Back in the art saddle again after a lengthy layoff feels great! I haven't been loafing, just changed horses to my other mare: fiction writing (magical realism is the genre) while dealing with grief over my younger brother's sudden death from an illness neither of us realized was stalking him.
So I've edited and done cover art for my 3 indy novels ("A Trickster's Odds," "'Ware the Wiccan Lass," and "One Diamond Shy" but then got a yearning to see my characters (I'm a Visualist, go figure!) come even more alive than just writing about them. It's not a "graphic novel" per se, but will have graphite-rendered plates scattered throughout the text. Blame it on my childhood fascination with illustrators like Gustaf Tenggren, Sam Savitt, and Wesley Dennis, and my adult love of realistic illustration/fine western art from James Bama. and Charles Marion Russell.
My renderings always take longer than I expect, but I'll keep on assembling everything for publishing through Draft2Digital,com who merged with Smashwords,com and now provide print-on-demand (POD) literature as well as online services.
Meanwhile, I still indulge in painting the bigger-sized canvases, my most recent upload to date being "Beach Brunch," done in designer's gouache. It was painted in two month's time to hang in the 2023 December Member's Artist of the month show at Bay City Art Center, a wonderful place full of creatives of all talents and disciplines, It's historic two-story mansion sits in the hamlet of Bay City, 5 miles north of Tillamook, Oregon. Their Artist of the Month exhibits, musical concerts, classes and food events are not to be missed, It's also where I was enthralled by seeing the first in-person flamenco dancer, Savannah Fuentes from Seattle WA, and her amazing guitarist, Diego Amador, of Seville, Spain. Truly inspiring!
I digress. The "Beach Brunch" imagines mythological characters Neptune Jr. and his date, the Goddess, Circe, doing their BYO fish brunch one morning at Cannon Beach, Oregon, USA. The town fronts a beautiful broad beach where I loved guiding trail rides down past Haystack Rock in the summertime. Waves and tides can get frisky at times, stranding those venturesome climbers of the Stack at high tide. The cars people drive onto the beach risk not only their undercarriages in the saltwater, but being swept away, left too long. You might guess the local tow company does a lucrative business hauling same out if the car owners wander too far down the beach. Neptune and Circe have no such problems. They just catch one of the outbound riptide horses to get back out to their digs.