Tag: creative life

Steamish Gnome

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This is an older picture I had hanging out on my computer. I was working on something brand new for today, but time just got away from me and I didn’t want to leave you all empty-handed. About two years ago I was playing around with the idea of writing an updated version of the Brothers Grimm story about the shoe peddler and the gnomes. While my mind was tossing around story ideas I also started doing some rough doodles of what I thought the creatures might look like. This picture is the result of those doodles. He has a bit of a steampunk flavor to him, I think.

Saturday I’ll be posting another character from the world of comics. Which one? I have no idea. That’s part of the fun for me.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

Super Kawaii

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I enjoyed doing something a little different last Saturday, so here we go again. A lot of times the ideas that really grab hold of me are the incongruous ones that shouldn’t really work. That’s a big part of why I wrote a book about a dwarf girl who was turned into a Valkyrie. I know Dwarves were not mentioned serving as Valkyries in the sagas, but the contrasting mental imagery of a 15 year old Dwarven girl having to deal with all of these stauesque, Nordic women was too hard to resist.

Which brings us to this week’s picture: Galactus, Devourer of Worlds! What do you do with one of the most powerful entities in the Marvel Universe, a giant alien who eats worlds – make him all cutesy! I love Jack Kirby‘s design work, his aliens, especially, have a sense of grandeur about them. So it was a lot of fun to pull off this week’s interpretation of one of his classic designs.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

The All-Father Gets His Cute On

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This week’s kawaii art offering features Odin himself. I cheated a bit on this picture. Odin loved to disguise himself and wander the countryside to see what he could discover. One element that all of his disguises shared was they all only had one eye. Odin famously traded his eye away to Mimir so that he could take a drink from the Well of Knowledge. So while I have the clothes resembling one of his disguises I couldn’t resist adding Gungnir into the mix. I don’t think it would be much of a disguise if you’re also carrying around a magical spear that never misses its target. Oh well..

Posted by Mark Neumayer

Super Kawaii

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Here is a little bonus artwork for the week. I’ve been sticking with the Norse-themed stuff for the most part but this doodle really wanted to be made. From past experience I know that you just have to roll with the muse sometimes and get these things out of your head and out onto paper if you want to get anything else done. So here she is – Supergirl.

I have had a longtime love of comic books from back in the days when my mom would walk me down to the corner store so I could buy a comic with my allowance. I don’t read as much mainstream stuff these days, preferring different indies for the most part. But not too long ago I bought my son a copy of Art Baltazar’s Tiny Titans and loved it. I’ve also been enjoying the Super Best Friends Forever animated shorts done by Lauren Faust for Cartoon Network. If you would like to see more comic character artwork let me know.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

A Horse That is Norse

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Okay, we are back to kawaii-style  artwork this week with the fourth of Loki’s children – Sleipnir. He is different from Loki’s other kids in a number of ways. First, although he does have eight legs, he is not a monster. Sleipnir, whose name means “slippery,” is a friend and servant of the gods and serves as the mount of Odin himself. Second, while Loki’s other kids were born to the giantess Angrboda, Sleipnir’s mother is… Loki. Yeah, confusing, I know. Loki is a shape-shifter. One time he needed to lure away a male stallion so Loki changed himself into a female mare. The plan worked and some time later Loki showed up with an eight-legged, grey foal. The sagas tell us “This is the horse Sleipnir, which excels all horses ever possessed by gods or men.” His most famous journey was when the god Hermod rode him to Hel while trying to free Baldur from the clutches of death.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

The Heart is Bold that Looks on Gold

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I’ve been posting kawaii artwork on Thursdays and I intend to keep on doing that. There is a problem with this week’s artwork – I don’t like it. I’m working on the kawaii version of Sleipnir but so far I haven’t been able to come up with anything I feel is good enough. (Those eight legs keep getting in the way of each other.) But I still wanted to post some kind of art so I did this piece.

I love the artistic style  that Games Workshop uses for the Dwarves in their Warhammer game. It’s kind of weird because although I have read a lot of issues of White Dwarf magazine and pored over websites about the hobby I’ve never actually played the game.

The Dwarves in the game are very attached to their ancestors and frequently decorate weapons and armor with these little iconic representations of them. The GW artists have done a great job of invoking the look of the various carved images that we find on stones and wooden relics from the Norse countries. I did this piece to represent one of these icons before it is attached to a piece of armor.

I’m happy with the art although I do think the lines are too precise. This is a side effect of me creating the base in a vector drawing program. I’ve create my original lines and shapes in Adobe Illustrator and then bring it on over to Photoshop where I add textures and effects. I’ve been using both programs for over fifteen years so it is often easier for me to do something in the program than it is using paper and pencil. The knotwork is so much easier in the digital realm – you got to love that Undo button! If you’re interested in the process I use to create digital knotwork you can check out a tutorial I did. The tute is a few years old but all of the same principles still apply.

BTW, the line in the title comes from JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

More Kawaii Artwork

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This week’s kawaii offering features Jormungandr. He is the colossal sea serpent that encircles the globe in Norse mythology. That’s really big, but I figure the guy couldn’t have been born that large even if his mother was a giant and his father was Loki. So we have my version of him when he was a wee lad.

This is the third in my series on Loki’s kids. We’ve covered Hela and Fenrir already so the only one left is Sleipnir. He’ll be racing onto the scene next week.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

Hela Goes Squee

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Okay, the other week I mentioned thinking about the Norse goddess Hela lately. Then I shared some kawaii artwork which featured her brother Fenrir. I had a picture of Hela done, but I wasn’t happy with it. It was a more modern take, making her into something of a Goth girl. While I like the concept, the execution just wasn’t working. I started from scratch and so this week I have a picture of Hela to share with you all. What do you think?

She’s smiling but my concept for these is that the children of Loki are still young and haven’t yet arrived at the grim junctures of their fates. So we can have her a little bit happy for awhile.

Two of Loki’s li’l ones down, two to go. I’m thinking I’ll feature Jormungandr next, thinking of a way to chibi-fy an 8-legged horse is a tough one.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

I Put a 15-year-old Girl Through Hel

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I did, it’s true. Although I’m not talking about cyber-bullying (Is there an app for that?) or even real-life bullying. No, this was more along the lines of making life miserable for the heroine of my second novel.

If you’ve been reading my other blog entries you know that I’m into writing books based on Norse mythology. I started out with Valda & the Valkyries. Now  I just finished the first draft of the second book in the series Valda Goes Through Hel. In this one I literally and figuratively put my spunky Dwarf heroine through Hel. She becomes aware of some troubling side-effects to being a Valkyrie, suffers the worst fate possible for a Dwarf, and has to lead a collection of scoundrels on a mission through Hel itself. For inspiration I followed pulp-writer Lester Dent’s advice:

Part one, hit your hero with a heap of trouble. Part two, double it. Part three, put him in so much trouble there’s no way he could ever possibly get out of it.

The manuscript is going out to my fantastic group of alpha readers now. I can’t say enough good things about how much I value their help. If you are a writer you know this already. Good alpha readers are a treasured commodity. Once I get their feedback and finish with the final edits I’ll be packaging it all together and getting it published as soon as possible.

Today’s image comes to us through wordle.net I plugged the text into their nifty tool and got back this fun word cloud. The larger the word, the more often it appears during the text. You can see Valda is front and center and Hrulfgar is back as well, but who or what are Draugr? You ‘ll have to check back next week to find out.

Posted by Mark Neumayer

Fenrir Pup

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I’ve been thinking about the Norse goddess Hela lately, mainly because she plays an important role in the book I am writing Valda Goes Through Hel. I finished the first draft and have moved on to edits before I send the book off to my awesome group of readers. That means I am in the part of the book process where I don’t have to be as creative. So my mind is whipping off onto different tangents as it tends to do.

So I was thinking about Hela, which got me to thinking about the other children of Loki. There was Jormungandr, the sea monster better known as the Midgard Serpent. He eventually grew big enough to encircle the entire globe. There was Fenrir the giant wolf who bit off the hand of the god Tyr and is fated to kill Odin at Ragnarok. We also have Sleipnir, Odin’s 8-legged horse. Loki was not the father of this “best of horses,” he was the mother. Go here to read more about that if you want.

Definitely a strange batch of children and the thought popped into my head “I wonder what it was like raising that group of kids?” (I know normal people don’t think of things like that. I crossed that bridge many years ago, folks.) Thinking about them as kids lead me to doodling on the computer which lead me to today’s pictures. One of Loki’s li’l ones down, three to go.

Posted by Mark Neumayer