First responders are heroes. We all know that. They’re the ones who get their hands dirty, and take the hits no one else has sack for. They fill the row of desks at the front of the class where it’s harder to goof off. They give mouth to mouth resuscitation to gross people with hairy lip-moles and bad breath. They run into burning buildings when everyone else is running out. They set the tone of the debate.
It takes stones to put yourself out there and be a first responder.
I’m talking about people like Francois, the first of three contest entrants to have submitted something within 24 hours of my announcing the Warding Contest. He wrote:
Peat
The photo is of me when I was young and had Chickenpox. I thought I looked pretty bad ass so I decided to ward myself.
Hope you like it.
Francois
He also included a kickass “night” version:
The next hero is Francine from the UK, who writes:
Dear Peter,
I heard about your contest and think it’s a great idea and would be loads of fun to do so here’s my entry :D. It’s a picture of my guinea pig zucchini.
He’s completely warded against huma- sorry, corelings.
Love Francine!
Finally we have the brave Lisa, who says:
Hi Peter, Hi Lauren,
I hope you like this one. It’s a picture of me with a mindwarp.
So I had this idea for the best contest ever. I asked Lauren if she was down with it, and she was, so here we go.
The contest is simple:
Step 1: Go to the Creations page on my website and scroll down until you find the 18 black & white ward symbols designed by Lauren K. Cannon. If you hover your mouse over them, you can see them by name. Click to enlarge, and right-click to download.
Step 2: Ward something. Anything. You can use as many or as few of the symbols as you like. You can draw the wards yourself or use the digital files. You can also carve, etch, paint, tattoo, brand, stencil, cut, silkscreen, henna, airbrush, or otherwise render the wards. Any medium. Any object. You can go all the way from making a full portable Messenger circle to just warding your sneakers with a Sharpie during history class. Whatever. Just make sure that when you’re done, demons aren’t going to want to go anywhere near what you warded.
Step 3: Take a digital picture of whatever you warded and send it to peat@www.petervbrett.com no later than July 1, 2010. If you want to physically send your entry, let me know in the e-mail and I’ll tell you how to do that. Please include your full name and the mailing address you would like your prize to go to, should you win. (I promise not to be a dick and share your address with anyone or use it for any other purpose without permission.)
That’s it. Lauren and I will review the entries and pick our five favorites. The lucky Warders will each receive a print of the new Renna painting gracing the home page, signed by both Lauren and myself:
If there are a lot of entries, I will also throw in some other prizes, like signed books and whatnot.
More news to come as the story develops. Good warding!
Hey all. I hope everyone likes the new site design. I know it’s something of a Desert Spear spoiler, but Lauren’s painting was just so amazing that I could only wait so long to post it. Hopefully most of my regular readers have had a chance to read the book by now. If not, well, don’t worry TOO much. There are lots more surprises to come inside. I’ll be talking more about the painting (and starting a contest to win signed posters!) soon.
In the meantime, I wanted to point readers to something interesting that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The Fantasy Book Club on Goodreads has chosen The Warded Man as their book of the month for May, and has opened a series of discussion threads, including one for author questions which I will be visiting and answering regularly throughout the month. Feel free to stop by and interrogate me.
Topics in the thread include the Painted/Warded name change, questions about the magic system and the number of books in the series, how becoming a father has affected my writing, and why I chose to include themes of religious conflict and sexual assault in the story. I think it’s worth reading if you’re interested. You can see the Warded Man discussion here, though you will have to take five minutes to register (free) with Goodreads and join the Fantasy Book Club in order to comment.
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains Desert Spear spoilers. SPOILER ALERT!
With the unveiling of our latest secret project, Peter asked me to write a guest post to show some behind-the-scenes action about creating the awesome image of Renna that now graces the site’s homepage.
My name is Lauren K Cannon; I’m a freelance digital illustrator. You can see more of my work at http://navate.com.
Peter and I go back a few years. We first worked together in 2007, when I designed the first round of ward symbols and painted a portrait of his title character from The Painted Man, which at that point had absolutely no notoriety whatsoever, as it was an unpublished debut novel by an unknown author. Both the portrait and the wards were initially intended to decorate Peter’s website. But once The Painted Man was released, everyone decided it was really, really awesome. The image of Arlen went on to become the cover of The Great Bazaar short story collection, and the wards—well, they are everywhere these days!
More recently, I designed the second round of ward symbols found in The Desert Spear and created the illustration on those awesome bookplates Peter’s been plastering everywhere. Watching Peter’s ascent from unknown to best-seller has pretty much been the coolest thing ever.
After the success of The Painted Man, Peter told me he wanted a new character portrait for when The Desert Spear came out, this time of a girl named Renna. We meet Renna as a child very briefly in the first book, and she develops radically over the course of The Desert Spear. Painting Renna clobbering some demons was never a question–it had to be done. But it’s also a major spoiler, so we decided to keep the project under wraps until people had the chance to find out themselves exactly what Renna becomes.
Peter gave me an ARC of The Desert Spear so I could get to know the character before I painted her, and the end of the book ended up giving me a perfect reference point for the illustration. Initially, when I did compositional sketches for Peter to review, I had a more general action shot in mind.
But the more we talked the more we both gravitated towards illustrating a scene right out of the novel. Chapter 30, where we first see Renna being badass, was an obvious choice, but first an issue with the character sketch had to be addressed. Apparently I drew Renna’s knife WAY too small. Peter kindly corrected me:
I should have known Harl was compensating for something.
For reference, I built a scale model of the knife out of some mat board, modeling the design after the avatar image Peter drew for Renna’s chapters. I have to do stuff like this a lot for reference material and I can never decide if it makes me feel awesome or silly.
From there we moved onto color concepts… for the artistically inclined, I do my digital work in Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter with a Wacom Intuos4 tablet. We fought a bit between the scene at the beginning of Chapter 30 where she’s lurking above the rock demon, or battling the wood demons a few pages later. I did quick color sketches of both for Peat to choose from. Wood demons won.
The first stages of an image are often quite awkward—I try to get an idea of what will be going on without committing too much. It’s very experimental and normally I hide my work-in-progress images far from public eyes until they are past the “growing pains” stage. Here, all I’ve got is Renna in a defensive position with a scribbled demon looming over her, and other lurking in the background. Important plot elements—her knife and her necklace—are both in hand.
I asked Peter for some help in designing the wood demons. He described them quite sparsely in the books, which I love as a reader but not as an artist. He directed me towards some fan art and official art from foreign editions of the books, and gave me a few insights of his own. From all that I conjured up a creature that was built along the lines of a giant gorilla, but agile and elongated with limbs that could be mistaken for thick tree branches and bark-like body armor.
I started working on the designed of the demons into the main image, and fleshing out the scene some more. Renna’s anatomy is still a mess at this point.
Ah, here it starts to come together!
Finally confident in the pose, I started playing around with the rest of the image. Started to refine the demon a bit and also decided to open up the composition to give the action more breathing room, and to make the demon more imposing. I also pushed the second demon way back so that I could add a third.
Forest painting time. Depending on my mood forests are either incredibly zen or pure torture. This one wasn’t too bad. Some lavender tones started creeping in at this point and I love how it added depth to the color scheme.
Everything is just getting detailed at this point… leaves on the trees, texturing the bark of the demons’ skin, sketching ward patterns onto Renna and tidying up her clothing.
Getting close to being finished here: the forest is finished up, as are the two demons lurking in the back. The main demon is finalized.
Ah, the final stage! I left the details on Renna for last. The knife, the necklace, her braid, and of course her wards. I’d been playing with the layout of her wards on and off throughout the painting’s creation, hiding the sketches on a separate layer. This allowed me to move them around without messing up the figure. It probably sounds bonkers, but figuring out warding patterns is really time consuming and difficult. I ran into the same thing when I painted Arlen. Peter has mentioned he has a sort of math behind how the wards are supposed to interact, but I am glad he hasn’t told me. I have enough trouble making it up as it is. A few finishing touches and splatters of demon ichor, and we’re done:
This is by far my favorite project from Peter. I haven’t had the chance to do many action-based artworks, so it was a great opportunity to challenge myself (always a good thing!). Not to mention, being able to create an image that was so much more immersive than anything I’d done for him before was awesome. Reading fantasy novels as a kid is what got me interested in art in the first place, and now I’ve got a best-selling fantasy author on my client list. Dream come true? Pretty much.
I’ve been lazy about posting pix from the London trip. All that resizing and formatting… feh. But I needed a blog update for today, so I pulled some together. More will follow.
So as many of you know, I snaked into London just before they closed the airports. The above sign was what I saw getting off the tube. The tube, BTW, is what British people call the subway. I would make fun of that, but theirs goes right to the airport, like a fucking civilized modern city, so I was able to zip right to and from Heathrow without spending a fortune on a cab or car rental, or having to wait around forever. I wish New York would get up to speed with that. Getting to JFK or LaGuardia is a pain in the ass.
But I digress.
On Thursday I just got my bearings, had proper English brekkie, and visited some bookstores, like the one my buddy Dave lives next to in Camden Town:
Visiting stores was a mixed blessing, because almost every major bookstore I visited was sold out of Desert Spears. The initial print run was already sold out, and the second printing was still being shipped. Might be days before they had copies.
So on one hand, HOLY SHIT! That is fucking awesome! Sold out all over town! Me! Ha!
On the other hand, you mean to say I just crossed an ocean so I could sign books, and there aren’t any to sign? That is bullcrap. But what can you do?
The next day I visited the fine folks at Harper Collins UK, where they again had a huge display of my books in the lobby. Emma, my editor, says that the display case is under constant video surveillance, because people are constantly trying to swipe the first edition copies of bestselling books it often houses:
After the Harper visit (where I did the video interview I posted the other day), I had a public signing at The Forbidden Planet London Megastore, which was once again a great time.
Two-time Peephole contest winner Dwayne didn’t think I would recognize him, so I called him out in line as soon as he showed up:
“Peephole contest” sounds kind of dirty, now that I think of it…
Anyway, there were awesome Desert Spear posters at London Book Fair:
And at the Voyager Books 15th Anniversary party, photographer Keira snapped a shot of with two of the lovely ladies of Harper Voyager, Alice my publicist (center), and Emma my editor (left). I feel bad that I’ve forgotten the name of the guy with the brown beard. Beautiful women make me forgetful:
First responders are heroes. We all know that. They’re the ones who get their hands dirty, and take the hits no one else has sack for. They fill the row of desks at the front of the class where it’s harder to goof off. They give mouth to mouth resuscitation to gross people with hairy lip-moles and bad breath. They run into burning buildings when everyone else is running out. They set the tone of the debate.
