Ivy Tara Blair

To celebrate ten years of Sister Claire’s first publication online, here’s a special message from Claire, and from us, to you, all of our dear readers. 

Here’s to a warmer 2019. 

Ah, of course.

The way text is presented Doesn't Actually Do Anything to add to meaning At All.

ONLY THE CONTENT OF THE ACTUAL WORDS MATTERS.

spacing, breaks, caPITALIZATION, WhY wOuLd ChAnGiNg AnY oF tHaT aFfEcT iNtErPrEtAtIoN?

n o n e o f t h a t m a t t e r s .

stop

acting

like

it

Hey there!  If you like my art and haven’t checked out my webcomic, Sister Claire, I highly recommend it. It’s about battle-nuns, witches, and monsters, and people who are in between. And everyone is some kinda queer!  I draw it, my wife Ash writes for it, and Laura is our editor and professional organizer.

I love monsters.

If you’ve ever got a few spare minutes while you’re waiting for the bus, give it a read! We pour our hearts and souls into this story and we’d really appreciate it.

Hey, dear~~~! So, the planning process goes through some stages.

Book Overview: We go over the general plan for the whole book. So Book 3, present one, we’ve known what happens in each chapter for some time now. Like, Chapter 4 is Bright Night, Chapter 5 is Helsing Abbey… we’re working on overviewing Book 4 now. Wouldn’t you like to know ;)

Chapter Overview: So, with our Book Overview done, we zoom in on each chapter at a time. “This happens, then this happens, this character does this”, and so on. That’s all done before the chapter starts.

Page Scripting: At last, we zoom closer in and start scripting page-by-page! We nail down what’s happening in each panel, and write dialogue. 

I really really dig this design

Oscar cups the creature's— no. She cups the child’s cheek in her hand and they look at her with a face crumpled up in preemptive grief, a gaze gone over to anguish.

SO the formerly imprisoned machina that wept shards, now sharing clementine’s body until she can give them a new one, was meant to be “the lament”, as a purpose more than a name

there’ve been parallels with nuclear contamination and shards

I’d assumed shards happened accidentally when a tipping point was reached, but now I have to wonder.. what if the sleepers were created to produce shards intentionally, as weapons to destroy other city states. but shards overran everything, because they messed with things beyond their understanding. then they tried to bury them and put them to sleep, but they couldn’t undo what they’d done, because they’d changed how life flows

Awesome! I can’t wait to see your art!

As for her horns, they are definitely different at different stages of her life! The last version of them was one I had to draw several times, so I actually made a Sculptris 3D model to trace because it got too hard to draw them over and over and different angles:

I think as long as they look like antlers, that’s the main thing. 👍

Incidentally, Sculptris is a free and super useful program that I highly recommend for stuff like this. I’ve used it to make a lot of digital 3D references for hard-to-draw objects and props:

Hope this helps!

me, immediately upon seeing clemlament:

Hesitantly, Nathan accepted the vial, holding it delicately away from his face. He’d never been fond of bottled scents. Aside from the eye watering potency of most blends sold by market stall apothecaries, to his delicate werewolf sensibilities, they always felt like somewhat of a lie.

He liked the smell of people the way they were. It told you everything you needed to know about who they were, what they did the most and whether they were happy or sad, and sometimes, quite literally, what they’d had for dinner the night before. So it was with some reluctance that he lifted the little vial to his nose and sniffed. Then sniffed again.

It was incredibly subtle, but there was something familiar about it too, something that reminded him of wandering through the sun scorched sandy streets of Steocidell*. But there was something else there too, tingling just on the edge of his senses, soft and tantalizingly warm.

“Oil,” he said surely, naming the base, tilting his head to the side as he thought, “myrrh, frankincense, cloves…small green plant with purple flowers…looks like mint and onion had a baby together…”

“Patchouli,” the vampire supplied helpfully, wryly amused.

“Some sort of musk,” he inhaled again, savoring the headiness of it and scrunching his eyes shut in concentration. “Deer?”

“Oh very good,” Vlad said, sounding genuinely impressed, and Nathan felt it flip over in his stomach. In the back of his mind he could feel the wolf tail wagging. “But you missed one.”

“Oh?” Nathan asked, unnecessarily surly at being duped by a bottle of perfumed oil, and immediately thrown off kilter when the vampire appeared beside him in the blink of an eye, affixing a single, dark bloom to the buttonhole of his uniform lapel as he looked up at Nathan with those dark, smiling eyes, close enough to taste the scent of him on his tongue.

“Rose.”

Oh noo no no no no noo.  These are not apologies these are challenges and I love challenges to bits :D

I SHALL TACKLE YOUR ALLITERATIVE SIBILANCE-IVE TEXT WITH WICKED WICKED GLEE.

*a distant ‘mwaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaa’ can be heard in the distance*

*....yes, narrators ‘mwaa ha ha’ - is that so odd?*