Working with Artists
I recently read an interesting blog post by Jim Hines talking about the process of the cover art design for his novel Snow Queen, and I was struck by how similar it seemed to be to the process I went through to get my website art, so I thought a post about that might be of interest to readers.
I started thinking about trying to get some cool website art when I saw the art my friend Juliette Wade got for her site. Since I’d started having a website, I’d relied mostly on creative commons artwork and photography to decorate it and make it look pretty, but I was never quite satisfied with it. After asking Juliette how much she’s spent for her artwork, I spent some time browsing artist over at Deviant Art (which was where she’d found her artist). I did find quite a few artists that I thought probably could have produced beautiful artwork, but I was stymied by the fact that many of them were overseas and some of them had no English on their DA pages. Some of the artists I seriously considered though were Mauricio Herrera, Carolina Eade, Terese Nielsen, and Rudolph Herczog.
Related Posts:
February 9, 2011 3 Comments
Revamped Website Revealed!
Back in August, I commissioned artists Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon to do some art work for my website and I couldn’t be happier with what they made for me. They did the original art for my Realms of Fantasy story “The Hearts of Men” and I so loved that piece that I just knew that they could make some fine quality art for the website. And indeed, it turned out beautiful. All of their work is exquisite and it’s really worth a trip over to their website to see what they’ve done for companies like RoF, TOR, Night Shade Books, and Pearson Education.
About the art work itself, the four characters are the major players in my Aztec fantasy novel The Gardens of Omeyocan (unpublished, but close to completion). The woman is Mayahuel, goddess of the maguey plant. Below her on that left side is Tezcatlipoca, or the Smoking Mirror, god of darkness and deceit. On the right hand side, at the top, is the legendary priest-king of the Toltec, Ce Acatl Topiltzin, who is also the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl, god of civilization. And below him is the war god Mextli–usually known as Huitzilopochtli. All of them are characters I write about quite a bit in my work, so they were all natural choices for the artwork.
Please do take a look around. The fiction section features fragments of the original sketches for the art work and they are just as lovely as the full-color versions.
Related Posts:
January 9, 2011 12 Comments
Website is Complete!
Finally, after about two weeks worth of work, and lots of stumbles and hair-pulling along the way, the website is now fully integrated into WordPress. Please do stop by and take a look around. I’ve expanded the fiction section to include notes on each story, and added more entries to the resources section. For back-end fun, try this link, or type a word into the search bar that you know won’t be on the site (I’ve tested and “porcupines” does not show up anywhere on the site 
). The header features eight different images that rotate each time you refresh a page (sometimes anyway. The randomness sometimes means the same header appears 3 times in a row.).
Now that this is all done, I can finally go back to working on the novel. It feels like it’s been far too long since I have….
ETA: btw, the url is now www.tlmorganfield.com
Related Posts:
August 30, 2010 2 Comments
Two Blogs, One for Official Business
I spent some time trying to get the plugins to import from LJ into WordPress to work but after having to delete over a thousand posts in batches of twenty (because I couldn’t find a plugin to mass delete them, and the plugin I used duplicates comments each time you update because it doesn’t do just newest…), I’ve decided that I’m going to make the WordPress blog a separate entity from the LJ one, and will use it only for official author announcements. LJ will continue to be the place where I do my ordinary everyday posts and everything that I post to WP will be cross-posted there, so those watching my LJ need not change a thing. I’ve added a link to my LJ for those who might be interested in following more than just my work news. I’m going to do some posts to populate my WP blog so it doesn’t look so pathetic (probably stealing from some of my technical entries on LJ, so beware upcoming repeated posts from the past. Feel free to ignore them if they look familiar.). I’m also going to do the long-overdue 4th installment of “Using Critiques”.
Thanks for the patience!
Related Posts:
August 16, 2010 No Comments
