Meri Greenleaf

I just realized that I never shared this art of the five main characters that I commissioned like two years ago! This was drawn by Niiausen over on Instagram and it's perfect! It's so them from Adair painting his found family, to Dray picking on Blythe (in retaliation for my previous art where it was Blythe poking Dray, that's the art I use in my site banner), to Etri being the quiet support to his goofy twin Sol. There's a cute excerpt about their found family and how much they mean to each other that you can read here. I'll be sharing that full story sometime in the near future since it's almost done.

I love the little details in this art so much, like Addy's paintbrush glowing the color of his magic and his tattoo-like skin discoloration from the time he channeled Etri's magic, Dray's dragonscale sleeve tattoos, the embroidered moons on Etri's coat, and how Sol never wears shoes if he can avoid it. Then there's Blythe's constant exasperation about these four dorks being hers, of course!

As an aside, I've been working on some writing again. It's been a rough year without much that I've felt was good enough to share on this site, so that's why I've been so quiet here. But I'm doing kind of a mini-NaNoWriMo to try to get back into my creativity and it's possible I'll share some of the stories I've worked on over the past few months. I'm not sure if anyone still follows this site, but if they do, I promise I haven't forgotten about it.

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I don’t think I ever shared these dolls/plushies that I made of my main characters, so here they are. Left to right in the top picture are Dray, Sol, Etri, Adair, and Blythe.

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I'm learning how to paint watercolor and was super excited when I saw that one of the lessons had us painting a sky with constellations! Concordia, the main country in the Unexpected Inspiration series, has a ton of history and mythology about their constellations, which they call the Muses.

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I've gotten back into drawing with chibis of my characters. The first one I finished is Dray and Sol, the pair of fire dorks. Sol managed to sweep Dray off their feet-- literally here-- mostly through silliness and kindness. Dray couldn't tell you exactly when this happened because theirs was a relationship slow to develop, but I don't think it takes any characters by surprise to learn they're a couple.

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Despite having a professional cartographer as my main character and working on this series for four years, I didn't have much in the way of maps. A few years ago I made one for my main country, but the rest of the continent remained a mystery. It was time to unravel that!

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This is a thing that I did with my Wreck This Journal that I’ve been meaning to share because I can see it being useful for writing. My WTJ is writing-themed, so for the "Make a paper chain" page I decided to instead use the links for writing inspiration.

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Look at this amazing art that perringdraws did of Adair! This just makes me grin so much because that is so Addy and his adorable dork self who's constantly setting free the light elementals the antagonists keep summoning and forgetting about. I've been poking at the current draft of book 1 (Colorweaver) and I'd like to share an excerpt from the chapter that inspired this picture.

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I probably should have shared this on, you know, Halloween, but a week late is my version of being on time. I was doing a challenge over on Instagram last month and one of the days asked "Do your characters celebrate Halloween?" Their world doesn't have Halloween, but their culture is a big fan of costume parties!

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