Black Seal Portraiture

Almost finished with contributors’ portraits for The Black Seal website. I volunteered for the job (heck, I invented the job) as a way to make our fictional contributors seem more real. Disquising a fiction by creating a larger one. It’s been an interesting exercise.

I don’t do portrait work generally and the few times I have I’ve usually either already known the person pretty well or had the person in front of me. For this project I’m working off a photo or two emailed to me from a far off land. I don’t know how close I’ve gotten to representing any of these guys. I’ve had to invent expressions when the ones in the photos didn’t match the mood I wanted. I’ve knocked off a pound or two. I’ve drawn more eyeglasses in the last couple months than I probably have in the last couple of years.

Once these last two are finished (hopefully tonight) I’ve got four more largish illustrations and I’m done with my allotment for issue #3. I believe that January is the intended publication date. The website will probably update sometime around then as well. I’ll make note of it when it happens.

Work continues slowly on The Cauldron. I’m debating whether I want to even commit to a regular posting schedule. I know I’ll have the first (and probably the second) page done by the First but I wouldn’t bet anything on whether I’d be ready for even biweekly publication in the first half of 2004.

I’ve promised Derek that I’d have the Dictionary illustrations for Mandate of Heaven finished by the end of the year. The work itself isn’t difficult. Finding a place to spread out my reference material and the time to work at it in between Aged Mother duty, household chores and reminding Nizzibet that, yes, she is My Favorite Everything, is the magic trick.