Alia Terra - Stories from the Dragon Realm

First Stretch Goal Met! (Now what?)
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 11:22:38 PM

Hello, Emily here!

We did it - thank you so much for your support and letting people know about the project. All print books will now be shipped with a custom designed and printed card, hand-signed by both Ava and Matt. They are working together on the design and we're excited to see that reveal!

Ava will be posting here tomorrow with a wonderful update featuring Romanian storytelling. I love this one; I'm excited for you to read it.

Next - at $7500 a hardcover option will be added. (Happy dance for book lovers!) If we keep telling people about the project, we can get there. I believe! Rolling into summer (northside) and Pride month, we're feeling so much hope and excitement this project can be seen and make it all the way to a fully illustrated book! Thanks, again, for your support. And see you tomorrow. : )

- Emily.

The Art Process
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 01:35:36 PM

Hello hello! Matt here. First of all I want to thank each and every one of you for your support this far! Having our main goal funded in under three days is fantastic, and my hopes are high that the ball will keep rolling and folks will keep spreading the love so we can make this the most beautiful book it can be!

My update today is going to be giving a little insight into how I work with pencil, ink, watercolor, and photoshop to create illustrations! If you like behind the scenes glimpses like this, consider upping your pledge to a reward tier that includes the Digital Hoard. One of the digital exclusives we’re including will be a digital artbook containing this sort of process work that goes into the Alia Terra illustrations!

Without further ado, using the Kickstarter image as an example: my process!

I start with thumbnail sketches. Small, rough drawings to figure out the composition of a piece. In the case of this Kickstarter image, I wanted something that alluded to each of our three stories, but also had a large central image.

You can see I chose the bottom most thumbnail, and at the time of sketching it, I was already working out the potential circular images for the corners. These drawings were done in pencil in my Alia Terra sketchbook (yes I now have a sketchbook dedicated specifically to this project!), and colored digitally, in Photoshop. 

The next stage is the rough drawing. And from there, a tighter more detailed drawing, and the inks!

I do the inked drawing on watercolor paper, with a combination of brush and Dr. Ph. Martin’s Black Star Matte ink (for the big lines), and micron (for the small stuff). After inking, I scan the inked lines (to preserve them, for posterity, or in some cases so I might eventually release a coloring book haha) and in the case of this painting, I reduced the size of the inked drawing, and printed it out on a smaller sheet of watercolor paper, four to a page. 

That gets us to my color study stage! I have...a lot of watercolors. And if I tried working every single color into every piece I did, it’d be a mess! So for each larger painting I do, I pick a palette that gets me the best range to suit the mood and lighting and color demands of that piece. In this case, I kept it simple, and used my “default palette” that I’ve developed over the last 10 years of fiddling seriously with watercolor. You can see the little swatches underneath the upper right color study.

With these I was figuring out color, as well as value (the lightness or darkness of things). You might be able to see my notes-telling myself to use the lower left study as a guide for the dragon and the undersea portion, and the upper right for “everything else”.

With the color picked, I stretched my watercolor paper by soaking the ink drawing in water, stapling it to a board, and letting it dry (this helps the painting not to buckle when I apply large washes of paint). Then I got to painting!

Everything gets built up in layers, generally working from large areas to smaller detail, from background to foreground! The last step after finishing the painting is scanning, and making final edits in Photoshop! This was a little bit daunting with this piece as it took SIX scans to get everything because the piece is so large, but I managed! The edits in photoshop focus on making the scan look as close to the original as possible where that’s a good thing, and tweaking things to look better than the original in areas where they can “pop” more!

And that’s that, boiled down to essentials! 

The next update from me will likely showcase my collaboration with author Ava Kelly in the design of the characters - their Romanian folkwear-inspired apparel in particular!

Thanks so much!

The genders of words and pronouns in Romanian
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 07:31:06 AM

Hi! Ava here.

Romanian is a gendered language. Words are feminine or words are masculine. Some words we call neuter (neutral) but those are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. Perhaps trans-words is a better description? Genderfluid?

As a gendered language, some things are inflexible. A dragon is a masculine noun, no matter if the dragon is of the she/her variety. So for a person, the pronoun changes for each one, as it does in English. And for some gendered things, we have different words, for example for “boy cats” (motani) and “girl cats” (pisici). But dragons are always perceived as male, just as tree (copac) is always masculine.

Alia Terra is bilingual. The stories are both in English and Romanian. Some translation occurred. (A lot of it, really!) As such, one of the things I struggled with for the Romanian version was the gender of words. How do I tell people that the dragon, which is a boy-sounding word, is actually a girl-identifying dragon? The grammatical dissonance is there and cannot be removed. We soldier on, because not all dragons are boys. Some of them aren't girls, either.

Here we are, then, at the question of nonbinary genders.

In English, we have pronouns outside of the binary. The old they/them, as a way to refer to people of unknown genders, and now a variety of genders. The new and exciting ones, too: ze/zem, xe/xem, e/em, and many others bringing a plethora of wonderful diversity to spoken language.

What of Romanian? There's el/lui (he/his), ea/ei (she/hers)… and we're done. Almost! We do get a set of neutral pronouns! Dumneasa, in third person. It means, in literal translation, "their lordship" as it's the modern, compact form of "domnia sa." Fancy, isn't it? Except this is part of the formal, polite pronoun set. Dumneasa comes with its gendered versions of dumeaei and dumnealui.

The particle sa (and its declinations) has roots in Latin, from an either/or type of construction. Looks promising, right? Except, if ea/el are she/her, sa is not they. Sa means theirs. Currently, in Romanian, we don't have an official, ungendered, third person pronoun.

In Alia Terra, I had to navigate between the restrictions of this beautiful language and the need to introduce a new way to look at the world around us. Not everything is "boy or girl" and as such, we need new words to paint the reality of present times. As a treat, I used za instead of sa for a dragon using pronouns ze/zem. Sneaked it in there, as the tiny step we need to take forward.

Alia Terra is precious to me in so many ways. Thank you for your support!

Ava

First Goal Met!
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 07:30:48 AM

As I promised, Matt and Ava will be here to talk to you soon, but I couldn't let this moment pass by without a huge thank you!

We have reached the minimum funding on our third day! Because of you! That is tremendous and we are grateful and also thrilled.

What happens now:

• The book is happening. You will get a book, for sure!
• The book will at least have one illustration for each story.

What happens next:

• If we reach $5K, individual cards signed by both Ava Kelly in Romania and Matthew Spencer in Michigan will be included with every shipped order. These can be glued in like a bookplate, saved, or displayed.

What happens after that:

• More goals, including a hardcover book and a live Q&A.
• At $12,500 the book can be fully illustrated. Oh, that would be wonderful. We are so hopeful! Nervous, but hopeful!

What could happen after after:

• Oh, we get this thing really going, we could do all kinds of cool things. So many dreams...

So if you're able and willing, please keep sharing and letting people individually know - it makes all the difference. And again, thank you, so sincerely, for loving our project. (Like we do!)

Here's that link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atthisarts/alia-terra

- Emily. ♥

Welcome to Alia Terra!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, May 28, 2021 at 05:40:16 AM

Hello! Emily here! Good (rainy) morning from Detroit. We are so grateful that you are interested in our project. I'm going to mention a few quick things today, and then we'll follow up with lots of fun updates from Ava, talking about their stories and culture, and Matt, talking about his art process. It's going to be a lot of fun!

First: first day. Wow! I haven't made coffee yet and we're almost to $2500! That is...awesome. We feel pretty positive that we'll hit our minimum, and once that happens, then we'll know for sure the book is going to happen. (BIG CHEER!) With that reassurance, the artist can start working on the project, and we all can take a big breath and focus on telling people about our campaign so that we can fund the stretch goals. If we can make it to $12,500, then the book will be fully illustrated!

Not only would this project going big mean a lot for the book and the creators involved, but it would mean the world to our small business. We've kept going, kept believing, setback after setback, and now would be a really great time for something to go. So thank you. Again. Thank you.

To keep things more streamlined for everyone, I'm not sending personal notes to each backer - so please know that I see every one of you. Every. One. And cheer and clap and send you joyful gratitude for your support and excitement that you will love these stories like we do. And you are welcome to reach out by message any time. Even to say hello. : )

If you have the time and energy and safety, please keep letting people know about the project. Shares with recommendations help (link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atthisarts/alia-terra), and also personal notes to people or groups you think might enjoy it. Thanks as always, and we'll be back soon with some really cool updates from Ava and Matt. I'm looking forward to them also!

- Emily.