Character Sketches

We’ve moved house again dear reader. And finally after more than a month in the new house, I’m rested and settled enough for my mind to start to actually want to create. I wanted to force it, since I have time to spend doing fun things now thanks to summer vacation, I have a LIST of things I want to create/do/make/write… but after so much change and struggle, the mind would not be forced. So I went outside and enjoyed the beautiful summer weather, or tackled another stack of boxes, and let the creativity just rest. I didn’t even have the mental power to read fiction before last week. Yes, it’s been bad.

However, slowly, slowly, I’m getting snatches of creativity, like bright sparkling bubbles, floating through my mind. A paragraph here, a writeup in my head about a funny thing that happened with the kids to send my husband who is on deployment, a fun image to run on Midjourney…. Snippets I might want to post here. It all is helping me feel better about actually getting back to creating again, besides making food to feed two hungry kids.

A few days ago, one of the writers in a discord support group wanted help envisioning a character for a story she is writing. I’ve helped her with creating visual character sketches before, it’s one of the ways which I most enjoy using Midjourney. This doesn’t match her vision for the character in her story, but I thought this lady was too interesting to leave hidden.

And I’m gradually getting back into creating art every day again, after taking the last several months off. The break was nice, and it’s good to come back and start creating book covers for the daily art challenge. Each day there is a different book title, and you can either play it straight and true to the book, or you can take artistic liberties and put your own spin on it. If' it’s a personal favorite, I usually play it straight, but if I don’t know the book, I get creative. In the covers below, I put placeholder names on the cover layouts. Proper placement of the title and author name is more tricky than you’d expect! I have no advice to give on that topic, I just fidget with things until it “looks right”.

All images created by Mariam Ehme, rendered with Midjourney. Cover layouts were created in InDesign, and available for adoption to a good home for a small fee.