For those who actually like to read my books: they're completely free for a month, as far as I can tell. Smashwords is having a promotional period, where they are giving the books away (books from cooperating authors, anyway). Disclaimer: just a very few books are still not free, I observed just a moment ago.
Anyway, it has been an education being on the
DeviantArt website. (I did not insert an exclamation point, in case it was interpreted as a wink and a nod; the
Deviants —as they call themselves—above all, take themselves
very seriously indeed. Those who become disillusioned with the site and the system seem to leave quite promptly, and then, as often as not, rejoin, because they miss the site!)
To really understand what is going on, you only need to visit it. The flavor of the site is different if you use your phone than if you use a desktop; in either case, you can look at thousands of images of artwork, almost all original art, though a few—a very small minority—are reprocessed images from the Web. You will find a few poems, a few short stories, but the vast majority of images are original art.
The genres of the graphic art on the site form an interesting study. They flow from any of (1)
:Anime-Manga type images, or from the video game universe; (2) Fan-Art; this means art produced by young artists (most of them are in their teens and twenties) as homage to movies and movie heroes; for instance there are images of Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, and even some art showing them together, and interacting in various ways; (3) Fantasy art based on fantasy literature, which is, in turn, based loosely on Anime legends, or great modifications of Irish, Norse, German, and French (and sometimes Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and even African) Gothic stories and legends.
The techniques, or the media used, are also an interesting study. There is (A) Anime-style art. This is a sub-genre of ordinary animation art, but it has a lot of convention, borrowed from Japanese animation. Instead of a continuous spectrum of emotions that are depicted on the faces of the characters, there appears to be (and I could be quite wrong here) standard emotions that are depicted in codified ways. Of course, there's nothing to prevent an artist from departing from the standard codified palette; but a skillful artist can depict any one of the standard emotions with just a few strokes of the brush, or pen. In the manga genre (Comics derived from Japanese illustrated stories), this is especially true. In the anime genre, in addition to the expressions, there are certain motions that indicate particular situations or interactions. Furthermore, the voice-actors can, using a not-very-wide range of vocal expressions, convey a surprisingly wide range of emotions, by appealing to convention. Of course, animation with full sound is not present in any significant volume on the DeviantArt site; you are sent off-site, to YouTube, or other sites to watch and listen to full video and sound examples. Then, there is an interesting technique based on software, which results in (3D) animation! In this method, an artist acquires one of several programs, which generate, using computer graphics, a a surprisingly realistic-looking character, equipped with any one of a set of costumes (usually bought separately, or built with difficulty from scratch), with hair of one of several possible colors (bought separately, usually), with any desired eye color, in any desired background, etc. The software itself is essentially free; the characters, the things they carry—weapons, wands, books, etc—need to be obtained separately, as well as the clothing and other accoutrements. (The character is actually an object of the software, using the term object in the technical sense. In fact, all the gadgets are objects, even including such things as shoes and eyeglasses.)
Then, there is conventional painting, (P), which is photographed and uploaded. There is also digital painting, (D), where the drawing is done using a mouse, on a computer, or other mouse-like devices, called pens or brushes. Often a brush is understood to be a program setting that is connected to a mouse or pen inside the software. There is, in my mind, no big difference between painting and digital painting; less difference than there is between oils and acrylic paints, as far as a non-painter is concerned. Of course, there are all sorts of other media, and all sorts of papers and canvases, the differences between which are totally sacred to artists.
There is an interesting discipline called Cosplay, for which I have not thought of an acronym. In this, people dress up in costumes, like Superman, or Zelda—a mythical character from a video game from the eighties, or even earlier—and enact scenes, or still tableaux, from the movies or games concerned. Sometimes they pose in scenes that were never parts of the original movies or stories, such as Superman beheading Batman, just to give an example. (One hopes that this is never enacted anywhere!)
There is a genre called digital photo-manipulation, where software similar to Photoshop (an Adobe product) is used to modify an ordinary photograph. Above and beyond the usual sorts of things we're accustomed to calling photoshopped, there are amazing different modifications that are possible, and virtually impossible to detect as a modification.
Women
Have I written about this already? I am so annoyed with this problem—which I am about to describe to you shortly—that I complain about it in my head to my imaginary friends all the time!
Most of the women depicted in the artwork are heavy-breasted, and most of them narrow-waisted, almost all wide-hipped, and many of them semi-nude. Now, I would expect that women drawn by young guys: teens and twenties, would be that way. Women of that sort probably populate the wet dreams of pubescent guys, (and possibly men all the way up to their eighties). But even female artists have bought into these aesthetic values, at least on DeviantArt.
Now, let's think about this. If you're depicting a goddess of fertility, for instance, you would—or, at least I would—represent her with full breasts, to convey fertility and motherhood. She would be gentle-eyed, and her pose would be somehow accepting, ready to embrace. If I'm depicting a warrior goddess, on the other hand, she would be sharp-eyed, ready to fight, well-muscled, equipped with effective weapons, her hair tied back, all business. But no; the battle-goddesses on DeviantArt are shown practically nude, wielding fantastic, totally ineffective swords, or ornamental lances; their breasts hanging out, their hair whipping about, likely to get the goddess killed merely by getting entangled in something. I'll just stop here. The artists on DeviantArt either know little or nothing about fighting, or would rather sacrifice martial realism for the sake of a sexy piece of art. To me, a realistic fighting figure is sexy; the look of cool concentration, the focus in the eyes; that's sexy. But . . . oh, it is so frustrating. The culture on the site, moreover, is to not offend with any sort of cutting criticism. Any criticisms must be prefaced with long and abject apologies.
Information accompanying artwork
Each piece of art is accompanied with optional information, and its title. The titles are sometimes self-explanatory, and that is all one needs. But also, often, without a detailed explanation, it is impossible to figure out what the artwork represents. For instance, a piece of art showing a girl kissing a boy, could represent the girl from such-and-such a comic series (a
manga series, for instance) kissing one of the boys from such-and-such a videogame, in such-and-such a scenario, imagined by such-and-such a member of DeviantArt. Often it is possible for a member of DeviantArt to actually request someone to draw such an encounter, and the requester will pay for the artwork. This is called a
commission. I knew that it was possible to commission a book cover, and I did. The young lady whom I commissioned to create a cover for
Little John Finds a Friend, one of the last couple of stories in the
Helen saga, delivered a simple but effective cover, with which I was completely satisfied. My original cover, and the new commissioned cover are shown below.
I think, within the parameters of the commission, the young artist gave me something that is eminently reasonable. The story was not highly dramatic, and the cover is appropriate.
Going back to the Information accompanying a piece of art, sometimes these information fields are completely empty. Sometimes they are filled with a sort of alphabet soup of references, which refer to various anime videos, or computer games, or movies, and even modifications of these sorts of things. For instance the Mortal Kombat series of games are referred to as MKI, MK2, and so on; the Final Fantasy series of games are FF, FFII, FFVII, FF10, or something like that. The Final Fantasy games are associated with movies.
Of course, we are aware now, that it is possible to make actual videos using this technology as a basis. We know that it is possible to make an object that can be animated, such as Gollum, from The Lord of the Rings, where the motion is borrowed from a physical actor. (This is how they make video games these days.) People have been angry at how the Speaker of the House of Representatives was depicted in a video as if she was drunk. Whoever did that did not realize that it would be altogether too easy to create a video of a drunken President; or perhaps they thought that actual videos of the President behaving in a silly way were digitally manipulated. (And maybe they were. I sincerely hope that did not happen.)
Generally speaking, the artists on the site are actually incredibly good: both the photographic artists, and those who create images from scratch. The artists who use 3D software are also excellent; they must use a wide range of techniques that manipulate the basic objects that they have procured, to deliver some image, which they must subsequently tinker with in Photoshop or other secondary program, to get the result they want. Some of them can deliver miraculous results, and the others are still learning how to do that. There are, obviously, elements of both programming, and digital image-crafting involved; it is an entirely new field of art.
For the intensely dramatic story of Helen and Sharon—which even I am at a loss as to how to characterize accurately—I commissioned a cover from a different artist, who has promised me a cover in early July. I intend to use the cover regardless of how appropriate it is, but I get the feeling that it is going to be a challenge for the artist. To begin with, my mental image of Helen is in flux; I imagine the violinist / conductor / singer in different ways at different times; and I asked the artist to represent her in two panels: one showing Helen, the Conductor, and one showing Merit, the fighter. I said, they are the same person; the one on the right is heavily disguised. She made it clear that she was not going to be able to depict a woman who weighed exactly 165 pounds, and I confessed, yes, that does seem to be beyond the realm of the possible!
Heels
I myself seldom wear very high heels, except perhaps at Halloween, and I detest the modern trend of women wearing enormously high heels all the time. It's even worse to see almost every woman on TV and in the movies wear higher than moderate heels. But most inexplicable is the every woman in DeviantArt images is shown wearing unbelievably high heels. I shall not speculate about the causes of this phenomenon.
Politics
When the artists give a glimpse of their political leanings, they tend to be left-leaning. Many of them—very delicately—deplore the rising sea levels, the rising temperatures, the dying species, the increasing poverty, and the wars dragging on, and the rising numbers of refugees. Occasionally, there is an outburst from the opposite side, with someone complaining essentially about either immigration, or about liberals and their speech. The worst that can be said about artists and their philosophies of life is that they're more concerned with whatever art they're involved with than with the state of the world around them. You seldom see artists anxious about bequeathing billions of their ill-gotten gains to their children!
One Last Thing
One of the silliest things I have noticed in hand-drawn artwork on DeviantArt is: garters. If you think about it, with most modern hosiery, you don't need to wear garters. Garters are used, more in the glamour photography industry than anywhere else, simply as an accessory. So, when you see a fighter-goddess wearing garters, you have to think: something is wrong here.
An interesting cultural phenomenon is taking place, and may have a bearing on the use of garters, among many other things: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese young people are insatiable in their search for thematic inspiration: stories, art, theater, and music. There are numerous references to classical Greek gods and goddesses, and the bare outlines of disemboweled classical myths are joyfully refilled with modern imaginings in the spirit of Godzilla. Olympus has been moved into galaxies far, far away, and slightly (or considerably) different battles are being fought in this new arena, with the gods and goddesses using lasers and lightning bolts, and powerful bolts of psychic energy. The conventional propensities of the gods of Olympus are often replaced with modern motivations. Giants and ghouls and evils spirits are replaced with robots, cyborgs, and other fearsome antagonists. (We don't have to go very far to see examples of this that have been already seen and accepted by everyone: Tolkien's orks are, to my mind, modern substitutes for Hades's armies.)
Everyone indulges in this sort of borrowing. Meanwhile, in search of any sort of inspiration, the folks on DeviantArt are not held back by the actual plotlines of the existing stories in which various characters appear. If they feel like it, they interpret a character from one story
in the style of another story, and have him or her interact
in the style of a third story, to produce a scene of their liking! This is certainly creativity at work; nobody complains about a drawing that contains anything at all (unless, of course, it is shown to children). But sometimes, I feel, these 'Deviants' would be well served to know the original stories of the classics a lot better; they're missing a lot, in stuffing those characters into their own little stories. The old myths were
epic not so much in the sense of the wide swath of destruction that their fights caused; they were epic in the sense of the far-reaching consequences that those ancients attributed to those conflicts. The epic battles of modern youth fiction too often resembles a huge storm in an enormous teacup.
Lalitha, meanwhile, priced to move as a free download, has not sold a single copy, which is frustrating for me. I think that story, which is not an essential part of the Sharon story, except for establishing essential background for the character Sita, is nevertheless a lovely, romantic story on its own, with several fascinating characters, even though they're essentially adults.
