Monday, September 28th, 2009
Dragon wings tend to be more or less bat-based, but photos of bats in flight tend to be rarer than ones of birds in flight, making studies a bit more difficult.
For birds I recommend the deviantart account of Cheryl Moore, where you can find a great number of photos of birds in flight – most of them white birds, meaning there is no pattern on the feathers distracting from the shape.
As for bats, during the last week some photos of bats drinking from a pond in flight went through the bits of blogosphere I watch. Looking up Kim Taylor brought up Warren Photographic, which has more (albeit smaller) photos of bats in flight.
On Deviantart I found one compact tutorial on bat wings by cactusart.
The wing tutorial by Kandice Zimbleman-Wang may be a bit weird on the formatting and spelling side, but content-wise I find it very helpful.
For the sake of completeness and comparison, you could look at pterosaurs wings, too. (What intersts me more after a bit of poking around wikipedia are the various head shapes, though. Fascinating.)
Tags: Art, Birds, Links, Tutorials
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Friday, September 25th, 2009
Denise never had taken to reading, much to her father’s chargrin. His claims that books were magic that could take you anywhere did nit impressed her, and she only read fiction when she could not avoid it.
When she inherited her father’s estate, she did not know what to do with the books, but the smell of paper and dust awoke nostalgia, accompanied by curiosity. She unlocked the one bookcase with doors and ran a finger tentatively over the spines, cracked leather with gold lettering on most. She pulled out a small volume, opened it in a patch of sunlight, and started reading.
When she suddenly stood in ankle-deep snow, wind cutting through her summer shirt, she realised the “magic” part had not been a figure of speech.
Tags: Books, Flash fiction, Modern fantasy
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Friday, September 18th, 2009
“With a good rifle, I could shoot him from here.” In Nico’s opinion, when you picked sides, you might as well do it properly. “Unfortunately I don’t think they make any here.”
On the way back from the lookout point to the camp, Daaren remarked, “I don’t like guns.”
“Oh? Why’s that?” He had shown pragmatic attitudes to fighting and killing, so moral objections would have been a surprise.
“They are too loud.”
Nico wondered if it was a good or a bad thing that an opportunity to introduce him to the concept of silencers was a long way off.
Tags: Daaren, Drabbles, Nico
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Friday, September 11th, 2009
If you think he’s pompous now, you should have heard him when I met him. It was during those really unpleasant “witch hunts”, and he was thrown into the dark cell I had been in for a while already.
As soon as I couldn’t hear the guards anymore, I made my own light and tried to cheer him up a bit.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I’d have thought this place had safeguards against magic,” he said, referring to the glow between my hands.
“Their idea of a joke, I guess. Whatever could an illusionist do? The guards are protected.” He did that contemptous sneer you get from some mages when I said “illusionist”, which annoyed me a bit, but I kept it under wraps. Mostly. “And what is your power they are not afraid of?”
He snorted. “Summoner. Can’t do a thing without chalk or something else to draw my circles.” The walls were poured concrete, not pebble in sight.
So I made some suggestions starting with blood and going downhill from there, until he went on a short lecture about required spiritual purity of materials if you didn’t want to get something a lot more dangerous, particularly for you, than you were aiming for. He looked really dejected, in an annoyed way. I went over the obvious idea to see if it had any holes in it.
“Circles and runes, yes?”
A snort and a nod.
“Well, if you can describe them exactly…” I did a little flourish and turned the unfocused light into a bright spiderweb spanned between my fingertips, smiling at him through the gaps. “What is purer than light?” Things started looking up from there.
Tags: Fantasy, Flash fiction, Magic
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Friday, September 4th, 2009
“All those pills… Don’t you want to try something herbal instead? All that chemistry can’t be good for you.”
“Mum, what do you think photosynthesis is? Magic? It’s really amazing chemistry.”
“But mixing up stuff in a lab, that’s unnatural!”
“Then so would be using a lighter to start a fire, rather than waiting for a lightning strike.”
“You don’t eat fire, though. Dear, herbal remedies are so much better, because they have less side effects–”
“Yes, mum, opium and cocaine are known for their lack of dangerous side effects, sure. And deadly nightshade is a tasty berry.”
Tags: Dialogue, Drabbles, Plants, Script
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Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Because some people take drink recipes including kerosene and battery acid far too seriously
In other “news”, I really regret leaving my camera at home today. I could have taken a nice one of a power pole and titled it “everything is full of starlings”.
Tags: Geeky, Links, News
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