NEW YEAR PLANS FOR 2024

 

The year 2024 marks the tenth anniversary of my foray into publishing novels. I published my SciFi novels: The Lady is Blue, Dragons of Vkani, A Tale of Two Colonies, and Captured by the Hawk in 2014. Also, I published my young adult fantasy novella, Rosemary’s Quest, although with a different title. This prolific output was because I had written The Lady is Blue, Rosemary’s Quest, and parts of A Tale of Two Colonies some years earlier. Later in the year, I hope to celebrate my tenth anniversary as an author by making a special edition of at least one of these stories.

 

This year, we celebrate the Chinese New Year of the Dragon. In honor of the Year of the Dragon, I am planning a Kickstarter campaign to create an Art Book, Whimsical Creatures, with images of mythical animals and short poems or pithy messages. The book cover(s) will feature dragons. Other images will have unicorns, anthropomorphic cats and dogs, fairies, merfolk etc.

Please join my campaign at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/auroraspringer/whimsical-creatures-an-art-book-of-fantastic-animals

 

NEW STORIES/BOOKS

1. I will continue work on the third book in my new epic fantasy series, the Oakenwald Chronicles. For the fourth book in this series, I plan to revamp a different unpublished story.

2. Next, I have some ideas for novella-length stories in my SciFi/Space Opera series, Second Chances in Space.

3. I will continue making beautiful books with illustrations of my stories. AI-art plus photo-editing can provide fantastic images of characters, scenes, and simply pretty art. You can see examples at WhimsicalArt. Two of my special illustrated books (Super Starrella and the Oakenwald Chronicles) were published in 2023 as a result of successful Kickstarter campaigns. 

 

DIRECT BOOKSTORE

All my stories are available at a discount from my virtual store https://payhip.com/AuroraSpringerNovels.

 

SOCIAL MEDIA

I post images and videos about nature, my travels, my books and art on Facebook,  Twitter/X,  YouTube, and Instagram 

 

The Joys and Tribulations of AI-generated Art.

 

AI-art is fun! I have spent more than a year creating AI-images. Despite significant improvements in the algorithms in the past year, the initial images often contain errors. Undesirable features are common and annoying when creating images of people or mythic creatures.

This post illustrates some common problems and describes the fixes for those errors.

Here is an image of a dragon created in NightCafe Studio. Can you see the problems? 

I’ve outlined three errors in the dragon’s anatomy in the next image. 

These types of errors are relatively easy to fix by photo-editing in software such as Photoshop or GIMP (free). The extra leg and pieces of wing can be erased or replaced by background colors. I also brightened the eye. The corrected image is shown below:

This image and other dragons are available as prints or on merchandise like totes, mugs, and T-shirts at https://www.playfulgallery.com/digital-art

And at https://www.redbubble.com/people/auroraspringer/shop

 

You can find more fantastic animals in pictures and poems at my campaign -   https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/auroraspringer/whimsical-creatures-an-art-book-of-fantastic-animals

Follow the campaign to join the fun and help to choose pictures for the Art Book, Whimsical Creatures.