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Description
Before I get into talking about the art and my process, a little reminder/announcement that the drawing tablet I use for all my digital art and touch-ups/additions to my traditional art (so 60% or more of my work altogether) has succumbed to a hardware issue and I'm trying to drum up funds for a replacement. You can read the full story in this journal entry , and if you'd like to help me out My (traditional) Commissions , dA Printshop , Redbubble , and Ko-Fi pages are all great ways to do that, and I thank you so much in advance for doing so. Even just spreading the word helps a lot!

romping through rose rows
the rouge holds roamers ransom
re-writing their wrongs

out yonder, they yawn
yearning for youth yanked from them
you yearn for them, too

grave group, so it goes
much greatness gone to the grass,
a goodbye garden

but the "byes" come back
they blow in on brisk breezes
blooming in balance

What's this? It's not Inktober yet, what are the mini-magnets doing out and about?

I was encouraged by AlinaLeeArts to enter the String Me a Haiku Contest! hosted by HaikuWriMo , and while I have only basic knowledge and understanding of Haikus, I've been really wanting to play with the mini-magnets lately after reorganizing them into some new tins, and it sounded like fun. (And like a good way to fill out my upload schedule since the bigger projects I'm working on still aren't quite finished yet. )

So I decided I'd take a stab at, or at least see if I could come up with a concept I was happy with and take it from there.

The contest rules state that an entry has to be made up of a string of at least four haikus, a Haiku for the uninformed being, according to Google, "a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world." And that the haikus should use heavy alliteration, which also for the uninformed is, "the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words."

This would pose a unique challenge for me because, as I said, I'm not very familiar with writing Haikus. I've read plenty of them, sure, and I think I had to write one at least once or twice back in K-12 school for English class or something, but other than that, if I've ever constructed one, it's been completely by accident. That said, I used two different syllable counters to check each of these before I ever arranged the magnets, so hopefully, they do indeed follow the 5-7-5 pattern properly, if nothing else!

Alliteration is also not something I intentionally use super often, and that combined with the limited syllables and structure I think makes for a unique challenge even for someone more familiar with the haiku form. Something I learned very quickly while trying to do this: Every syllable counts, you don't want to waste a single one!

Before I could get to actually writing the haikus, though, me being me, I needed a concept/theme to work off of. How would I pick letters to alliterate? What would the haikus be about? Since I want to use the mini-magnets (as is more or less my standard for short-form poetry) what should the background(s) look like? Will all four tell a continuous story or four short stories that go together? I have to have at least four haikus, but am I just going to do four, or will I maybe do a few more than that?

I decided the easy way to break it down would be to have each haiku dedicated to a specific letter for alliteration, then make a poem based off of whatever I could come up with within that letter alliteration, as I worked I could go back and forth between the separate haikus to develop more of a story, and then once they were done or mostly done, I could decide on what I would do for the background(s) based on the poems themselves.

This process did change a little bit, as I started off using a haiku generator to help me get more in a haiku-writing mindset. I did through that pick up one line, "seeing a balance," that obviously got translated a bit differently into the final version ("blooming in balance"), but other than that I really was still largely on my own. I'd toyed with a few other concepts, but none of them felt right or were really sticking with me.

Then I got the idea to pick each letter for the haikus based on an acronym; a well-known combination of letters. That would also potentially give me a theme to work off of.

Initially, I thought of ROYGBIV, the acronym for the basic seven colors of the rainbow. And I actually started working on trying to make my haikus based on that, but the letter "O" stopped me pretty short because once I had the letters, my idea was to do word-association like I normally do for the Inktober prompts; I'd list out some potential words to use that I felt somehow connected with the color and started with the same letter as the color. Frankly, there just aren't a lot of letter-O words that I could also connect back to the color, and the few I did come up with just didn't seem like they had a super compelling story hidden within them.

But I did really like the idea of the colors because that gave me a good launching point for the backgrounds; I could just use the same color the haiku was based on within the background for it. It sounded like fun, even. So I didn't want to just totally ditch it.

After giving it some thought, I figured the best thing to do would be to try using the four main colors everybody knows: Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue. If I still couldn't come up with my haikus based on those four letters, then it was time to pick a new acronym.

Fortunately, even though I had my concerns about the Y in particular, I had a much easier time after that. (I mean, I already had most of the one for "Red," from the ROYGBIV stage, but still.)

It's funny though, I thought "Blue" was going to be the easiest, based on my knowledge of "B" words, but that one was actually the one I ended up tweaking and re-writing the most. Probably because it was also the last one I did, and I had started to develop a vague story about yearning for life and visiting a grave in a cemetery, so I had to work within that theme. Though, that said, I think "Green" is actually the weakest of the four, as far as impact goes, despite it being the one that kinda hammers home the life/death theme the most. It was the most difficult one to balance my syllables appropriately because of the words I really wanted to use.

Obviously, this "story" developed as I worked, so it's a bit more on the abstract side, but this is how I see what these four haikus say together; They're talking about someone, probably a young someone (I picked a girl for the background, but the poems could go either way), walking through a field of flowers and stumbling upon a nursing home, maybe with a couple of residents on the porch, and a cemetery nearby. Maybe connected to the home, maybe not. And the young someone stops and reflects on life, and how even once someone passes away, oftentimes we can be reminded of them, or almost feel as if they're still here, in the small things and little fleeting moments here there, like the petals of a flower or the whispers of a seasonal breeze in the air. They come back in those small ways, completing the circle of life, that essential balance of the universe.

Of course, that's just one way to interpret it, and even then there are still small details that could be changed while still keeping the sentiment the same. Personally, that's one of the things I enjoy the most about poetry and the mini magnets--you don't always know what you're going to end up saying until someone else reads it and tells you what it says to them.

As for those backgrounds, they're all fairly simple watercolor paintings. Once I had the poems and this vague idea of a story, it was fairly easy to come up with a background concept for each one to make them a little more interesting. Normally, I'd use sponged-ink backgrounds during Inktober, but I've been toying with the watercolor idea in the back of mind and this seemed like a good time to experiment since I was already pushing the envelope in various other ways.

You can see pretty much exactly what I had in mind for each one, though I will clarify the green one is supposed to be a tombstone in the grass since it's the only one that I think might not be super clear right away. It could just as easily be a rock.

For each of them, my process was very simple; I just picked 1-3 shades to make a gradient from the appropriate color, alternating each one slightly depending on what I wanted for the sky, and then I added the grass and silhouettes on top using a combination of watercolor and black pen. And then the very last one, "blue," got the added moon, stars, and some fireflies using gel pens (and a little bit of pastel for glow). It was the most complex, but "yellow," was actually the trickiest because I have not yet mastered the ability to free-hand a human silhouette. I had to sketch it out separately and then use my lightbox to transfer the outline and fill it in.

And, funnily enough, the backgrounds you see here were actually meant to be smaller test-runs before making bigger ones and actually physically setting the mini-magnets on them to photograph. But I was so happy with how these small test ones turned out, I honestly didn't feel like I needed to make the bigger ones.

So I pivoted a bit; I formed each mini-magnet poem on a plain blue piece of paper (a "blue screen" if you will to make it easier to separate the words) and photographed them, then used Photoshop to get each haiku onto its respective background.

This ended up working to my advantage, as I could just focus on arranging the words to make the words properly and not working around the paintings underneath, and then once I had everything in photoshop I could move things around as necessary much more easily.

I'm not super sure about the haiku part, but I'm really pleased with how the overall result looks, and especially happy with 3 out of the four backgrounds. So much so, I will be posted a wordless version of just the backgrounds to go along with this one for your viewing pleasure! fav.me/ddrqj28

I don't think I'll be placing in the contest (I could be wrong, but I'm aware I'm a little out-of-my-element here ), but I enjoyed the process and the end result, so it was still worth it in my eyes. It was really nice to have the mini-magnets out and put them to use again, especially since I've been having a craving to do so lately. And having them all freshly re-organized made using them all the more enjoyable.

Though I'm still not quite sure in what form it'll be, I am very much thinking of doing more non-Inktober stuff like this with the mini-magnets going forward. I have so many of them and I enjoy using them, even when it's a daily challenge and running me a bit ragged. You might say I'm a bit of an addict.

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

Description
Before I get into talking about the art and my process, a little reminder/announcement that the drawing tablet I use for all my digital art and touch-ups/additions to my traditional art (so 60% or more of my work altogether) has succumbed to a hardware issue and I'm trying to drum up funds for a replacement. You can read the full story in this journal entry , and if you'd like to help me out My (traditional) Commissions , dA Printshop , Redbubble , and Ko-Fi pages are all great ways to do that, and I thank you so much in advance for doing so. Even just spreading the word helps a lot!

romping through rose rows
the rouge holds roamers ransom
re-writing their wrongs

out yonder, they yawn
yearning for youth yanked from them
you yearn for them, too

grave group, so it goes
much greatness gone to the grass,
a goodbye garden

but the "byes" come back
they blow in on brisk breezes
blooming in balance

What's this? It's not Inktober yet, what are the mini-magnets doing out and about?

I was encouraged by AlinaLeeArts to enter the String Me a Haiku Contest! hosted by HaikuWriMo , and while I have only basic knowledge and understanding of Haikus, I've been really wanting to play with the mini-magnets lately after reorganizing them into some new tins, and it sounded like fun. (And like a good way to fill out my upload schedule since the bigger projects I'm working on still aren't quite finished yet. )

So I decided I'd take a stab at, or at least see if I could come up with a concept I was happy with and take it from there.

The contest rules state that an entry has to be made up of a string of at least four haikus, a Haiku for the uninformed being, according to Google, "a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world." And that the haikus should use heavy alliteration, which also for the uninformed is, "the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words."

This would pose a unique challenge for me because, as I said, I'm not very familiar with writing Haikus. I've read plenty of them, sure, and I think I had to write one at least once or twice back in K-12 school for English class or something, but other than that, if I've ever constructed one, it's been completely by accident. That said, I used two different syllable counters to check each of these before I ever arranged the magnets, so hopefully, they do indeed follow the 5-7-5 pattern properly, if nothing else!

Alliteration is also not something I intentionally use super often, and that combined with the limited syllables and structure I think makes for a unique challenge even for someone more familiar with the haiku form. Something I learned very quickly while trying to do this: Every syllable counts, you don't want to waste a single one!

Before I could get to actually writing the haikus, though, me being me, I needed a concept/theme to work off of. How would I pick letters to alliterate? What would the haikus be about? Since I want to use the mini-magnets (as is more or less my standard for short-form poetry) what should the background(s) look like? Will all four tell a continuous story or four short stories that go together? I have to have at least four haikus, but am I just going to do four, or will I maybe do a few more than that?

I decided the easy way to break it down would be to have each haiku dedicated to a specific letter for alliteration, then make a poem based off of whatever I could come up with within that letter alliteration, as I worked I could go back and forth between the separate haikus to develop more of a story, and then once they were done or mostly done, I could decide on what I would do for the background(s) based on the poems themselves.

This process did change a little bit, as I started off using a haiku generator to help me get more in a haiku-writing mindset. I did through that pick up one line, "seeing a balance," that obviously got translated a bit differently into the final version ("blooming in balance"), but other than that I really was still largely on my own. I'd toyed with a few other concepts, but none of them felt right or were really sticking with me.

Then I got the idea to pick each letter for the haikus based on an acronym; a well-known combination of letters. That would also potentially give me a theme to work off of.

Initially, I thought of ROYGBIV, the acronym for the basic seven colors of the rainbow. And I actually started working on trying to make my haikus based on that, but the letter "O" stopped me pretty short because once I had the letters, my idea was to do word-association like I normally do for the Inktober prompts; I'd list out some potential words to use that I felt somehow connected with the color and started with the same letter as the color. Frankly, there just aren't a lot of letter-O words that I could also connect back to the color, and the few I did come up with just didn't seem like they had a super compelling story hidden within them.

But I did really like the idea of the colors because that gave me a good launching point for the backgrounds; I could just use the same color the haiku was based on within the background for it. It sounded like fun, even. So I didn't want to just totally ditch it.

After giving it some thought, I figured the best thing to do would be to try using the four main colors everybody knows: Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue. If I still couldn't come up with my haikus based on those four letters, then it was time to pick a new acronym.

Fortunately, even though I had my concerns about the Y in particular, I had a much easier time after that. (I mean, I already had most of the one for "Red," from the ROYGBIV stage, but still.)

It's funny though, I thought "Blue" was going to be the easiest, based on my knowledge of "B" words, but that one was actually the one I ended up tweaking and re-writing the most. Probably because it was also the last one I did, and I had started to develop a vague story about yearning for life and visiting a grave in a cemetery, so I had to work within that theme. Though, that said, I think "Green" is actually the weakest of the four, as far as impact goes, despite it being the one that kinda hammers home the life/death theme the most. It was the most difficult one to balance my syllables appropriately because of the words I really wanted to use.

Obviously, this "story" developed as I worked, so it's a bit more on the abstract side, but this is how I see what these four haikus say together; They're talking about someone, probably a young someone (I picked a girl for the background, but the poems could go either way), walking through a field of flowers and stumbling upon a nursing home, maybe with a couple of residents on the porch, and a cemetery nearby. Maybe connected to the home, maybe not. And the young someone stops and reflects on life, and how even once someone passes away, oftentimes we can be reminded of them, or almost feel as if they're still here, in the small things and little fleeting moments here there, like the petals of a flower or the whispers of a seasonal breeze in the air. They come back in those small ways, completing the circle of life, that essential balance of the universe.

Of course, that's just one way to interpret it, and even then there are still small details that could be changed while still keeping the sentiment the same. Personally, that's one of the things I enjoy the most about poetry and the mini magnets--you don't always know what you're going to end up saying until someone else reads it and tells you what it says to them.

As for those backgrounds, they're all fairly simple watercolor paintings. Once I had the poems and this vague idea of a story, it was fairly easy to come up with a background concept for each one to make them a little more interesting. Normally, I'd use sponged-ink backgrounds during Inktober, but I've been toying with the watercolor idea in the back of mind and this seemed like a good time to experiment since I was already pushing the envelope in various other ways.

You can see pretty much exactly what I had in mind for each one, though I will clarify the green one is supposed to be a tombstone in the grass since it's the only one that I think might not be super clear right away. It could just as easily be a rock.

For each of them, my process was very simple; I just picked 1-3 shades to make a gradient from the appropriate color, alternating each one slightly depending on what I wanted for the sky, and then I added the grass and silhouettes on top using a combination of watercolor and black pen. And then the very last one, "blue," got the added moon, stars, and some fireflies using gel pens (and a little bit of pastel for glow). It was the most complex, but "yellow," was actually the trickiest because I have not yet mastered the ability to free-hand a human silhouette. I had to sketch it out separately and then use my lightbox to transfer the outline and fill it in.

And, funnily enough, the backgrounds you see here were actually meant to be smaller test-runs before making bigger ones and actually physically setting the mini-magnets on them to photograph. But I was so happy with how these small test ones turned out, I honestly didn't feel like I needed to make the bigger ones.

So I pivoted a bit; I formed each mini-magnet poem on a plain blue piece of paper (a "blue screen" if you will to make it easier to separate the words) and photographed them, then used Photoshop to get each haiku onto its respective background.

This ended up working to my advantage, as I could just focus on arranging the words to make the words properly and not working around the paintings underneath, and then once I had everything in photoshop I could move things around as necessary much more easily.

I'm not super sure about the haiku part, but I'm really pleased with how the overall result looks, and especially happy with 3 out of the four backgrounds. So much so, I will be posted a wordless version of just the backgrounds to go along with this one for your viewing pleasure! fav.me/ddrqj28

I don't think I'll be placing in the contest (I could be wrong, but I'm aware I'm a little out-of-my-element here ), but I enjoyed the process and the end result, so it was still worth it in my eyes. It was really nice to have the mini-magnets out and put them to use again, especially since I've been having a craving to do so lately. And having them all freshly re-organized made using them all the more enjoyable.

Though I'm still not quite sure in what form it'll be, I am very much thinking of doing more non-Inktober stuff like this with the mini-magnets going forward. I have so many of them and I enjoy using them, even when it's a daily challenge and running me a bit ragged. You might say I'm a bit of an addict.

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram