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12 Books in 12 Months

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12 Books Quads

A few weeks back I posted a link to 12 Novels in 12 Months, my writing twin from Canada who started her project last June… and now another 12 book writer has popped up in Utah!  Michelle started in January and you can find her at 12novels.com.  I think we might have to found some kind of club.

There is also a 12 books project going on in Wisconsin, although this one is a little different than ours.  Writer/game designer Matt Forbeck is writing four trilogies this year and he crowd sourced actual money to help him do it.  Why didn’t I think of that back in December 2010…

All of this goes to show that it was clearly an excellent idea, because great minds think alike.  Or, as my friend claims they would say in Germany, ‘two idiots, one thought’.  And it means you are spoiled for choice in terms of reading the ongoing adventures of people who haven’t finished their novelling yet. How many people across the world will do this in 2013?  Lots, probably.

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28 Drawings Later – Day 10

One of the main characters in East of the Sun and West of the Moon (a fairytale which is my chosen theme for this month’s 28 Drawings Later challenge, new people) is The White Bear.  So I thought I would draw him.  In doing this I came across lots of adorable pictures of baby polar bears and nearly died of a cuteness overload.  And then my friend posted a picture of her newborn baby on facebook and I literally did die of a cuteness overload.  If you take the word ‘literally’ to mean ‘not literally’, which I understand is the way the kidz use it these days.  Curse you, society. I’m now feeling quite broody, and plan to go out and obtain myself a baby human and a baby polar bear, not necessarily in that order.  Still, I figure they’ll look out for one another rather than fighting if we introduce them to each other early enough.

Anyway, here’s my drawing of a bear.

Day 10 - The White Bear
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28 Drawings Later – Days 8 and 9

After I requested help with drawing the wind t’other day, Bridget wrote: “You could pick color palettes based on the types of settings those winds would be found in — a gentle breeze might have a tropical, warm blue; harsh winter winds are silver and pale blue; the heavy winds that bring in the often-stagnant spring storms clouds are heavy and purple, charcoal or black, whereas the the sleepy winds that push around those brief summer torrents are heavy but perhaps dappled with the oranges and purples that trail behind them in the skies.”

I decided to muck about with this and had a vague notion of using pastelly watercolours and then inking some blowing stuff (leaves, brollies, general detritus) over the top.  Twas then I discovered my tin of watercolour crayons (you draw on the page as you would with a normal crayon then get a paintbrush and some water and turn it into paint) and it all got a bit more multimedia than that.

Day 8 - East of the Sun and West of the Moon

The background was done and the sun and the moon fingerknitted during Masterchef last night, and the white bear finger puppet (who is a bear, not a seal as some detractors would have you believe) was normal knitted during 10 o’clock live.  Just to give you a rough idea of how long this took, as some people are posting that sort of information on the Facebook page…

Day 9 - The Journey

This one is the pretty young daughter journeying east of the sun and west of the moon.  Although it looks more like the way you used to draw birds as a kid.  Anyone..?  Oh, never mind.  It’s mostly the watercolour crayons again, but the stars and cloud patches are expertly rendered in chalk pastel.  LAWL.

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28 Drawings Later – Day 7

Four of the characters in this play are the wind.

This presents a problem you may remember from the Disney film Pochahontas – namely, can you paint with all the colours of the wind?  If so, what are those colours?  Because you can’t really see the wind, can you.  Traditionally the main visual indicator of the phenomenon is a trail of destruction.  My first thought, then, is things being blown by it.

Day 7

If you have a more imaginative way of doing this, please leave a comment…

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28 Drawings Later – Days 5 and 6

Two in one again today. The first one isn’t technically a drawing I suppose, but never mind. It’s an experiment with the text from the story.

Day 5

And today’s effort is a set of quick character sketches for the youngest, prettiest daughter.  When you put ‘pretty’ into flickr or google image search you get a lot of loose waves and enormous eyes.  Combine this with my tendency to draw people in an overly cartoony style and this is the sort of thing you get.  I think this is exacerbated by using photos, so at some point this month I will endeavour to draw from life…  But not on this day.

Day 6 - The Daughter
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28 Drawings Later – Days 3 and 4

Because I did not post yesterday, today you get 2 drawings in one go.  How delightful.  You can see even more if you go on the 28 Drawings Later Facebook page, which I urge you to do.  I love basically everything on there.  Although a word of warning – don’t go expressing your love by clicking ‘like’ on every other picture unless you are happy for them to clog up all your friends’ stalkerfeeds.  I did that the first day and my flatmates signed in to just see about 30 pictures by strangers on their home page, with nary a status update about how that person you knew in school fifteen years ago ‘ate a really nice biscuit’ to be seen.

In other news, if you happen to be in Pitlochry this evening (well, it could happen) why not head to the Festival Theatre at 9.30pm?  They are running an event as part of the Winter Words Festival called Fearie Tales, where actors read out scary fairy stories, and tonight (after an evening with Neil Oliver, which sounds delightful) they are reading one of mine.  It’s called Daniel and the Witch and it’s probably excellent, but that is not really for me to say.

Day 3 - A Broken Compass

East of the Sun, West of the Moon – you’re going to need some sort of navigational help to find that place aren’t you.

His Wife

The kind but poor gentleman’s wife.  I don’t know how she got her hair like that.

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