Jael: Yeah. I don't originate art in the computer. I don't go in there to begin do my art. I do it, then I enhance it, so it's never like a "from scratch" thing. Oh, computers are wonderful tools! Absolutely phenomenal. I don't know how we lived without 'em.

Crescent Blues: Did you put together your own site?

Jael: I have a Webmaster, Jeff Watson, who's my Web guru. He's a lovely man. Jeff told me years ago: "If you ever want to do a Web site, I will do it for you." We have a plan worked out. He's been wonderful. He keeps it clean and tidy. I probably should learn how.

Crescent Blues: If you've got a good person doing it, you probably should let him do it.

Jael: I do, and Jeff's wonderful. He does a lot of other top illustrators as well, because he likes to.

Crescent Blues: That's what generally happens in this business. People do it, because they like to, and they give you a gift.

Jael: They do. And of course, I make sure I send him little goodies. He does like my work. Jeff's a very high-profile software person who heads over 30 people at work. So he doesn't need to do the Web stuff. He just likes to, and it's like a vacation to him when he can update [the site].

The Dream Lives © Jael

Crescent Blues: Is The World one of your newest commissions?

Jael: No… oh, you're talking about The Dream Lives, which will be the cover for the new edition of The World by John Grant. I was very thrilled when he asked to use that piece of work. I was very honored.

Crescent Blues: What is the history behind that painting? I thought this was something new for the book.

Jael: Eliza and Mark Shallcross own that piece. I've borrowed it back on several occasions to hang when I've been guest of honor. It was done when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. I was devastated for weeks, and that was my statement. If you look at the ring of planets, there are seven little planets signifying the people that I was devastated to lose.

Crescent Blues: That seems to be a very special piece in your repertoire. Are there other pieces that have similar resonance to you over time?

Jael: In different ways. Every one of them is like a child with a different personality. You can't say that two of them are exactly alike. They're all different. They're all meaningful in different ways. Some more than others, but they're all your children.

Crescent Blues: Well, you've got a big child that you're doing now -- five by seven…

Jael: Yeah, five by seven feet. This is fun, because I've been given complete freedom. The only thing they've asked me to do -- other than have it exotic, almost celestial and prophetic -- is to include a little bit of rain forest, which is no problem. I can play with this one, and it's going to be a huge canvas, and I'm going to have to clean my studio out. But it's going to be wonderful. It will be like my nirvana. I can't wait.

Crescent Blues: No specifics at all?

Jael: Nope.

Crescent Blues: When you put your brushes away for the night, what do you do?

Jael: I don't put them away. [Laughs.]

Greg, my cutie-pie, always comes in at 11:30 at night and says, "Are you through?" And I say, "I'm never through." But I do get tired. I used to be able to work happily until 2 a.m., but I find now that I do kind of fade at 12:30 a.m.

I always work better at night. That's one of the blessings and the curses of having your studio at home -- it's always with you. I feel guilty when I do housework, because I feel like I should be painting or at the computer doing my work. That's a hard thing, but I don't want to not be home.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Cover by Jael)

Crescent Blues: Does that mean painting is your recreation as well as your profession?

Jael: Oh yeah. One day when Greg found me suffering from the sufferings that illustrators go through, he said, "Why don't you just give it up, stay home and just do housework?" I said, "Oh, oh, no! Say that again and you're dead. That's like ripping my heart out. You can't separate one from the other."

I am a creative person. When I'm dead, I'm done. "Retirement" is not even a vocabulary word that I understand. I've always been creative, and I'll drop dead being creative. I always thought if I was by myself, I'd be in a nursing home teaching people how to paint in my one room.

I'm never quitting, and I want to get better. So I still have my 30 best years ahead of me.

Crescent Blues: That's a great thing to look forward to.

Jael: Well, it's true. It's very true. I believe that artists have it over actors and actresses, whatever, because we can continue. We don't go out of style. We don't grow too old to fit the role. We can as long as we can see. And if I couldn't see I would sculpt. If I couldn't sculpt, I would paint with my toes. I would make a work somehow. I always have something creative -- with the music or with the art.

Crescent Blues: Have you continued with the music over the years?

Jael: My mother was a genius with the music, absolutely brilliant. Her singing voice: beautiful. I have a legacy to fulfil with her. She wrote music for years and years. She published a lot, but there was a lot that was only in manuscript. None of the children of my sisters or my brother have the harmony. I'm the only one who knows, because I'm the first one, so I do have a legacy to fulfil with her -- to write down the music and tape it for everyone. I've got a lot of things to do. [Smiles.]

Crescent Blues: You don't have time to slow down.

Jael: I know.

Crescent Blues: So this is what you're doing when you're not painting -- writing down your mother's music.

Jael: I haven't started. I do have a piano, but I gave it to my daughter, and she's had it for the last 15 years. But Greg saw another piano that's in beautiful shape, an old upright with a beautiful tone. I've also got books to write, people to write about.

Crescent Blues: Non-fiction?

Jael: Biographical. When I was seven, I was with my mother in San Francisco waiting for my father to come home from the Philippines, from World War II. We met a gentleman who had a vast library and who kind of adopted us, and I became his little grandmother, at the age of seven. He became my grandson at the age of 67. He sent me presents and came to visit, and he became part of our family.

He gave me magic. He gave me my first Alice in Wonderland. He gave me sets of pastels. He gave me sets of the opera. He gave me sets of postage stamps that had my image on them. I didn't appreciate him then. He sent me letters -- the serious and sad side of life, what I should watch out for. Very like Lewis Carroll. Very wonderful. I've got to let people know about him.

Then there were the Native American children that we had. We had a lot of foster children.

Crescent Blues: Your parents cared for foster children?

Jael: No, I had them on the farm when I was raising my kids. Native American children came to live with us, because the schools on the reservation were bad. It was a church program. They became part of our families. We didn't get any money unless some major medical problem happened, and we always stayed very close to their families.

That is a wonderful thing that I need to write about, because I had one son die in a wrestling accident -- Sandy Napoleon -- and I've got to write his story.

There are a lot of things that have happened in my life that I feel the need to tell people about.

Crescent Blues: We've been doing this kind of on the fly. Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to talk about -- your snakes, for example?

Jael: My snakes are wonderful -- a bull snake and a rat snake. I got them as babies -- they are 14 years old now -- from my wonderful friend, who was the genius behind the Hammond Map Company, now retired.

Tales of Suspense and Horror (Cover byJael)

Ernst is an Austrian gentleman who literally built his maps from aluminum foil, on a base, then airbrushed them flawlessly. They were breathtakingly beautiful, with minute details. Then he photographed them to look 3D for the finished product. He's close to 80 years old now, and has, along with his cartography, been a licensed herpetologist (snakes, lizards -- all sorts of cool scaled critters). I met him, when I asked if I could go photograph his chameleon for the Sword and Sorceress IV cover art, and he gave me my babies, only six weeks old at the time. Ernst and I have been good friends ever since.

Other than that, just how enthusiastic I can still be, and it's exciting to know that a few people like my artwork and what I'm doing. It's very rewarding. I think it's kept us young. I think it's kept us vital, healthy. Creative people have a blessing that I'm very grateful for. I can't imagine doing any other thing than what I'm doing.

Crescent Blues: Except maybe riding a Harley®.

Jael: Well, yes. [Laughs.] Since you bring that up, I met my cutie-pie 11 years ago. He walked into my life… He actually rode into my life on his red motorcycle, and we haven't been apart since. It's been an adventure, because I would not have settled for somebody boring. I would've been a bad person for them.

He's just a challenge. He's cute, he's challenging, and he's got a sense of humor, and he rides a Harley. We've taken a trip to Europe and ridden through the Swiss Alps and through the Bavarian Alps, which are astonishingly wonderful. He's taken about five thousand-mile trips. We've been to everything.

Crescent Blues: Do you get any visual references that way?

Jael: Sure. That's one thing that's neat, because I can't work when I'm on the back of the motorcycle, so I paint in my head. And I know I don't have any other duties that I can perform, so it's my Zen time. So I've got about a hundred paintings in my head. I just need the time to get them out.

Crescent Blues: Do the things in your head make it to canvas?

Jael: Sure, sure. They even come out with the book covers. It's subliminal.

Crescent Blues: So you can translate your mental images. Other artists have told me that what they see on the finished canvas is never as good as the picture in their heads.

Jael: Oh! I don't believe that! I don't believe that. You just have to let your imagination work for you. It comes out, maybe, in different ways, but the true ways will come out.

Crescent Blues: Do you use a lot of live models?

Jael: I do for the book covers. I pick up anybody I can. So whoever looks good, I

Deed © Jael

ask them if I can paint them.

Crescent Blues: And they always say "yes?"

Jael: I've never had anybody refuse me. For The Cat Who Went to Heaven, I needed a Japanese starving artist, and I found this wonderful looking man in a post office. I said, "You would be a wonderful starving artist." He turned out to be a wonderful model.

[Editor's note: A few days after her Lunacon interview, Crescent Blues learned that Jael planned to turn in 27 sketches for a new book during an imminent trip to New York. We asked her to expand on this tantalizing tidbit.]

Jael: The 27 sketches are for a continuing kind of fun job I've been doing for the last several years as they came up -- How to Draw books for Scholastic (through Kids Books). I've done Superheroes and Villains, Aliens and UFOs, dragons, angels, super hot cars, etc. etc. etc. This time around, the buyers for Scholastic were frantic for a military-oriented book -- tanks, fighter planes, vehicles, ships, etc. -- sans blatant weapons. (These books are for young kids, ages 5-11.)

When I was in New York, I gave the publishers roughs. I already completed the cover comp, which was what sold the "wished for" concept to the buyers. But I had to flesh the interior out, with around 27 more images of all sorts of cool stuff, which I had to research. As you know, the military is pretty sneaky about not giving away too many details, so we'll have to be a bit generic this time.

The publishers will pick 17 roughs to go to final. Then I'll ink five progressive steps for each of the 17 images, for the kids to follow, up to the fifth, finished inking. That's a lot, isn't it?

It's a lot of fun and pretty easy -- just a lot of mundane work and a lot of inking. [Smiles.] But the books I've done have been fantastically successful. And reprinted AND reprinted. Carol Russo (a top graphic/art designer for Time, Warner, Baen, Tor, etc.) finalizes colors for the cover comp with me.

It's just a fun job, nothing spectacular, but the kids love me when they find out I'm the one who's done a lot of these books. Mine seem to be their favorites:)

Jean Marie Ward

Click here to learn more about Jael and her art.