artform. I have a slightly weird answer for this. Can I just give love to Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos? They are my film school. I was thinking of my love of Edgar Wright, but then I thought of their video essay on Edgar Wright and how to film comedy, and his essay on Jackie Chan and the rhythm of action and then their essay on the Coen Brothers and Shot Reverse Shot. I must have watched that 30 times ahead of the TV show that I’m making now. I started out in editorial and Tony Zhou is an editor and he talks about when to make the cut: it’s an instinct, it’s a feeling, it’s a rhythm. I realized the one thing in common that I could mention about all the films I’ve loved is Every Frame a Painting. It’s their love of movies that comes bubbling out of every single essay that they made that I just wanna shout out at this part of my career.

Were there any crucial films that you turned to in your development for Shadow in the Cloud? Indiana Jones was something that Chloë brought up—she likes the spiffiness and the humor of Indiana Jones. Sarah Connor was our touchstone for the female character. For one-person-in-one-space type stories, I watched Locke quite a lot, to figure out how they shaped tension and story and [kept] us on the edge of our seats when it’s only one person in one space. In terms of superheroes, I came back to Aliens. Not Alien. Aliens. You know, there are two types of people in this world—people who prefer Alien over Aliens, and people who prefer Aliens over Alien. But actually I think I vacillate for different reasons.

Can there be a third type of person, who thinks they’re both great, but Alien³, just, no? Maybe that’s the best group to be in. We don’t need to fight about this, we can love both of them! I was having an argument with James Wan’s company about this, because there’s a rift inside the company of people who prefer Alien over Aliens.

Okay, program a triple feature with your film as one of the three. I don’t know. Ask Ant Timpson!

I’ll ask Ant Timpson. [We did, and he replied: “Well, one has to be the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. And then either Life (2017) or Altitude (2010).”]

Thank you Ant! I used to go to his all-nighters as a university student. He is the king of programming things.

Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Life’ (2017).

It’s strange that we never met at one of his events! Ant would make me dress up in strange outfits and do weird skits between films. (For those who don’t know, Timpson ran the Incredibly Strange Film Festival for many years—now part of the New Zealand International Film Festival—and still runs an annual 24-Hour Movie Marathon.) So what’s a film from those events that sticks in your head as the perfect genre experience with a crowd? It was a movie about a man protecting a woman who was the girlfriend of a mafia boss: A Bittersweet Life. Not only does it have one of the sexiest Korean actors, sorry, not to objectify, but also I actually screenshot a lot of that film for pitch documents. And, do you remember a crazy Japanese movie where someone’s sitting on the floor with a clear umbrella and a woman is lactating milk? Visitor Q by Takashi Miike. I remember just how fucking crazy that was.

Finally, what was the best film you saw in 2020? I haven’t seen Nomadland yet, so keep in mind that I haven’t seen all the films this year. I have three: The Invisible Man, which I thought was just amazing. I thought [writer-director] Leigh Whannell did such a great job. The Half of It by Alice Wu, a quiet movie that I simply just adored. And then the last movie I saw at the cinema was Promising Young Woman. The hype is real.

Related content

Kairit’s list of “She Did THAT!!!” films

Beyond Badass: Female Action Heroes

Up in the Air: The Letterboxd Showdown of Best Airplanes in film

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

‘Shadow in the Cloud’ is available in select theaters and on video on demand now.

[hot-gothics]

I am almost an entire month late in doing this, lol, but here it finally is! It's pretty fun to put this all together and see what my focus was for each month~ Thank you all for sticking with me throughout the year and thanks to all the newcomers who've joined me in my journey of art <3 Here's to another great year of art! \o/ I have a lot planned and I'm probably too ambitious, but here we gooooooooOOOOOOOOOOO!! I'm gonna give little blurbs about each month's piece or what I remember going through each month haha, so feel free to read over my ramblings and such >w>

January - 

I chose this piece because of the lighting and the expression. I really liked how the torn down wall turned out behind him and overall this is one of the best completed works of that month. It was a hard choice between this one and one with a sunset behind a female crocodile woman, but I ended up choosing this one for the color in the hair and that it was furry while the other one was a human with crocodile features. (both were not my commissions)

February -

This is probably one of the best pictures I've ever done to be honest haha. I still love the idea of it, the layout, the lighting, ALL of it. I even entered it into a scholarship contest and WON. But the best part of that contest was that it was for my university and this is KIRBY FANART xD that still kills me! haha

March -

Every time that I hang out with my friend :userVibrantEchoes: I end up drawing either Kirby or Pokemon stuff and this piece came from one of my sketches I did while hanging out with her. It was really just something I pulled out of files to work on after completing commissions in a stream but I experimented with lighting and I remember switching between two versions of my preferred art program (because a new update was released that changed nearly everything about the main tools I use) in order to get used to how the new version worked. This was a complete experimentation for all kinds of things but it turned out to be the best piece of the month (in my opinion anyway lol)

April -

Apparently April was when I started to get REALLY into Overwatch, haha. All the work I had available to choose from was Overwatch related and most of those were sketches or colored sketch style comics that I had done at the time. So I went with one of my FAVORITE colored sketch pieces where I had included a big ol' essay about Hanzo and how I adored that character and for what reasons, applying all I'd learned in my psychology classes as well as my own personal experience with depression and loss of family and difficulties with siblings to my claims. Then I tied in how McCree works really well as either a good friend or a lover for him based on their pasts. People seemed to LOVE it too! Though I honestly was expecting some sort of hate for that analysis of him but lots of people commented (this feedback is mostly on tumblr, btw) and messaged me about the analysis or left tags on their reblogs about how they were thinking similar things or that I did really well with it. I love getting feedback on anything, but the sheer amount of it for THIS post... it was amazing and totally worth it.

May -

I shipped a few different pairings from Overwatch >w> Pharmercy is also one of them~ This piece was a pun on how Mercy's line in the game says "healing stream engaged" and I put a ring on her finger and titled it "Healing stream (and healer!) engaged!" ...unfortunately no one commented on that :'c

June -

This is around the time that I started switching from drawing BnF artwork to drawing furry art almost exclusively. I had been MAJORLY involved with the BnF roleplay community there for a while and did a lot of work for people on that site between doing my own roleplays. This was done for a dear friend of mine from that site of one of his new characters. Tagging on from the Pharmercy piece in May - I had become really drawn to doing a glow effect for some reason and wanted to do some sort of magic piece. So this one came about. The character himself was a mimic octopus, hence the designs on his skin and the almost tentacle texture to his hair. 

July

-

In July I spent a LOT of time sketching and doodling furry stuff so I didn't really have any "fully finished" things to choose from for this month. After attending Texas Furry Fiesta in March I wanted to get more involved with the furry community but I didn't know how. I downloaded Telegram and tried talking with the artists/friends I had met at the convention but nothing was really sticking with me because I barely knew anyone local. But July was when I found out about the local Texas chats and started attending furmeets and events, made friends, etc. I started making LOTS of stickers for myself of my brand new fursona design to use in the chats (after years of having two separate sonas I combined the species into one that feels like ME rather than characters). Overall it's been a fantastic experience and I've made SO MANY new friends in the local furry community, it's great. BUT! Splatoon 2 had also come out and I discovered Marina because of one of my new furry friends who was/is obsessed with Splatoon and fell in love with her design >w> so I did a little bit of fanart for her during this month~

August -

The last month before school starting up was also the last time that I drew the kemono design of Dimitri with his BnF boyfriend Onnen the elk. At this point I had fully decided that I was moving on from BnF to get more involved with the furry community and I had mostly stopped drawing Overwatch fanart all the time too. I believe my computer was broken at some point and the game had to be deleted, the drive wiped and such. I lost a lot of files that I had been working on... but I didn't re-install the game and ended up not playing anymore because school started up at the end of the month and it was my last semester so I had some pretty big classes that needed my attention more. 

September -

I'm really amazed that I had next to NOTHING for this month to choose from. All I had done in September was school work, some Telegram stickers, and maybe some sketches here and there. So what I chose for this month is an example of one of my favorite stickers that I had completed during the month (for Siber) and one of my projects during that month was to use Adobe Illustrator and design a sign or logo then use the laser cutters at the school to both do etching and cutting. And I redesigned my logo from about a year before and included elements that are super important to me (bunny and dragon, since I'm a dragunny, and the star since my last name is Starr). I also created my own font for the actual letters in my username too, which got me big points in my critique in class. It totally went to my head when everyone in there was just blown away with my design of it x3 I was struttin' the rest of the day~

October - 

This piece is super emotional for me. As some of you may be aware; I lost my dad a few years ago. For some reason the thought came to mind that when/if I get married I'm not going to have my dad around to dance with me during the traditional father-daughter dance and then I tried to remember if he and I had EVER done that together and I'm pretty sure we never did. Maybe when I was very very young, but I don't remember ever going to anything like a "father-daughter dance". So... this is a drawing of a moment that will never happen. Also - my dad's fursona is a lion with a "chipped" afro, by the way. He loved the character I designed for him too x3 It's just kind of hard to see that in this drawing since it's cropped and he's mostly behind my sona's head

November - 

I didn't have much to choose from for this month as I was still super busy with school, but this is when I started getting back into traditional art and began making badges for people~ One of my first commissioned traditional badges was for a local fur and I really like how it came out :3c so that's the one I chose to represent this month! \o/

December - 

Another piece with Siber here, haha. But this one had a bunch of elements in it that I really enjoyed doing. There's the "magic" effect with the music around him, the color scheme is super wintery, there's foreground and background elements that I think really make the picture work well, and I really just like this picture haha. I think it's a strong representation of my styles mixed together since all I'd drawn of him up until this point was stickers so I was pretty set into a certain way of drawing this character. But this turned out really well and I just really like it haha

Boy that was a lot of blurbing >-> lolol Thanks for reading if you did! I'd love to read your comments on what month is your favorite or if you had a piece from last year that is definitely one of YOUR favorites that I didn't include (I'm super interested in that actually, please let me know lol) Do you think I chose good work for this? :3c Do you think I over-explained my own reasons behind choosing these? lol Lemme know what you think in the tags or comments or through my inbox! \o/  I DO definitely read all of that ~ ❤❤❤ And thank you again for following me ❤❤❤

[savrenim]

Hi! I love your works! What got you into writing and theater? How and where did you start? Just very curious because you are so good! Thank you!

Vaguely long answer (extremely long way too long I’m so sorry I think this is the most I’ve talked about myself on tumblr in years) under the cut because I ramble a lot about my own life and these two things have been stupidly important in my life?

Writing!

So I was a very solitary kid because ew what was being outside, that’s boring, which meant I spent every single day from about fourth grade, when I was finally allowed do this, to eighth grade, during recess and lunch, in the library reading. (Same in high school, except we had different periods and breaks and by that time I was in enough AP classes that it was usually homework I was doing.) I read so much as a kid. Then there were also the classroom libraries that were just, like, two shelves of books that you could read during class if you were done with your exercises, those I’d read every single book on the shelf since, like, second grade, although each grade new classroom new shelf so new books, but by third or fourth grade I was on my third read-through of everything on that grade’s shelf and was so bored of books that I’d read already and decided then and there that if there were no new books for me to read, I was going to write my own book to read.

I don’t think the .docs exist anymore of this really shitty story that I started in third grade that I’m pretty sure were about three triplets who were princesses and the Chosen Ones and had all sorts of magical powers but it was a world where everyone had different types of powers but theirs were more powerful because they were Special with a Capitol S…I think one could manipulate all water, one could make force fields (which, of course, she could use to fly, you can do anything with forcefields if you try hard enough) and I forget what the other one could do, probably control energy/electricity? It was somewhere between 30 and 50 pages of Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double spaced. The Princesses had to run away from someone trying to assassinate them and take over the kingdom and train and learn to use their powers and the only thing I remember is that their powers kept getting more and more ridiculous as the story went on as I got more and more creative with applications of them (like the water one made a boat out of water and they escaped in the ocean sitting in this water boat as it propelled along like that scene from The Incredibles except the boat was all water instead of Mom and Dash), it was a mess but it was a beautiful mess and now it is gone forever probably because I think my mother’s computer has crashed and been replaced a couple times since then. RIP.

I’ve never really stopped writing, like. I wrote a shit-ton of fanfiction in high school because I found a show that I really liked the world background and felt like not enough of the characters were explored so I just hit the ground running, I think there’s, like, 550k or so of fanfic I wrote on an account that I have buried at the bottom of fanfiction.net and will never reveal to anyone ever. There’s a draft of a novel from high school too, this one, like, 95k, and I still have it. I may or may not have been re-working it as a part of a 7-novel biblical apocalypse in space idea that I had for a while, but that all got put on hold when I started it feels more like a memory. Um. Since high school, I did NaNo four or five times and have vague half-drafts sitting around from a bunch of those, too? Then there’s an immense amount that Wayfinder has played into my writing, which will be covered in the theater section, but I’ve probably written somewhere around 200k for Wayfinder, and then I’ve participated at this point in 102 Wayfinder games, I’ve kept a list, and those feel like living in a novel for anywhere from two to five hours and are just…all life-changing in terms of gaining perspective. But yeah, there are a dozen half-finished drafts of this and that that I’ve got on my computer that maybe one day will become something, maybe won’t, they keep me warm on a cloudy day type deal.

I remember when I first entered college four and a half years ago I was really proud because I’d passed the landmark of having written 1 million words of fiction so far in my life. I’m probably around a million and a half now? I stopped counting. But I was obsessed at the time with the 10,000 hours rule which when applied to writing was the 1 million words rule so I officially thought I maybe Wasn’t Crap™ after that.

But, yeah, writing has always been a huge part of my life, and a mostly private part of my life? It was just something I did in my free time for me and if I ever shared it, it was fanfiction, and in high school that meant it was anonymous in that it was under a pseudonym and disconnected from me as a person in every other aspect and thus very compartmentalized. Never something I had to worry about confrontation or being judged about. As a kid I always wanted to be a novelist, like, do science and math and then publish cool science fiction on the side. I still want to do that, write and publish and original novel. Although it’s less of a life goal and more, like, if it happens it happens. I was worried for so long about getting a manuscript accepted by an agent or editor but as I’ve gotten older and older I’ve started hating capitalism more and more and would want anything I write to be available for free online, and my friend @ink-splotch has been talking to me and giving me advice about what self-publishing is like, (also go read her books) (they are the best in the world and I’ve gotten a ridiculous amount of inspiration from just aaaah the writing style and the world mechanics and the casual folklore and treatment of side characters), but, like. Yeah. Maybe I’ll publish one day. I’m considering writing a sequel to it feels more like a memory and writing it as an original novel because the main things that the sequel deals with are the consequences of “what does a Seer mean in terms of modern physics” (as in our modern type modern, maybe even a bit in our future) and, of course, our favorite cast of characters still appears but it’s not terribly important that they be the specific historical characters and there’s a lot of issues surrounding “any story about these historical characters is a story that is intrinsically exalting slave owners” that at this point, like, if I’m writing a story that’s no longer set in the historical setting, why should I stick so solidly to the names of people that at this point have evolved very much beyond their historical counterparts and will probably eventually evolve past the direct musical interpretation too, when I could just change names and then have it be my own original fiction that could either stand on its own or be read as a direct sequel, and then it’s not connected to the atrocities that Hamilton characters are connected to, and also just I really do want to try my hand at original fiction again. So that might be on the horizon.

Um, writing. Yeah. I’m really only used to doing it for me. To be honest, it’s ridiculously weird to me the following that it feels more like a memory has gotten, and kind of uncomfortable at times? I mean, I wouldn’t change anything, I’m really grateful for the massive response and how much it’s mattered to various people, it’s not mine anymore, it’s a collective experience this attitude almost definitely also comes from my experiences at Wayfinder and mostly it’s just really weird to me how big of a part of my life this has become? Like, when I look back on 2016 and 2017 and maybe 2018 decades from now, they’re going to be the years when I was first doing math and physics research and publishing papers in scientific journals and applying to grad school and working on my cool shiny space thesis but also the years that I was writing it feels more like a memory, like, literally, there are pages and pages of handwritten scenes scrawled in my personal journals right next to mathematical calculations and notes and research and grad school lists. This fic has kind of really changed my life. It’s been a huge part of what I think about on a day-to-day basis, I’ve put an immense amount of time and energy and resources into it, I’ve learned so much about a bunch of subjects that were never relevant to my life before, I’ve made friends, I’ve started talking to people, also just, like, bouncing ideas around and going back and forth about the musical Hamilton and writing plans and writing techniques and James Madison has been one of the reasons I’ve gotten really close with a person that I consider to maybe be my best friend today. Even this blog has gone from “my Wayfinder friends and maybe a few campers follow me” to “holy shit a whole bunch of people that I don’t know, like, an entire order of magnitude more than the people that I do know, follow me now,” and it was just really…unexpected. I started writing it feels more like a memory for me. It was an experiment, it was just curiosity of trying to reproduce the sense of inevitability and growing doom caused by Aaron Burr’s dual role as narrator and character, it was never supposed to become…this.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really grateful, I think it changed me for the better, and this isn’t me going “I wish everyone would unfollow me so I could go back to being a hermit,” I’m just kind of…still in shock. That it’s grown bigger than me. And that maybe if I keep doing this writing thing, life won’t go back to normal, this is the new normal.

Anyways that was probably way more deep and introspective than you asked for, let’s move on to

Theater!

My father is a tenured professor at UCLA in the math department, he got a joint math-physics PhD from Princeton, he taught me how to do algebra over the summers before I learned to read, you can see where I got my math genes from.

My mother, who is an accountant and a damn good one too so also does a shit-ton of math, was really really into musical theater before she settled down to do taxes, and did a bunch of theater and singing, like, she was a Madonna impersonator once and totally toured Japan with an Elvis impersonator giving shows, she and my father met at a singing competition that she won and I don’t think my father ever got over it, she and my dad are divorced now but the person she’s currently with and has been her ~soulmate~ for forever she met because they were in a production of Lancelot and he was playing Lancelot and she was playing Guinevere.

(It’s really funny because actually the woman that I’m in love with and that if I believed in soulmates would defs be my soulmate, it’s scary how in sync we always are it’s like we can legit read each other’s minds, literally, and we consistently call each other at exactly the same time not having planned it and finish each other’s sentences and have been on the same page about everything for as long as we’ve known each other and also literally dated the same dudes vaguely in reverse order before we went “wait what if screw guys, we were dating instead” and she maybe hopefully will become my fiancé when I’m in a stable enough position financially to ask, I also met her through theater camp after we kept being cast in roles in which we were romantically connected to one another until we went “what if we did this in real life too.” So I guess it too runs in the family.)

I was in choir from, like, first grade on all the way through high school, religious choir in 1st-8th and then “we perform cool arrangements” choir in high school. My father coached me in signing lessons so I could be in the school-wide talent show in first grade. I was a total ham, I loved the spotlight. I took piano lessons for a little while? So I can sight-read. But, like, the theater side of things, I was in every single musical I was allowed to be from 7th grade, where they first let you into the drama program, through the three years I was in high school before I technically dropped out of high school. I ran lights and soundboard for a bunch of events in college because wheeee work-study jobs, so I was in on the technical side of theater too for a bit.

The real theater thing that I’ve actually been really involved in and really active in has been a summer camp called “The Wayfinder Experience”. It’s…I call it “gay theater camp” a lot because it really is, like, the amount that it is a safe space for LGBT kids is ridiculous, I’m pretty sure there are more non-straight and non-cis people in the community than not, and Wayfinder is just…absolutely unique in what they do. I found them when I was 15, a counselor from AstroCamp that I was absolutely enamored with went “you should really come to Wayfinder, I think you’d love it,” and I did mostly because I was absolutely enamored with them, and it changed my life.

Wayfinder is technically a LARPing camp, I guess, but they’re so much more than that. What they do revolves around these “Adventure Games” that are run, but there’s a huge amount of improv workshops and community-building exercises and spending time in nature and ridiculous games like Blood Rush which the best I can describe it is “Vampire Murder Football” but everyone hangs out, gets to be silly, gets to play all these really cool different things during workshops, but then also there will be a writer for any given week of camp that has prepared a whole world with its own mythology and history and geopolitical landscape and religions and important conflicts, we range in genres from high fantasy to cyberpunk to apocalypse settings to Westerns to just…anything that anyone can imagine. And the gamewriter will, over the course of the week, lead workshops where they tell everyone about this world they wrote and cast people as characters in it and everyone will do character development workshops where they flesh out their own backstories and make connections to other characters and are led through exercises that is everything from “how does your character walk” to “what are slang words that your little friend group uses” to “what do you dream about at night”. And then for game, the Sets and Props department turns the entire campus into an area in the world that the gamewriter designed, and everyone gets a full costume designed for them from the costuming department and then just for, like, three to five hours, we all enter the world that we’ve been learning about all week and just…act. Improvise. Like, there’s “flow,” or quasi-planned events that staff members who are cast as characters that generally have some power to shake and move things (i.e. politicians, respected scientists, mad wizards, evil Lords of the Dead) will be told “okay about an hour after game starts if these things happen do this or move things in this direction,” but otherwise it is the campers who are kind of deciding the fate of the world by their actions and their choices that they make fully in character.

So yeah. It’s like living in a novel. And I’ve gotten to do it 102 times at this point, for the first summer as a camper and then pretty much immediately I got hired as a staff member. I’m every once in a while a Workshop staff, aka leading forty-to-sixty kids in theater games and improv games and run-around games outside etc etc, I’m usually costuming staff which means wheeee so much sewing and organizing from our pre-existing costuming, although I’ve done Sets and Props a fair amount of the time too. I also was involved in the founding of the Frontier Adventures, which is an off-season year round program that every other month on Saturday runs a full day event and all proceeds go to the Hero Fund where kids who can’t afford to go to camp can get to go for free and so I was doing, like, directing and hiring and renting the land and organizing the schedule and just running those events for the last two years. I retired for the 2016-2017 season to concentrate on applying to grad school.

And then, of course, I’ve done a lot of gamewriting for Wayfinder. I’ve written and run four pretty serious games that I’m stupidly proud of—The Old Land, Octagon House, Requiem, and The Wishing Well. Writing a game is like nothing else in the world. It’s kind of like writing a novel, it’s certainly as much work as writing a novel, except you get to watch your novel come to life. You have to know your world inside and out—in the world background workshops, you’re going to have fifty kids throwing questions at you that are anywhere from “how’s the gay thing going” to “so you know your werewolf world has seven different moons for the seven different tribes of werewolves, and the sixth moon has an irregular orbit, first of all I’m assuming this is a rocky planet because it holds life so it can be at most four times the size/density of Earth but then also all of these moons are large enough such that their gravity makes them spherical, what does that do to the tides? As well as are tidal forces strong enough to affect volcano patterns on this planet, like it does on Jupiter’s moon Io? Also how in the world does the sixth moon have an irregular orbit, was it created more recently than the others or tugged into the gravitational well of the planet within the last few millennia, or—“ to, you know, more answerable questions like “how does [this part of the mythology] affect [this geopolitical issue].”

But it also just—it makes storytelling such a collaborative process. You write something, you dream up a whole world and the unique incredible people who live in it and the thousands of stories that make up their lives and the bursting potential of where a story can go, and then you hand it over, you give it to a community that you know and you trust and you’ve just met, you gift each of your characters to someone new, and then you watch as their bring your world to life. Your story isn’t your story. It’s the story of everyone who has experienced everything along with you. And it’s so incredible to be on the other end of it too, to be gifted a character and given the fate of the entire universe that rests on the decisions that you and your friends make in the moment. You live and you die and you laugh and you sacrifice everything and you find bravery within yourself that you never had before, and when you come out of it, you’ve…you’ve got fifty or sixty new best friends that maybe you haven’t known them in the real world for so long but you’ve bled (not usually real blood, we’re a summer camp for kids, after all) and sweat and cried and changed the world next to them, over and over, and it forms bonds of trust and a community in the real world unlike anything else.

So, yeah. Wayfinder has been a huge part of my life and my worldview and my experiences for the last…six years now? They’re my community, they’re my best friends, it was where I turned when I was scared and hurting and didn’t know where I was or how I was ever going to get through life and it was just…everything. And it sort of still is. So yeah. Gay theater camp. It’s the best.

I learned about Hamilton through Wayfinder, actually. I was Patient 2, but, like, I learned about it one day after Patient 0 learned off of an add on Amazon.com, Patient 0 showed it to Patient 1 who the next day when I was driving him and two other staff members to the cleanup for a Frontier showed it to me and then I infected, like, 100 campers within the next two months so I feel like I really deserve the title Patient 0 but technically I’m Patient 2.

I kind of really miss doing musical theater, like, theater on a stage type deal for an audience, I’m just way too busy now with math and physics things to consider that. But, yeah, theater, it’s great, it was a huge part of my childhood and then gay theater camp was the biggest influence on me during my formative years.

Hope that answers your questions!

[northpolenotes]

Great Gifts for 5 Year Old​ Girls​

Are you looking for a great birthday or holiday gift for little girls around the age of five years old? Do you have a niece or little girl turning 5 years old soon? Are you having trouble figuring out what to get for her?

Whether it’s for her birthday, special event, or holiday, there are certain gifts that are always a winner amongst this age group of girls.

My niece Layla LOVED all of these toys at 5 years old. Even now that she’s 9, she STILL plays with them. These aren’t toys that kids just simply grow out of because they allow for kids to use their imagination. That’s something we should never grow out of. Just ask all the YouTubers who play with them.

Here’s a list of Layla’s Favorite Toys!

Shopkins Cutie Cars

Have you heard of Shopkins? They’re miniature food and other inanimate objects with faces on them (depending on the “Season”). Shopkins comes out with new items and calls them seasons like shows. They also give them very cute names like Kooky Cookie, Lippy Lips, Strawberry Kiss, etc. Those are Layla’s favorites.

To expand on their brand, they came up with Cutie Cars. I gave these to Layla not only because she asked for them, but because it felt like a real gift. She asked for the figures, which was fine, but then what do you do with 30 miniature food items?

I felt like I was adding a creative element to her playtime with these Cutie Cars. They’re relatively inexpensive and they’re not cheaply made. It was a sound investment.

You get 3 cars per box, and they come in different themes. I bought her 3, Bumper Bakery, Candy Combo, and Pretty Performers. Here’s the list of choices:

Bumper Bakery

Breakfast Beeps Collection

Candy Combo

Fast and Fruity

Pretty Performers Collection

Dessert Drivers Collection

Freezy Rides

Speedy Style Collection

Check them out on Amazon:

Shopkins Cutie Cars

Num Noms

What is a Num Nom? Well, it’s two toys in one. They are little scented creatures that are filled with other creatures. Num Noms are in the surprise toy category which every kid is into nowadays.

Nums are the outer portion of the toy. They’re soft, squishy, and hollow. They’re nested on top of the Noms which are hard shells. They Noms are either mobile with tiny wheels on them or they’re filled with lip gloss.

Like Shopkins, Num Noms come out with different characters and are featured in Series. This set below is Season 4, featuring:

10 scented Nums (outer) in a variety of flavors, including one mystery Num

Two scented glitter lip gloss Noms

Reuseable lunchbox package as a storage case

Num Noms are also great for imaginary play and are often depicted on YouTube as mischevious characters. I’m not really sure why, maybe it’s because of how they look, but it’s how Layla always played with them, often with her Shopkins.

Check them out on Amazon:

Num Noms

Hatchimals

What is a Hatchimal? A Hatchimal is a robotic pet that hatches from an egg.

When you first buy the toy it’ll be encased in its hard egg shell. DO NOT put it in the microwave or try to drill it open. It will break and then you’ll be out $$.

There are directions inside on how to care of the Hatchimal to get to break through its shell to come out and play. You must care for it by rubbing, holding, and cradling it to get it to crack.

I bought this gift when my nieces and nephews were still living in Maryland and I was in New York. So although I got to see the unveiling of the gift, I didn’t get to see how long it took for them to get the egg open. However, it did come out. According to the company it takes approximately 20 minutes for the egg to hatch on its own.

What’s so cool about this toy is that it has stages of life. The toy doesn’t grow, but it’s abilities develop. Each Hatchimal will eventually learn how to walk, talk, and play games like peek a boo. There are five stages: egg, hatching, baby, toddler, and kid.

They come with everything you need: 2 AA batteries, an official Hatchibirth certificate, 4 accessories, an instruction booklet & cheat sheet.

Check it out on Amazon:

Hatchimals

Baby Alive

Baby Alive is a great gift for a five-year-old because she’s not just a regular doll. She’s a doll that little girls can feed and change because she asks for it!!

Little girls can practice their nurturing skills with this doll. They can make her food in the Baby Alive blender, feed her, give her a bottle, and change her diapers because she actually pees and poops.

I opted for Baby Alive Spoonfuls because the other one uses playdoh as her food. There were customer complaints about that food getting stuck in the doll and never coming out. I didn’t want to deal with that and my sister hates Playdoh so I went with this one instead.

The food is powder and is mixed with water which seems to go down pretty easily and doesn’t get stuck in the doll.

The diapers can be used a few times, but eventually they need to be thrown away. Layla got some hand me down diapers when her brothers outgrew the ones that they were in. That worked out well for her.

Note that this doll DOES NOT talk.

Check it out on Amazon:

Baby Alive 

LOL Surprise Dolls

LOL Surprise Dolls are very popular with little girls. The LOL isn’t laughing out loud like in text. It stands for little outrageous littles. However, you might laugh once you find out the secret to each doll.

They love the anticipation of finding out what’s inside the spherical egg. The packaging of the LOL Dolls prevents anyone from seeing the actual doll. Hence the name Surprise Doll.

Each doll is encased in a plastic ball and then sealed with plastic wrapping. You’ve gotta do a little work to open them and that builds on the surprise.

Once open and revealed, you’ll find 7 surprises!

secret message sticker

collectible stickers

water bottle

shoes

outfit

fashion accessory

L.O.L. Surprise! glam glitter doll

So what does this LOL Surprise Doll do? Well, that’s another surprise. You have to put her in water to find out. After she’s been dunked in the water you’ll discover if she cries, spits, tinkles, or color changes!

It’s a fun toy since there are so many surprises that go along with this gift. The only negative is you’re not sure (when you buy more than one) if you’ll be getting duplicates of the same. On a positive note, Layla just treats the duplicates as twin sisters.

Each ball that the doll is designed for more play. It becomes a little carrying case, doll display, or hang out and bathtub.

I’m not sure how many Layla has collected by now, but she LOVES every one of them.

Check it out on Amazon:

LOL Surprise Dolls

Littlest Pet Shop

Layla was turned on to Littlest Pep Shop toys (LPS) by her cousin Lola. Both are obsessed with animals and so it’s no surprise that they like playing with the toy versions.

They both love that you can pop their heads off and put them on different bodies. Think the puppy head should now be on the duck’s body? No problem!

This LPS toy is an Amazon exclusive with 15 pets inside!!

armadillo

4 dogs

duck

fawn

guinea pig

turtle

hippo

meercat

fox

bear

mouse

cat

What’s also special about this LPS set is that it comes with a special cat, named Ziza Glitterton. She’s a scannable pet so girls can also play within the LPS Your World app. She can play games and level up with this virtual pet to unlock new rooms and accessories in the app. It’s a cool addition to the regular LPS dolls.  

Check it out on Amazon:

Littlest Pet Shop

Of course there are also FREE gifts that can go along with these toys.

Try writing her a letter. It’s a gift that they can hold on to forever. Loving words are never outgrown!

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Need Help Getting Started? Enter your email address below and get 3 Letter To Your Niece or Nephew Templates

* indicates required

Email Address *

(function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='FNAME';ftypes[1]='text';fnames[2]='LNAME';ftypes[2]='text';fnames[3]='ADDRESS';ftypes[3]='address';fnames[4]='PHONE';ftypes[4]='phone';}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true);

Does your niece love to color? Layla always asks me to draw her different things so that she can color them in! She loved my animals so much that I decided to create an entire book for my readers. Enter your email address for a FREE hand-drawn, coloring ebook – A-Z Animals!

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Get Your Free A-Z Animal Coloring Book!

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

(function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='FNAME';ftypes[1]='text';fnames[3]='ADDRESS';ftypes[3]='address';fnames[4]='PHONE';ftypes[4]='phone';}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true);

I hope that you’ve found the perfect gift for your 5-year-old girl in your life. Layla loves each and every one of these toys and continues to get great use of out them. I often peek in on her to find that she combines these toys so that they all play together. Her imagination never ceases to amaze me.

The post Great Gifts for 5 Year Old​ Girls​ appeared first on .

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2uME6pR via IFTTT

[t-baba]

Kerry Ellis Shares Her Passion for Book Cover Design

[special]This post was previously published on the 99designs blog [/special]

It’s not every day we tell you to judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Kerry Ellis (aka Llywellyn) we encourage you to.

Kerry has been a prolific book cover designer on 99designs for more than six years. While she may be modest, her portfolio is vast with inspired covers ranging in style from Saul Bass to Celtic classicism.

We recently chatted with Kerry to learn more about what makes her tick creatively, where she finds inspiration for each cover and who she’s reading right now.

Name: Kerry Ellis 99designs handle: Llywellyn Location: United States Specialty: Book covers

Tell us a little about yourself.

My childhood was spent moving around the States until high school, which gave me a nomadic travel bug at a young age. That led to a study-abroad program in Ireland during my university days, which connected me to a professor who unknowingly set me on my path to become an editor by hiring me for the Writing Center when we got back to campus. I’ve spent more than a decade in various publishing fields as an editor, and I love it.

You’ve been a member of 99designs for a long time (six years!). Can you talk a little about your experience?

Gosh, has it really been that long? I started like most folks with a passing knowledge of Illustrator: thinking I could easily make some extra money by creating logos. I mean, how hard could a logo be, right?

I was horrible at it. Probably better than some, but my first contests on 99designs showed me how much learning I had to do. So there was a long hiatus where I wasn’t very active at all.

After more hands-on experience with layout design at NASA, I returned to the 99designs platform and discovered the book cover category. As an avid reader and full-time editor, I was smitten with this category. That’s when I really found my niche and started to make good progress on the platform.

What do you enjoy most about freelancing?

The freedom to choose what I’d like to work on. Since I have a full-time day job, I have incredible freedom in selecting what I’d like to work on during my evenings and weekends. Since it’s work on top of a day of working, it has to be work I’m really going to love doing. Freelancing allows me to do that.

You’re clearly a bibliophile. What do you love most about designing book covers?

The stories! There’s such an endless supply of stories, and I love discovering new worlds and characters through them, then trying to bring them to life.

What do you think is the greatest challenge when a designing book cover?

Condensing what took the author several hundred pages to tell into a single image. This is even more challenging when you don’t have the entire manuscript to read. Given only a short brief, you have to rely on the author to identify what’s truly most important about their work.

Often, they’ve spent so long in the company of their own words, they can lose sight of some of the subtle themes and imagery a designer with fresh eyes might pick up on and run with. Doing all that writing justice is so challenging and incredibly rewarding when you get it right.

Your style changes for each cover you work on. How do you decide on each specific “look”?

Does it? Funny, because I feel like I’m always doing the same thing: minimalism and grids!

Sometimes the author has a specific style in mind, which will set me down one path of image mining. Other times, a particular word or phrase will create a picture in my mind, and I set about looking for stock photos or old paintings that fit that image but also spark a gut reaction when viewed. Whatever I find that creates that spark ends up driving the style for that cover.

Of course, I do this all with the genre in mind. Each genre has its own look and feel, but I don’t always like to play by those rules (which is probably why I do so poorly in some genres). For example, if a book is a hard-hitting thriller/mystery, I’m not likely to use a frilly script font on the cover.

However, I also don’t want to use the cliché dark-blue-tones-with-big-serif-font style if I can avoid it (I can’t always avoid it, but I’ll start in left field until the author kicks me out of it!).

Has there been an author you loved working with? Or a certain project you’re especially proud of?

Quite a few! But I’ll keep it to a couple of big personal milestones.

The first was a contest for a trilogy. The books were mystery with Celtic mythology as a theme throughout. If you couldn’t tell from my incredibly Welsh username, a quick look at my bookshelves would tell you just how obsessed I am with mythology and all things Celtic. So that contest was personally thrilling for me.

Even if I lost, I had to try because the subject matter was so near and dear to my heart. It ended up being the first big cover prize I won! I was absolutely elated and kept stalking the books’ publication because I honestly wanted to read them. (The first book is finally out!)

The next was the contest that gave me enough courage to ask for Platinum promotion: The Gondola Maker. That was an intimidating contest—tons of great talent and entries. I personally love reading historical fiction, which is what first drew me to it, but I had also recently been to Venice and had tons of photos from there (what I feel is my best photographic work to date).

I noticed that none of the entries actually had a gondola maker represented. Now, a lot of times going for the obvious thing is also the dumbest thing for book covers, but I still wanted to give the author something different than pages of gondolas and no makers.

That composite ended up being the largest I’ve cobbled together to date (that’s won): the hands and wood file from one photo, the apron from another, the rolled sleeves from yet another, and the gondola itself from one of my own photos. Then the wax seal, the winged lion, the prow fork—all of which I turned to public domain images for because the required stock purchases were starting to add up.

It turned out better than I could have imagined. The author loved it. And she sent me a few copies, all of which I gave to friends and family except one—my own keepsake. That’s the cover that made me think I was actually good at this and should keep going.

Where do you typically draw your inspiration from?

Art and photography, which are a big part of my background. I love modern art museums and the old masters with their classic portraiture. Art history was one of those university classes that I never, ever missed, and started me on a path of visiting art museums in every city I visit across the globe.

About 8 years ago I started delving into photography and immediately fell in love with the likes of Alfred Stieglitz and George Hurrell (probably didn’t hurt that I’m a classic movie buff). Old tintypes and cyanotypes give me butterflies.

And vintage posters. Alphonse Mucha was the first to draw me into that world, and I simply adore it.

Those are my go-tos when I’m in a rut and need reminding how much great art is out there waiting to be rediscovered and repurposed and introduced to a whole new audience.

What are you reading right now? Do you have an all-time favorite book?

I’m in the middle of several books at the moment: The Long Mars, Station Eleven, The Brothers Karamazov, Remembrance of Things Past (which I swear I will someday finish…). I also just bought 6 Thomas Hardy books because I somehow missed reading him entirely during all my years studying literature.

All-time favorite book is tougher. I have many, and each for different reasons. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, because it was my introduction to fantasy fiction courtesy of my father (he gave me his leather-bound copy of The Hobbit, and after I finished it, he surprised me by buying the trilogy for me that week).

Grania, by Morgan Llywelyn, because she blended my loves of Celtic mythology and historical fiction into a powerful woman who I would never had known existed otherwise. So enamored was I that I wrote to Morgan Llywelyn when I went to study abroad in Ireland to ask if I could meet her. To my surprise, she replied and agreed. Unfortunately, her schedule didn’t end up allowing it, but I called her from Dublin right after seeing the real Tara Brooch and had the most wonderful conversation with her.

And The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. Because it introduced me to his writing and the Discworld. A journey I’m so sad has ended but I’m forever grateful to have experienced and read.

See more of Kerry Ellis’s work in her portfolio here.

Continue reading %Kerry Ellis Shares Her Passion for Book Cover Design%

by Kelsey Bryant via SitePoint http://ift.tt/2kSBO1v