Hello, friends! It’s been a…long while. About a year ago I announced I would be switching over from a Wordpress-hosted site to a brand new self-hosted site, which would allow me to use plugins, more templates and themes, and just overall more control over the site. Web design and the messy backend of website management is a huge learning curve, despite a great class in grad school, so it’s been a long time coming as I’ve tried to work it in between a busy work schedule.
Excuse The Mess; I’m Moving!
Over the next few weeks you may notice an uptick in backposting and eventually some out of place web ads you didn’t notice before. That’s because I’m working on updating my portfolio and transitioning away from WordPress’s hosting plan. Once my site finds a new hosting service, I’ll be able to finally install plug-ins and additional features my personal WordPress plan didn’t provide—and I’ll eventually get my own domain name! Switching hosting shouldn’t affect you all, and if you continue to follow my site, you’ll stay with me through the transition. You may just notice me backdating some projects over the next few days as I catch you up on projects I’ve finished this year. I started this site in college to keep track of school and freelance projects, but it’s time for a facelift that accommodates my cover design work and writing endeavors more clearly for potential clients and publishers. If you’ve been here for awhile, stick around! If you’re new, stay tuned!
Free Story For Today Only – Grave Robbers Exclusively on Havok
There are dozens of problems you may encounter when stealing your own coffin, but for Vlad, it was his lack of physical hands.
You read that right. That’s the opening sentence to my flash fiction short story, “Grave Robbers,” which is published on Havok today. It follows Vlad, a young ghost (only several centuries old), as he plans the perfect heist to steal his own coffin from an ancient Scottish castle.
Life Update: Post Graduation
The last year and a half has been a constant churning of life’s ocean waves when set on a giant spin cycle. Between COVID and finishing up my master’s degree, I barely have an internal clock or a solid sense of time (as if I had one in the first place). But now things are finally getting back to normal (well, as normal as post-graduation adult life can get), and therefore it’s probably worth giving a life update.
Mockup Cover Designs for RED Trilogy
Eighteen-year-old River Ardis lives in a future where terrorists infiltrate the country as teenagers. She tries her best to keep her head down and away from the unrest until she meets a distraught girl from the 1990s. But little do either of them know, the oppressive government has been hunting the time traveler for years—and anyone associated with her. I began writing my time travel dystopian trilogy when I was fourteen, and it’s since undergone extensive edits for the past ten years. While I intend to pursue a traditional publishing house, which would be responsible for cover designs, I wanted to design my own cover and layout for a class project.
Magic of the Real Kinetic Type Video
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVkyWKQu5F0&w=560&h=315] Last summer I was able to attend the Realm Makers virtual conference, where author ND Wilson was the opening keynote speaker. His perspective on the fantasy genre and the Christian author’s role was game-changing to me, and it really left me with a new perspective on God’s creation and fantastic storytelling throughout history. Wilson believes that we live in “God’s fantasy novel,” in that, God’s creation and history is fantastic, and is the origin for all fantasy fiction (Marvel comics inspired by the Book of Judges, for example). In the original keynote, Wilson echoed some of JRR Tolkien’s and CS Lewis’s beliefs on the fantasy genre, and charged his audience to live in God’s novel as a character they would want to read about. Since a lot of his points stuck with me and other conference attendees, I wanted to adapt his talk into a short video that explained his view on fantasy, informing them of a new and unique way to see God and storytelling.
Rivera Ardis Character Design
In my Advanced Digital Graphics class, we had to break out of our graphic design comfort zones and focus more on creating our own graphics to amplify our skillsets. One of our projects required us to do a character design or portrait, so I decided to draw my main character from my novel. While it’s not particularly my favorite digital painting ever, it taught me a lot about warm light and cool shadows, perspective, and drawing a character within a setting (something I’m pretty terrible at), so this was a really enjoyable project. I got a B+ on this project.
The Book of Esther Redesign with Commentary
For class we were tasked with redesigning a short book of the Bible. One of our options was Esther, and even though I wasn’t particularly a fan of that story, I knew there was a lot of interesting history there. I decided to not only redesign the book like the class required, but I also wanted to make it a historical and biblical commentary. My dad and I worked together to sift through the historical references–Dad came up with a timeline based off of James Ussher’s Annals of History while I read Josephus. Below is the cover jacket design and some of the spreads in the book. I’ve also included the introduction to read below the designs, in case you want to know more about what went into the in-depth project. If you’d like to purchase the book, you can find it here. I got an A- on this project.
The Mandala Blog: Assateague Island
Assateague Island, a 48,000 acre vacation oasis, is shared between Virginia and Maryland, and is relatively untouched by human civilization.
