blogging101

Australia Day, Wicked, Site changes, & Writing

  Australia Day Happy Australia Day! For those of you not from a land down under, today is my country’s national day of celebrating who we are. For many of us (myself included), that means grateful citizens born overseas who have been given chances they may not otherwise have had. Like most countries we have flaws, but I am proud of this place and would not live anywhere else. Wicked

A productive day of short story writing

  Hi all! Sorry, today’s post is not going to demonstrate anything. Nor is it going to be some deep and meaningful monologue upon some artistic philosophy. Nor a useful insight. Instead it is a bit of shared happiness regarding my day of writing. Well, not really a day of writing. Perhaps

Tears of a blue priestess

The current short story upon which I work features blue priestesses who tell fortunes using cups filled with tears of blood. So I wanted to make a picture of such a priestess. I envisioned a close up of her face with the blood tears flowing. The first step was putting the basic scene of the head together in DAZ Studio. As my renderer for DAZ Studio (and Blender for that

The importance of a picture reference library for writers and artists

Every day I spend about an hour watching YouTube videos on topics ranging from the history of particular genres to various art “how to” guides. Recently I stumbled across one by a professional artist who spoke about his picture reference library. At the time I thought “That’s cool” and forgot about it. But later that day I realised just how valuable an observation this was. (Unfortunately I cannot find the

Our ways - a response as me and one about my villain

Over at the Pursuit of Happiness blog my blogging mate gave a challenge called Our Ways. Among the questions that could be addressed were the following: Does each of us know what she or he wants to do? Do we have realistic plans? Do we work hard to carry them out? At the time that I noticed this I was performing a bit of a personality deconstruction of my villain.

Halt there spaceman!

Hi all, Today I discovered an absolutely brilliant video tutorial on using Photoshop to create a space scene. It was so good that I just had to share it with you all. You can find it on YouTube at: As you can see, it is only 11 minutes long. I learnt soooooo much. So I have used the knowledge that it imparted to create a scene and then added a

How visual art provides insight to writing

A few days ago I introduced you to my villain Kerphulu with a picture. The thing is, I met him myself only hours beforehand despite knowing him for over a year. Sounds strange? Well let me explain. I have been writing about Kerphulu since September 2013. The novel-in-progress “Tempting in Shade” simply describes Kerphulu in physical terms as a short, sinewy, red-headed man with short-cropped hair and a sense of

Introducing my psychopathic villain Kerphulu

As you know I am writing a short story about a key moment in the life of my chief villain: Kerphulu. I thought that I would create an image of him with one of his victims in this story. I hoped that this would give me a better sense for the man. It did. Here it is: I took the Hare psychopath scale into account as I designed him (see

Games and Themes

This is a bit of a brain dump, so don’t expect cohesively structured thought. Me and computer gaming …or should it be computer gaming and I? Anyway, grammar aside,