Fear Not the Dead, Pool Your Thoughts to Love Instead

Welcome back to our occasional, and not-generally-scheduled update of what's going on around the THC studios!

• Valentine's Day Sale! You have until 2/14 to get 25% off anything in the Etsy store! Click HERE to shop, use code LOVE16 when checking out - no minimum purchase! 
  
• FREE VALENTINE'S DAY CARDS! Last year, I did a fun Valentine's Day bonus for our Patrons (Join us! Get cool stuff!), and this year, I've chosen the best of them and created a free, downloadable, printable sheet of Valentine's Day cards. While you're there, consider becoming a supporter for as little as $1 a month, it makes a huge difference, and you can show your support and reap the benefits! Click HERE to get the full-size version. 
  
• Will's superheroine comic, Morel, has officially launched its own webpage - www.morelcomic.com - check it out! 
  
• Commissions have been flowing in! Check out Indi's Commission Page to get on the list! Watercolor commissions have been hot, get signed up for a truly one-of-a-kind, frameable artpiece to call your own. (Pictured here: a camera-phone pic of the 18x24 "Sylph" cover art, from the upcoming Sylph video game.) 
  
• 2016 Tour Poster! We've got most of our shows lined up for 2016, so take a peek and see when we'll be in your neck of the woods! 
  

2015: By the Numbers

Welcome back to THC's occasional update of what's going on around the studios. It's December, and we're fast coming up on another click of Earth's odometer, so I thought I'd take a moment for retrospection before we slide into 2016.

2015 was a hell of a year. Let's do this by the numbers:

17: Number of conventions THC attended this year as artists/vendors. That's pretty far down from 2014's 38 - we'll be finding a happy medium between those two numbers for next year, I'm sure!

321: Number of posts on our Patreon page. MOST of those posts are patron-only exclusives, like works-in-progress pictures, full .psd files, high-res, watermark-free files, sneak-peeks, and Patron-exclusive stock art. We launched the Patreon officially on 1/15 of this year, and it's been a wild ride already!

63: Number of watercolors completed this year (that I have scans of - there were probably at least that amount that got discarded). Here's a collage of some of my favorites:

426: Number of pages in the final release of Into Dreams: A Gina Harwood novel, which was released on June 11, 2015. 

74: Number of commissioned paintings or drawings completed this year (not counting a few at conventions). Again with the collage, though this will probably be the last one, as they're surprisingly time-consuming. 

8: Stock Art pieces released to the Patrons after introducing the concept late 3rd Quarter. 

7: New Fan Art prints in the entirety of 2015 - Crowley, Charlie Bradbury, Arya Stark, Xena, Tyrion Lannister, Seven and Four. I've got one underway and I'm looking to expand this number a bit in 2016 - I wanted to cut back, not cut out fan art altogether! 

3: Other Milestones I couldn't figure out a way to fit into the "Numbers" theme. In addition to all of this, we also created and released Shroud of the Avatar: New Beginnings - our first (but not last) foray into officially licensed comics. We also created and released the Geocaching Pinup set and the MD Expansion of GoCache to commemorate GeoWoodstock XIII, held ten miles from where we live. :) 

2015 was the 4th year since Tortoise & Hare Creations took its first shaky breath, but it's been - by far - the busiest. THANK YOU for being here with us, and I hope you're just as excited as we are to see what Year 5 brings to THC!

Birthday Presents for Everyone!

Hey everyone! We're doing a pledge drive for the end of our first quarter on Patreon, culminating in my birthday on March 15th! Why is this a special day for anyone but me? Well, my hope was to hit 10 patrons, and we've blasted past that in the last few days, so it's stretch goal time! If we can hit 20 patrons - at ANY level - by March 15th, then everyone gets birthday presents! We'll send a package stuffed with THC loot and gifts to every single patron we have, regardless of their pledge level. So, check out our levels now and jump on! www.patreon.com/tortoiseharecreations

A few other things of interest:

• I'm so close to the end of my first draft of GH3 that I know how many chapters are left, exactly. SOON! I expect to be finished by the end of next week if I keep buckled down.
• I finished "Seven" - Sylvester McCoy as Doctor Who. It's also available on our Patron stream as a high-res, watermark-free file. 
  
• The proof has been ordered for Shroud of the Avatar: New Beginnings! Assuming it comes back with no errors or changes required, we should have that available for sale by the end of March.
• We're putting the final touches on our new form anthology comic, as yet untitled. Stay tuned for more information there!

As always, thank you for your support and your interest! - Indi

February Wrap-up - and how not to record a Hangout video

Well, the second part of that title is easy. How not to record a Hangout video: Accidentally choose "Hangout" instead of "Hangout on Air." For some reason, I've found the Hangout apps notoriously difficult to navigate. I have some sort of strange block in that area. Anyhow, my apologies - I shared the link and we started well before I realized that I'd never clicked "On Air," (or go live, or whatever it's called) because it didn't exist.

So, here's a synopsis of what we discussed on the video, which is essentially a wrap-up of the month of February and a look forward to what's coming next.

• Gina Harwood Book Three

•  I know I've let slip the working title for this book, which is "Into Dreams," but while I'm 90% sure this will be the final title, I continue to mostly refer to it as GH3 for ease of reference. It's sitting at a hefty 425 pages at the moment with about 100 pages of rough story to get through, but have no fear. I will be making my best efforts to edit it down as far as I possibly can - I know it will be larger than the previous two, but I'm hoping to distill it down to around 400 pages for the final. February saw a massive jump on the page total, though our house was down with the plague for two weeks, so the first draft should be finished up around mid-March.
• I'm not yet to the point where I feel comfortable providing a solid release date, but my estimation looking at the current state is late April to early May for the first proofs. I'll be releasing it to my beta readers for feedback following the first major edit, which I'm hoping to have complete by the end of March.

• GoCache News

• Will has written up a 6 card expansion that will be released at GeoWoodstock. We're super excited about this and will make it available to our online customers briefly, but it will be a limited release that won't be reprinted after this year's GW, so watch for it and be ready to place your order! In addition, we're expecting to have a special bonus card for those of you at GeoWoodstock that will be a giveaway with purchase, so if you've been on the fence about attending the largest geocaching festival in the world, get off the fence! It's going to be an awesome weekend!
• In addition, one of my art goals for 2015 was to do some model shoots for painting reference, which dovetailed nicely with my goal to have four geocaching pinup paintings ready by GeoWoodstock. I'm ecstatic to say that I had my first shoot yesterday with a lovely 19-year-old woman named Kylee - she was inexperienced, but patient and had a great feel for her angles and limbs, so a lot of the shots turned out really well. The camera loved her and so did I, and I'd love to work with her again in the future. I'm excited to get started on those pinups soon!

• Other Assorted News

• Convention season starts in earnest in March, and we're busily getting prepared for this year's shows. Besides the table placement having to be rethought to showcase GoCache and our new comics (news on that in a moment), I'm also working on completing several new fan art prints for our returning convention customers. Already completed are "Four" (Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor), and "Xena, Warrior Princess" (which is self-explanatory). I'm likely to complete "Seven" (Sylvester McCoy as the seventh Doctor) this week, and I believe I have Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones (played by the fabulous Peter Dinklage) slated next.
• We're changing the format of our existing comics slightly, and will be releasing a 2015 anthology comic that will collect several of our stories together and present them alongside new material. This is best for everyone - not only will you be able to follow all of our in-house stories in one place (our licensed titles will continue to be their own separate books), but it gives us a centralized product to include things like standalone art and short stories with our comics. We both are excited about this change and think it'll allow us to focus on putting out the highest quality stories. 

That's it! You're caught up! Thank you for following us, and please check out our Patreon page - I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank each of our patrons for their support. Having the Patreon has actually really lit a fire under me to multitask better - we started the Patreon just as my professional focus necessarily shifted to writing, but usually my art suffers from a few months to a half-year of inactivity when that happens, and I really wanted to avoid that by maintaining less-deadline-y art projects in my "afterhours" time. Having the patron-stream is a lovely reminder, and hearing feedback on my works in progress or what the patrons would like to see more of is really nice and keeps me feeling more connected to those who are viewing our works. So, thank you - you're not just giving us a few bucks a month, you're also keeping me creatively on fire. :)

Join us! www.patreon.com/tortoiseharecreations 

WIP - "Four" - about 70% complete

Here's a preview of my next Doctor print - "Four." This is about 70% into the process. This one is very exciting for me, because it's the first of my portraits that I attempted directly in color, instead of the greyscale process I usually use. I'm also not using the smudge method of blending my paints any longer, instead I'm just using a basic round brush with a lower flow to layer color with more control. It's been a really good lesson so far, and I'm ecstatic with how well my first attempt is coming along.

If you want to see the works in progress from the beginning, I have several posted at our patron stream, along with several high-res, watermark-free digital copies of my prints for patrons.

There will be a few more surprise prints coming out over the next few weeks, and we're going to be running our annual Valentine's Day Sale, so watch for the announcement to find the code you can use to get 25% off any of our merchandise at our Store, including this and any other new prints I manage to finish before then. - Indi