Category: Fantasy

The Convoluted World of Ruwenda

Technically its name is “The World of the Three Moons” but the country the series revolves around is called Ruwenda, so I’m going call the world Ruwenda as well, similar to how “Narnia” refers to both Narnia the country and Narnia the greater world around it. The purpose of this post is to give some …

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Golden Trillium [Review]

Golden Trillium by Andre Norton Bantam Books, 1993 Golden Trillium is the third book in the Trillium series of fantasy novels, which debuted, with much fanfare, in 1990 with Black Trillium. Since that’s over 30 years ago, I’ll recap the project here. Three respected female writers of classic SFF, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, and …

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AI Art Adventures: Fiddler on the Ref

After a year or so mucking around on Midjourney I’ve only recently begun using the –sref and –cref functions. What are these, do you ask? Well, they are offshoots of the basic reference pic users can paste into their /imagine prompts. Midjourney calls them Imagine URLS. As the user’s manual says, “Imagine URLS can be …

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Essence of a Golden September Afternoon

I like the way this turned out, even if the bottle isn’t symmetrical and the white bird a little odd in its feather placement. It was inspired by another series of AI artwork I’m working on.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/18/24: The Best of Twittersnips (Maritime Magic)

Are you or your adventurers embarking on an ocean voyage? Here’s some magic to help you out.   Maritime Magic Magic Items Clover of the Sea: A rare ocean plant that looks like an oversized, dark green, 4-leafed clover. It grows in sandy, shallow inlets and is used as a component in luck spells. Figurehead …

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Farewell to the 2024 Summer of Narnia

It ended sooner than I wanted. However there is lots of leftover material for next year’s three-month extravaganza! I’ll close with this delicious AI-generated version of The White Witch’s bento box. Made of polished and ornamented silver, it contains plenty of raw fish (tuna and salmon filets), hardboiled eggs, roe, oysters, pickled garlic, and nuts …

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Narnia French Editions, 1952 – 1953

Many first edition Narnia books published in other countries had unique, enchanting artwork that was never repeated for further printings. These covers for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (shortened to The Lion and the White Witch) and Prince Caspian have a light, airy, featherweight feel that seems more appropriate for a book of …

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Witte Heks

That’s Dutch for “White Witch.” The theater production below was staged in the Netherlands. Obviously, it was a childrens theater project, going by the youth of the extras who are playing the reindeer and dwarves. Interestingly the witch has black hair as in Pauline Baynes’ depictions. And here’s yet another Scandinavian version of The Lion, …

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Hvid Heks

That’s Norwegian for “White Witch.” And she’s the showstopper character in this very oddly staged Norwegian version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even though she’s not exactly white. Actually, none of the winter scenes are. Click to see full size version, you really have to! Here she’s using a variant of the …

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A Typical City of Calormen

I’ve been saving up artwork of desert landscapes, cities, and caravans, but they all tended to blend together. Typical of concept art. So, I really did blend them together.