October 2022 Calendar — danse macabre (ish)

These calendar pages are made possible by patrons, who get it a little bit early, along with alternative colourways, and other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art: patreon.com/tanaudel. It is also supported by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: ko-fi.com/tanaudel.

For this October, here are some dancing skeletons! What more can I say, except that any incorrect choreography is because the skeletons learned their moves from the movies.

Here are the early sketches — first roughly working out the movements, then filling in the bone structure (and referring to previous skeletal designs, so I could be inaccurate in the same ways).

And the design is up — in blue and pink — on Redbubble as prints, scarves, bags, cases, etc (along with other Halloween designs).

Below (for personal use) are the printable versions — one pre-coloured and one to colour in yourself.

If you like them and/or like supporting artists, you can contribute to the calendar (and get it and other behind-the-scenes things early) at patreon.com/tanaudel (starts at US$1/month) or tip me a few dollars through Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/tanaudel. Either is greatly appreciated! And of course many previous designs are available as prints etc on Redbubble and Spoonflower.

Also, I have a very occasional mailing list (not a newsletter), if you’d like to keep up with any major announcements: Mailing List Sign-Up

October Calendar — Bats!

Note: This calendar is supported by patrons, who get it a little bit early, along with other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art: patreon.com/tanaudel, and also by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: ko-fi.com/tanaudel. 

Here is the October calendar — a simple frolic of star-eating bats.

It began, as usual, in pen and ink — here’s a close-up. I’ve been drawing maps and bats all week, and have become very inky as a result.

Ink drawing of a bat chasing a star

And it is now up as a repeating pattern on various things (dresses, cases, scarves…) on Redbubble — and there’s a collection there of previous Halloween-adjacent designs, too (including more bats, and musical skeletons).

So here (for personal use) are the printable versions — one pre-coloured and one to colour in yourself. If you like them and/or like supporting the arts, you can contribute to the calendar (and get it and other behind-the-scenes things early) at patreon.com/tanaudel (starts at US$1/month!) or by buying me a coffee or two through Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/tanaudel.

October Calendar — Musical skeletons

Note: This calendar is supported by patrons, who get it a little bit early, along with other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art: patreon.com/tanaudel, and also by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: paypal.me/tanaudel. 
Further note: My first book, Flyaway, is out! It’s an Australian Gothic story (so perfect for October), from Tor.com (US) and Picador (Aus) and is available through most of the usual places. And my second book, Travelogues: vignettes from trains in motion comes out in October. It is available to pre-order from Brain Jar Press and most of the usual online places, and is also just the right size to post to people who like words and trains and travel.

Welcome to October! It is spring, here, so it’s difficult to get properly spooky — the trees are turning purple and red and white and the bush stone-curlews are sobbing in the shrubberies.

So here, for this month’s calendar, is an orchestra for a danse macabre.

And I’ve made it into a repeating pattern, so it is up on Redbubble on various things (shirts, scarves, phone covers, etc).

And here (for personal use) are the printable versions (including a bonus purely pumpkin-coloured one). If you like them and/or like supporting the arts, you can contribute to the calendar (and get it and other behind-the-scenes things early) at patreon.com/tanaudel (starts at US$1/month!) or through the tip jar at paypal.me/tanaudel.

October calendar: Cold hands

Fairy tales are famously hard on the feet (per Kelly Link’s “Travels With The Snow Queen”), but they aren’t kind to hands, either.

So here, for Halloween (and with the very excellent support of my patrons) is a collection of specific and general fairy-tale hands: spindle-pricked, scissor wielding, changed to silver, unlocking doors… (I’m including a non-blue-handed version, for those less spookily inclined, but the black-and-blue really does look rather like the colour schemes in Edmund Dulac’s fairy tale illustrations).

I also really like the underlay-colours here. Still want to work up a design like this without lines, but I keep getting distracted by detail. I should start with silhouettes.

I’ve also created a repeating pattern of this design, and it is now up on Redbubble on notebooks, dresses, etc (as part of my Halloween and Fairytale collections) (and if you like fabric by the yard, I’m waiting for test prints from Spoonflower). Incidentally, Girls Running From Houses (from last October) is now a repeating pattern and is on there too.

Edit to add: I’ve added the blue background (pink hand) version to Redbubble, too: Take My Hands.

The files below are for personal use and — as I mentioned — are done with the help of my wonderful supporters on Patreon (who also get sneak-peeks, variant colours, stationery, new Daleks, etc). If you’d like to join as a patron (from $1!) or otherwise throw a few coins in the tip jar to help the calendar keep happening, that would be very welcome — the calendar is fun, but takes a lot of time.

Note re links: I’m experimenting with affiliate links, which means I might get paid a small commission if someone buys something after clicking a link on my site. This is my first attempt, so I’m really just testing out the program links at this point!

Halloween edit

I’ve updated my Redbubble store to include a Halloween category, bringing together (and updating) a few old pieces, with some new bats and skeletons thrown in for good measure.

In particular, I’ve updated Girls Running From Houses to be a repeating pattern and put it on a few more items, including (by request) hardcover journals.

October Calendar – skeletons

The October calendar is here, with the support of my patrons (who get it early, along with stationery and other things!).

Here is a door hanger from last month’s design

It is spring here (and a warm one!) but I know that is not the primary festive focus of friends in other hemispheres. So this month it is rather happy skeletons.

You can print them either pre-coloured, or to colour in yourself. And if you have a spare $1, please do consider supporting me on Patreon, which helps make the calendars (and more!) possible.

In other news: The harpies are up on Redbubble as T-shirts, notebooks, scarves etc; The River Bank has been published and is very beautiful; the new limited edition Angela Slatter story The Tallow Wife (illustrated by me!) is available at Conflux this weekend, and we are both here to sign it; I will be going to the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio at the beginning of November, and (all going well) will have original art for sale there.

 

October calendar

Some spooky things in trees for October!

I did this at the last minute, which is why there is so much going on in the picture. I also watched a lot of Frost tonight. And did some other illustrations. And it is 2am, good grief. My eyes basically look like the eyes in these pictures.

I changed the order in which I coloured the under-layers, and am getting closer to a useful effect.

By clicking on the images below, you can print the calendar either pre-coloured or for colouring in.

 

And I’ve put it up on Redbubble, too, on assorted things.

American sketchbook 2014 part 2 – Boston and Salem

Note: If you’d like to see more detail, just click on an image. You should go through to its Flickr page where you can look at a larger version of it.

The first part of the report is at Part 1 – New York, New York

I caught the bus from New York to Boston, through hours of autumn foliage. Here are some tree sketches from a moving vehicle, trying to approximate colour with a limited range of pens, and to catch the shape and pattern of leaves from a distance and at speed.

Boston! Where the squirrels are tough and muscular and will beat you up for food. Also, Leif Erikson.

A visit with Theodora Goss, full of books and fairytales. Then off to the Goya exhibition at the MFA! It is always striking to see paintings in the life. In the case of the Goyas, there was such a wonderful, candid, intense, scribbly nature to the art – both texture (ink and engravings) and air. The Family of the Infante Don Luis is enchantingly candid, like a photo during the setup for a family photoshoot – some are posed, some are wandering in or distracted by an adjustment, one man grins directly at the viewer…

Lively and all of them full of more than one story – full of story.

 

(I also visited the Jamie Wyeth exhibit, but was running out of time so only sketched one seagull).

I then visited my first Blick Art Materials store, which was marvellous. Fortunately, I was travelling light on this leg, having sent my luggage ahead with Kelly to Northampton.  And on Thursday evening, I took the ferry to Salem.

Halloween is an interesting time to visit Salem! Between the costumes, the views of early colonial American history are frequent and fascinated me because the visual vocabulary is so different from the corresponding period in Australia. Our European images really start off with Georgian aesthetics.

Here is the detail of some notes on the progression of gravestones – the skull-and-wings which is most common in the earlier, pragmatic, puritan, ‘in the midst of life we are in death’, and is replaced by romantic imagery of angels, willows and urns.

The Nathanael Mather inscription “an aged person that had seen but nineteen winters in the world” was used by Hawthorne in one of his stories, but I am not entirely sure what it means.

Next, the Peabody Essex Museum, which was full of small wonders, and a brace of brave figureheads.

A lovely little velocipede. And I did visit the House of the Seven Gables, of interest for many reasons, including that the restoration for tourists was based on a novel rather than the history of the book, and is old enough (over 100 years) to of itself be of historical interest.

By now it was Halloween properly. I sat out on the sidewalk with the neighbours to man a candy table in the cold (we had warming beverages), then went out to roam the streets, eat deep-fried confectionary and sketch costumes.

 

Next in the series is Part Three: Western Massachusetts and World Fantasy Convention

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This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts.

The Dalek of Sleepy Hollow (with bonus Austen)

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Halloween and Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. There is a lovely edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham, and this Dalek is encountering Rackham’s Ichabod Crane.

Growing up in Australia, Halloween was not an event – my mother, however, had many stories from her childhood in America, so my image of Halloween is in soft nostalgic shades, being made up of those tales, the costumes in E.T. and readings of poor Ichabod Crane’s misadventure with a pumpkin in Sleepy Hollow.

Australian pumpkins are very different from American ones, but I still consider them an unsettling vegetable. In my experience, they climb trees and are often found hiding under the bedclothes – I am not the only visitor to my parents’ house to have had this encounter.

It is 200 years since the first of Jane Austen’s novels was published. I was away from my usual equipment, but drew the following as part of the general spirit of celebration on Twitter this morning (aware that the first published was not P&P):

In other news: I did manage to get a picture up for last week’s Illustration Friday: Fuel (because not everything is about Daleks, yet). There have been some lovely reviews of Steampunk!, and this one from Karen Meisner at io9 mentions my comic.

Five things I did not buy in America

Two weeks before I flew, a… unique individual gave me two valuable insights. One was that I would meet the love of my life in America (I either didn’t, or don’t know it yet). The other was to buy two things which are not obtainable over here. I will not tell you what they were because then Errantry would turn up on completely different google searches to the current standards of “mr squiggle knit” and “teapot microwave Sydney proof”. I did not buy those two things.

Here are five other things I did not buy, but should have:

1. Autumn merchandise: Fabric and paper autumn leaves, oak leaf cookie cutters and a particularly hideous purple-and-orange owl-patterned bandanna.
2. More cheap Moleskines (I did buy two).
3. I heart NY t-shirts, ironic alteration, for the purposes of.
4. Novels. $8 new! Why, why, why did I not buy more books?
5. Cinnamon rolls. With cream cheese icing/sauce. More than two of.