Rovering is Fantastic

 Hello everyone, I present to you a digital piece - the first I've completed in some time!

This will be the first in a series of Rover-themed art I intend to use to help promote the Rovering 4 Life Association. They will be used on small posters (as our current computers can only handle such a large size of digital canvas, bleh) and other mediums.

This features a young woman Rover charging at a dragon that the viewer cannot see directly, only as a shadow looming over our Rover Knight. She is confident and smiling, as a scout is cheerful, even in the face of hard things. This is inspired by a few things: first is Robert Baden-Powell's writings about St. George slaying the dragon, and how we need to face our personal challenges with a smile, just as St. George slew his dragon cheerfully (describing a painting he had of St. George). The second inspiration was the illustrations in B-P's books Scouting for Boys and Rovering to Success. He has a lot of simple inked illustrations, and so I emulated that in a way. I used cross-hatching for the shading.

Speaking of slaying dragons, I've been right in the middle of the chaos of moving and having a baby, and it's been hard to face it with a smile at times. However, things always get better, and more and more I'm able to face my challenges with a smile. 

The picture featured here is not the full-sized version and is watermarked for the sake of copyright protection. If you are a Rover and are interested in using this artwork, please contact my Rovering email: aspenmountainrc@aol.com.

Summer Summer Summer

 Hello everyone, it's been a long time, no? The past several months have been interesting. I'm pregnant with our fourth child, and I dealt with some really bad morning sickness. I'm pretty sure that if it weren't for my nausea medication, I would have been hospitalized a long time ago. 

Because of the pregnancy, our family has had to fast forward things a bit to get ready to move, so we'll be out of our current house hopefully by the end of June or within the first few weeks of July. We've had to go gung-ho on outdoor projects and pack up a bunch of things inside. I'm always exhausted while wrangling 3 boys and do what I can around the house.

I've pushed on with my Rover scouting (I haven't updated that blog for some time as of writing this), and I've been given a prominent position in the association. It's given me a chance to expand and showcase my talents as an artist and writer.

Amid all this, I've chipped away at writing projects as well. I'm going through the first revision of Book IV of The Legacy Incarnate. It's been fun adding a few details to help flesh out the story and characters some more. While doing that, I've been writing short stories for LI BIV.V. I'm on the fourth short story in the anthology; I'm not exactly sure how many stories will be in the book, but there will be at least five or six. The fun thing about short stories is being able to flesh out characters I don't normally write about, or to write about aspects of familiar characters you never really see in the main series.

I'm excited for both these projects, and I look forward to sharing more with my readers in the future.