It Lives!

Well, hello again! I’m back.

    It’s been more than two years since I’ve posted here in The Watcher Tree. I’ve been busy, to say the least, and I’ve missed updating this blog. I want to fix that.

    Sorry for the long, long, long absence. If you’re still following The Watcher Tree after all this time, I thank you so much for hanging in there with me. This blog has mostly been an informal place for me to share my projects, working methods and my continuing progress as I muddle through being an illustrator/writer/cartoonist. Occasionally, I’ll lapse into geeky posts without warning, going on about such subjects as Doctor Who or Doctor Strange or Blake’s 7 or the Pre-Raphaelite artists or Romantic poets or...

   Despite my professional illustration work and commission work, I still hold down a full-time day-job at a bookstore, as well as Saturday part-time job to help ends meet. I still do this for a steady paycheck and health insurance, which I most certainly need. This often makes me wish I was more prolific as my artist, but there are late nights and early mornings (with lots of coffee for fuel) and lunchbreaks in the bookstore for creative time.   

    Around my job(s), I’ve managed to keep making stuff (always, always making stuff) as well as practicing my story-writing techniques. (I’ll confess right now, without shame, to writing pseudonymous fanfiction. It’s good practice—and fun!) As far as my progress as an illustrator goes during the past few years, I’ve been able to post quick snippets about my projects on Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt and Tumblr, sharing sketches and finished pictures to whomever wants to see them. My longer, more in-depth posts about projects have mostly been on Patreon these days, where I have some wonderful supporters who help keep me in gouache and brushes. In return, they get artwork and commissions from me as my thanks. (You know who you are: you guys rock and I can’t thank you enough.)

    But, sadly, I haven’t had a lot of time to come back and update the The Watcher Tree. I hope to remedy that now.

    Looking back at my own posts here, I see how much I’ve grown and changed since I first began it back in 2012. And I’m still learning.

    People have asked “What’s happened to Pre-Raphernalia?” 

 
    A lot of the work I highlighted early on in this blog was from my cartoon series Pre-Raphernalia, which is currently on hiatus, waiting grumpily for me to get back to it. I’ve been so busy with (paid) assignments that it became difficult to do any new work for it, despite many cartoon ideas for it left unfinished in my sketchbooks. Despite it being comprised mostly of these sketchbook drawings, the Pre-Raphernalia blog took quite a long time to put together, especially with all the added historical liner notes.




     However, I love the work I put into Pre-Raphernalia and I hope I will eventually be able to return to it again in the future. My love and geekiness for the Pre-Raphaelite artists is undiminished.

    My novel Heaven and the Dead City, which I posted about quite a lot in the earlier days of The Watcher Tree, had become a monster of work that I realized was beyond me as a graphic novel, so I made the decision to turn it into an illustrated prose novel instead. Something a lot of people don’t know about me is that I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been drawing. I have as many filled notebooks of writing as I do sketchbooks, and that’s a bookcase and a half. It’s always been my dream to combine my two loves into a single format. However, painting an entire graphic novel by hand had become impossible with my current schedule. Perhaps writing it as an illustrated book instead—while is still a tremendous amount of work—is a more attainable goal. I’ll certainly let you know. 

    So, what have I been doing in the past two years since I last goofily posted about Avon from Blake’s 7 and all my Doctor Who fan art? Things that have surprised me.

    Once more, if you’ve been with me this long, thank you! And if you’re new to my blog, please bear with me. As a middle-aged woman finally finding my artistic stride after all these years, I hope I can also help inspire creativity in others by writing about my attempts. It really doesn’t matter if you’re eight or eighty, if you’re using crayons or acrylic gouache, just do your thing: creativity has no expiration date, art is NOT a competition and we NEED more artists in this world.  

                  Sorry for being so long-winded. Future posts may be a lot shorter. 

                                                        Here we go!