 Even when trying to make my art better reflect the epic fantasy feel of Woodwalker, it still ends up looking like middle-grade unicorn giggles. If anybody has Alan Lee's phone number, tell him we need to talk.
I also don't think Mae would actually have books with her, since she has to carry her whole life on her back. Maybe she uses the pages she's read as firestarters. (Literary professionals screaming in the distance.)
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 Here it comes! I am an extremely visual person by nature, so I am so stoked to finally be able to share Woodwalker's book cover with you! Keep an eye on my Facebook page and this blog on Wednesday for your first look!
I will be posting a special blog post about the process the art department and I went through to design and illustrate the cover. It was a process not without surprises and setbacks, but ultimately it led to the great result I will be sharing with you SIX DAYS FROM NOW! Here are a few pieces I've posted in various other places over the past few weeks. The first are the rest of the pen-and-inks, starring Arlen, Colm, and Valien (see Mae and Mona here).    The next are several speedpaints--I've been unhappy with the stiffness of my work lately, so I've been practicing speedpainting to try to loosen up my style. The first is the four protagonists heading through the hills to the Silverwood Mountains, based on photos of Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The second is Mae working a job in a quarry to earn some money during her exile. The last is actually from the sequel to Woodwalker, which has been my main focus lately as I work on edits to the manuscript.    Woodwalker is in the final stages of publication now. Final copyedits are done--that means no more edits to the manuscript. The text is formatted to turn it from a word document into a book. And best of all, the cover design has been finalized! My editor and the art department had me do the artwork for it, which was a lot of fun and very rewarding. Soon we should have a cover reveal. Stay tuned!
 "Rest," a speed paint of Mae in the Silverwood We are three months out from the publication of Woodwalker on May 17! I have been doing a lot of artwork and planning in preparation. This whole process has been so wild and exciting--- on publication day, it will be almost exactly two years since I started typing the first few paragraphs of Woodwalker. So much has happened! My characters and world have grown and changed so much! I have an agent, a publishing house, a sequel! And I couldn't have done it without so many of you. Whether you're close family or an online follower, your support and interest mean so much to me.
If you'd like to help me spread the word about Mae, Mona, and their adventures, here are a few ways you can help:
“What are you doing?”  I’m a park ranger, traipsing along in the footsteps of John Muir and Stephen Mather and the like. And a lot of people, most notably my family, have accused me of casting myself as Mae. This irks me, because it means I’ve committed the most rookie of all mistakes—just writing oneself as the protagonist, rather than creating a unique character. I thought I had left those days behind in middle school. But beyond this, it irks me because Mae’s job is different from mine. She is, at heart, a conservationist rather than a preservationist. Responsible use of resources over preservation for the sake of preservation. In fact, this is why I chose October 4th as her birthday—the death date of oft-maligned Gifford Pinchot, father of modern forestry, with the thought that she’s continuing his work. Granted, Mae has a heart for the inherent worth of wilderness that Pinchot is often accused of lacking (she probably would have been on John Muir’s side over the damming of Hetch Hetchy valley), but her job as a Woodwalker is ultimately to oversee responsible use of the Silverwood’s resources. This is a society not merely passing through a stand of wildland as visitors, but living intimately in it and relying on it for their survival. As such, preservation probably isn’t even a concept the folk of the Silverwood are concerned about.  And let's face it, Gifford Pinchot was a babe. Now, the Silverwood will have been practicing silviculture and forestry much longer than post-European United States, and as such, they’ll have graduated out of some of Pinchot’s more outdated ideas (such as restricting wildfires at all costs). The Wood Guard would oversee strategic timbering to reduce the spread of blight or infestation and would monitor wildfires to facilitate forest regeneration. So that’s what Mae is doing in the illustration above—felling a pine that has fallen prey to pine beetles. And this is where we hop to another, less famous chapter in the history of forestry and land use—the Women’s Land Army and the Women’s Timber Corps. These two organizations, like many others involving women in unusual workplaces, emerged during the First and Second World Wars. The two mentioned were in Britain, but there was also a Women’s Land Army of America and an Australian Women’s Land Army. Their work was closely related to entities like the US Forest Service, but I bring up these lesser-known organizations because the illustration above is referenced directly from a photo of a lumberjill in the Women’s Timber Corps.  Image from http://histomil.com As famine loomed in Britain in World War I, women were hurriedly recruited to fill agriculture and forestry jobs the soldiers had left behind. They were recruited again during World War II. Once each war was over and the men returned home, the organizations were disbanded—yet another instance of women being ushered into a workforce to compensate for a lack of men, only to be kicked out when the need was gone (or, in the case of the National Park Service, when word got round to Washington that women were working as rangers). And despite the amount of timber the Women's Timber Corps provided for the war effort, they were given no recognition for their work until 2007, when a memorial was erected in Scotland.   Images from http://long-may-she-rain.blogspot.com/2012/10/lumberjills-of-womens-timber-corps.html The Wood Guard is decidedly coed, as with any other profession and industry in the world of Woodwalker. Women serving as foresters or soldiers or politicians is so normal as to be beyond comment. This is perhaps the biggest fantasy element in Mae’s world. But I hope Mae serves as a little homage to these women, continuing their work for the good of her people and her love for her home. I realize few people care about the differences between a park ranger and a forester, or a preservationist and a conservationist, but Mae is unquestionably more akin to the latter. With some exceptions, her convictions align more closely with Pinchot’s than Muir’s, and her work aligns more closely with that of the women of the Timber Corps and modern foresters than park rangers. In this sense, Mae resembles my conservationist friends building trail at Philmont Scout Ranch or the vegetation crews working to control hemlock woolly adelgids in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Which apparently means I've written fanfiction about my friends, rather than myself.  Write what you know, right? (Pictured: Katie Fyhrie, Philmont conservationist, who did all the hard work while I took pictures.) Boy, these past few weeks have been a whirlwind. Official edits to Woodwalker manuscript, redrawing the world map for the interior pages, a fourth draft of the cover art, and then feedback on my second manuscript... I'm pretty ragged. I thought I'd take a few days and work on some art to just calm my nerves a little, but I'm kind of sucking that up, too. I just don't have the stamina to finish anything. So here's a good old-fashioned sketchdump of concept work and doodlery.   Top left are a few inane doodles of Mae and Mona in a Pixar style, which I usually shy away from because all Disney-Pixar's female leads look the same, with the doe eyes and button noses. This gave me a complex as a kid because I knew with my big hawk nose I could never be cast as a Disney princess. But several of my favorite artists draw in this style and I can never resist trying to mimic my idols. (For the record, I'm over my childhood complex now--- turns out hooked noses were a sign of aristocracy in ancient Rome, and as my heritage is largely Italian...)
To the right of that is a junky sketch of Valien on his coronation day looking all smirky (and a bit like a mashup of Loki and Kylo Ren, which in all honesty, is pretty accurate). To his left is an unfinished concept of Mae with her archery gear. I've since changed the weaponry of the Royal Guard from recurved bows to flatbows, so this isn't quite right anymore, but she'd still have the hip quiver and spare arrows in her bow hand. I prefer hip quivers over back quivers because I've always found them easier and quicker to access, and they leave room for a backpack, which the Royal Guard would certainly need on days-long scouts in the forest. I also know highly accomplished archers would sometimes keep their spare arrows in their draw hands, but Mae isn't necessarily supposed to be the pinnacle of archery. She's good because she has to be, but she's not a prodigy, so I imagine she would be perfectly satisfied with keeping her spares in her bow hand. Below that are two concepts for Lumen Lake, both of which led me to swear at my screen as I created them. In fact, one of them is actually saved under the name "arrgHATE.jpg." I'm just not that good at large-scale environments despite my love for them, and these didn't turn out how I wanted them to. But they gave me good practice, and they helped me with my worldbuilding. Tiny Colm is in the foreground of both. Hopefully I'll be able to pull myself out of this funk before I have to write any more self-deprecating posts. Woodwalker is with the copy editor now, and my editor has a synopsis of manuscript 2. So things are still trucking along!  Mona's always looking out for Mae. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone! Here's to a big 2016!
This new piece I just finished gives me a good opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the cultural fashion in the book and where I drew my inspiration. Hang in there, because none of it makes sense.  While I love drawing Mae being the skilled badass she is, fancy dresses and finery are certainly more fun to draw, and it’s not entirely out of character. A big part of the Wood-folk’s culture revolves around dancing; all their holidays incorporate it somehow, and it would be an integral part of the smaller communities throughout the mountain range. Any social gathering would likely give way to dancing at some point, whether it’s out in the town square or in the cramped space of someone’s parlor. While Mae is probably more at home with a tunic and scout pack, she would have cherished this part of her native culture and would long for it during her exile. Nailing down exactly what real-world culture the Wood-folk mirror is impossible, because I took a bunch of seriously cool influences and mashed them together. The most significant aspect, wardrobe-wise, are Mae’s soft-soled leather boots. These would be worn by everyone all the time, with different fringes and decorations for different occasions. Here she’s wearing boots embellished with bells, which would be a popular choice for dances. Her titular rank as a Woodwalker would in part be conveyed by a pair of boots with two bands of fringe. And at a solemn occasion like a funeral, folk would wear boots with no embellishments at all.  Exhibit A. Oops, this seriously highlights how much I fudge on feet. Apologies. These were inspired by several different Native American cultures, but that wasn’t the only influence. With dancing being a large part of the culture, much of the Wood-folk’s wardrobe would be designed around what looked cool while spinning or moving. Enter the influence of belly dance. I took a belly dance class in grad school (yes, grad school, bring it on), and I came away loving not just the spirit and fluidity of the style but the gorgeous ensembles that went with it (I never wore any myself; mostly I was in yoga pants and blown-out socks). I really wanted to capture that incorporation of the ensemble as part of the dance. So a dance in the Silverwood would likely be filled with flowing fabric, miles of pleats, and embellishments designed to move with the dancer.  You may notice similarities between Mae’s bodice and the one above. Hint: they’re exactly the same  Another Silvern dancer, a previous queen of the Silverwood. Neither the Native American influence nor belly dance influence makes any sense with the actual music, of course. The instruments and melodies driving the festivities would be derived from traditional Celtic music. Fiddles, whistles, and dulcimers would be accompanied by bodhráns, or flat drums struck with tippers. Ultimately, the style of dancing would most closely resemble contra, a folk dance similar to square dancing, only done in a line and by hipsters (it’s okay, I’m one of them). They’d also have partner dances that would incorporate contra moves, such as Mae’s partner allemande above.  John Joe Kelly, of the band Flook, one of the greatest bodhran players in the world. Also he kissed my cheek at a concert in Savannah. So basically we’re looking at an Appalachian folk dance set to driving Celtic music, danced in elaborate gowns and super comfy footwear. This concludes my thesis on the absolute greatest mashup of dancing traditions possible (I told you this happened in grad school). Tune in for the next installment of Continental Fashion Culture: Lumeni Diving Costumes. This one will include shirtless men.  Mark your calendars.  On Saturday, June 28, 2014, after the girls had gone to bed, I opened up a blank Word document and started typing. This itself wasn’t unusual—I’ve always written stories, almost as long as I’ve been drawing, and throwing vague ideas onto paper was nothing new. But this time was different. This was the novel I was determined to see through to the end. Not write just for my own enjoyment, but with the ultimate goal of seeing it in print. Dragged along by a determined protagonist through a constantly-evolving world, I had high hopes for this little brainchild. One year, four months, and fourteen days later, I can finally announce that Woodwalker has been picked up by HarperCollins and will be published in the spring of 2016!  There are an outrageous number of people to thank for helping make this a reality, the foremost being my amazing agent, Valerie Noble of Donaghy Literary Group, who believed in me and Woodwalker from the get-go. I’m grateful to my new editor, David Pomerico of Harper Voyager Impulse for taking me on for publication. Will, of course, who was the first person to lay eyes on my ugly little larvae of a first draft and assured me it wasn’t the worst piece of writing ever penned. My beta readers—my mom, who prodded and nudged each scene to achieve its full potential; my dad, who corrected all my biology and natural science errors; Anne Marie, who helped me create a believable and dynamic world; and of course Caitlin, who will always and forever be my soul sister, partner in crime, and fellow writer. Oh, and Corey, even though he never actually finished the book. For updates, artwork, and inside information, you can keep an eye on this blog or follow me on my other social media accounts, namely Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for your support, your interest, and following along on this wild journey.  I've had the good fortune to have a decent amount of time to do some in-depth painting these past few weeks, which resulted in a series of pieces starring Mae and each of the Alastaire siblings. First is Mae in a typical interaction with Mona. Mae's got her old silver compass, and Mona is wearing her royal pearl pendant.  Next is Mae glancing sidelong at Colm (why do they always look like they just got caught making surreptitious love? What is this subtext??). This intimate little scene comes near the middle of the book, where they're each sharing a few of their secrets with the other. Mae's roughed up from an altercation with a rockslide.  And finally, we come to Arlen. Anyone who's ever been backpacking knows there's always that one person who remembers they have a pocket full of beef jerky just after the bear bag is hung. Arlen is that person.  From an artistic standpoint, each of these pieces has furthered my own little quest of achieving more depth in my work and not getting too finicky with details. Like most artists, I have a tendency to overwork my pieces. To counter this, I've been working zoomed out to 33% and only going in really close for intricate details like faces. It's helped some, though I still need to work on preserving the freshness of the original sketch. |
Emily B. MartinAuthor and Illustrator 
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