Janny Wurts and her bagpipes at Dragoncon 2002. (Photo by Jean Marie Ward)

Writer, artist, horsewoman, archer, musician Janny Wurts has many strings to her bow. In addition to penning and painting the novels in her famous series, The Wars of Light and Shadow, she practices many of the skills she describes in her books and short stories. In the second part of her Crescent Blues interview, Wurts discusses some of the secrets of her art and the music that inspires her.

Crescent Blues: Did you have one event that you look back on now as your "big break," or was it a string of events that let you know you were on the path to what you wanted to do?

Janny Wurts: It was a string of events more than one big thing that happened, because I knew where I wanted to go. The people around me didn't. I didn't necessarily let on that this is where I wanted to end up. They would've found it ridiculous.

I saw that I could take simple, small drawings to conventions and sell them. So I could, essentially, learn to draw on the fly. So I'd do one convention a month and take artwork, and that would apply to a certain amount of my living.

I did what amounted to paste-up and lay-out, the stuff that people do on computers now, but back then they did it with wax and tape. But that paid me $20 - 25 an hour, so I could earn very quickly enough to pay the rent as a freelancer. So again, staying as a freelancer, staying free-wheeling and not being locked down, I was able to make good at it. And the graphic lay-out led into book lay-out and design. So it was all things that were going to give me "basement" knowledge. I didn't want to stay in the basement, but I'm grateful I had that background now.

Then I said, I can't go to publishers right off the bat. I can't draw well enough. But over here, this market's starting up. They don't have the kind of budget the big publishers do. They can't afford the first-rate artists. So I'll make my start there. I'll accumulate a portfolio, and my originals will get better and better, and every month. I'll go to that convention, and I'll hang next to the big guys, and I'll see where I am in the continuum. Oh, my figure's weaker here. I'm going to have to take another course and draw.

That was my college education coming out. I could comparison check where I was against the professional market and say, my prose isn't special yet. Don't send anything in. Just keep writing. I had four finished novels before I sent one out. So when I did sell one, I knew how to do it. It wasn't like: "Great God, now you have to write another book. How did you do the first one?" I knew inside out how to write, and how to make a plot flow, and I had the knowledge that they would finish. I've finished books. So that when I'm under the gun and there's a contract, I'm not confused, because I've done this four times. It's amateur work. It will never see anything except the inside of a file cabinet in the dark, but it taught me.

I didn't get the instant, overnight, lucky break, but that doesn't say that you couldn't. Somebody else may. That might happen to them, and you roll with that.

Janny Wurts: I had a dream, and it would not die. I was willing to starve for it. I was willing to work slave wages for it. I was willing to get rejected again and again and again until I got there. I was willing to constantly reevaluate everything I did. Failure is a valuable thing. Why did she fail? Being able to determine whether it really was that the work was bad, that you really did not know your craft yet, or was it because this person's taste was different. In other words, you have to learn the game -- when to stand your ground and when to say, "This is a piece of garbage, and I need to go back to the drawing board and learn more."

Crescent Blues: Or: "I need to learn my market better."

Janny Wurts: Whatever the case may be, a failure is always an opportunity, and if you can't look at it that way, go do something else, because you can't afford to be right all the time and still be in the creative arts.

Janny Wurts: I started with watercolors and inks, and I had to abandon them very early. Watercolors and inks are very cheap, and I could work on them in a small space, but the market required more photo-realism. That required oil paints or acrylics, so I learned those. Then I chose oils out of preference, because I like them better, even though they have flaws, even though they don't dry as well, even though, even though, even though… To me, they're more expressive. They're more alive on my brush. Acrylic requires very, very mechanical brushwork.

I went through a lot of different techniques before I arrived at the one I use. To someone starting out, I say, do what makes your heart sing and stay with it. You know which technique works for you. Go for it.

Crescent Blues: Do you like working in the photo-realistic style, or would you prefer to be doing something else?

Janny Wurts: A number of decisions go into the style -- what you are calling photo-realism versus texture. Texture can take forever to dry. You cannot get them up to a photographer, drag them around conventions, bring them up to an art director, scan them -- you name it. It's too impractical to handle them. I work on a masonite, because it's less easily damaged.

When you use the word "photo-realism," I stick a little bit, because I don't like using photographs, and I generally don't. I work right out of my head. I do not have a model for my characters, sorry. No one person. It's right here. [Wurts points to her head.] I know what they look like. I just keep refining the painting or the drawing until they get there. I know when they look right, and I keep messing with the pencil until they do.

I want to create an experience where you're looking through a window into another place. I don't want the distraction of the texture. I'm not doing a sculpture. If I wanted texture, I'd do sculpture, and I can do sculpture. There's no reason I couldn't do that head in 3-D.

The third reason is I like to use really high-grade oil paint. If you use a thick, heavy technique, it gets really expensive really fast. The longevity of the paintings is going to be less, because all those different layers of paint are going to crack or get damaged. Thinner layers of paint are going to stay more resilient. They're more stable over time. That's pretty much why I don't like a textured finish.

Crescent Blues: So it's a personal decision as well as a professional one.

Janny Wurts: That and the practicality. That painting, once it's done, has to go and get photographed in different places. It's got to travel a bit. The photographer is not in my backyard. It's got to be shipped, or it's got to be sent. To endure the sheer, physical handling, I need something that's going to dry in 24 hours.

Crescent Blues: Do you use any special techniques to get it to dry or do you just make sure that the paint is thin enough that it will dry in the allotted time?

Janny Wurts: I use a medium that's practically antique. You can't buy it anymore. They won't sell it off the shelf, so I have to create it. Literally. I have to buy the raw copal resin from Africa, and I've got to get a chemist to boil it up to the required degree, or I've got to do it, and it's a messy, messy job. Luckily, I paint thin, so I don't need too much. I don't use any dryers, because the chemical dryers continue to dry the paint forever. Eventually, it turns the whole surface to powder and it falls off. I use natural substances that are going to last.

That particular medium will be dry in 24 hours, and it will undergo a chemical change in 48, and it will not come off with turpentine, absolutely will not come off. I could put a damar varnish over the top to protect the paint layer. Once I've done that… Once I took a clean t-shirt and some turpentine, and I poured [the turpentine] on the painting and [Wurts mimes scrubbing on a flat surface] as hard as I could, and even the fine little highlights on the hair -- I'm talking hair-fine lines -- didn't come up. The rag was white, clean except for the varnish. Once it goes through that chemical change in 48 hours, the paint will not come off.

Crescent Blues: Some of the old methods were superb.

Janny Wurts: The older artists really had a familiarity with their materials. They knew how to make it from scratch. They understood what they were handling, and they understood how it worked. They weren't going into the art supply and buying it for $5.69 off the shelf. I wouldn't have been as curious about what went into my paints if they hadn't stopped making what I wanted to use commercially.

Crescent Blues: So you discovered your medium while it was still commercially available.

Janny Wurts: It was [supposedly] pioneered by a man named Frederick Taubes, but it wasn't really pioneered by him. People have been using copal resin for years and years. But copal got a bad name because it does go through a chemical change in 48 hours, and if you use it as a varnish layer with no paint in it, it turns black over time. So it got this rotten reputation for destroying paintings, because if you use it as a varnish, it will eventually darken. But if it's added to the paint, it becomes suspended in the paint medium, in the paint pigment, itself. There isn't enough in there to turn dark, and the paint itself will color it. I talked to some museum guys, who said, "If you're mixing it with the paint, it's not going to affect it at all. Just don't use it as a varnish."

So copal got a bad name as a varnish, and Frederick Taubes' lifetime of research sort of got thrown in the trash can. Wrongly. He was a brilliant man. He wrote a book called The Mastery of Oil Painting. Permanent Pigments used to sell [the resin] with his products. It makes the paint handle unbelievably well. It changes the nature of the paint profoundly. It gives that misty sky. The trademarks that you see of my style are largely due to that medium. Taubes stopped making copal resin, because it got a bad name.

Crescent Blues: What's it made of?

Janny Wurts: Copal comes from the sap of a tree in Africa.

[The loss of the product] was very sad. So when I couldn't buy it anymore, I turned to Don [Maitz -- Wurt's husband] and said, I can't throw away all the painting I've learned to do all these years, because they can't sell my medium. And I sure don't want to go to a damar-based varnish, because it isn't going to set up like this stuff does. It's very, very tough. We'll just have to repeat Taubes' recipe. It was very roughly sketched in Taubes' book -- not in the kind of detail you really need, so we had to trial-and-error it. I think there's a guy on the Internet who's making it. So you could possibly buy it off the Internet now.

Crescent Blues: Most of the people you paint seem to have a family relationship. They share similar jaw lines, similar styles of eyes and the like. Was this intentional, or was this the result of who the character happened to be?

Janny Wurts: In the Wars of Light and Shadow series, two characters are half-brothers, so there is a family relationship.

Crescent Blues: I'm thinking of paintings that are not from the Wars of Light and Shadow series.

Janny Wurts: Probably just the way I perceive the world. There's a lot that goes into a picture -- you want to make something beautiful. Even if you're drawing a character who's shadowy, dark or scary, you still want it to be a beautiful scary. I think everyone has their own concept, stylistically, of what's elegant to them. Some of that is going to come out in the way I write and paint. When you can have it your way, and you can paint the line here and have it look really awkward or you can paint the line here and have it look beautiful, why not go for the esoteric value?

Crescent Blues: You're pursuing your own standard of beauty.

Janny Wurts: Right -- what rings right to me, what pleases my eye. Everybody is different. That's what's so incredibly rich about our individual resources. Everybody is going to have a different mode of expression.

Crescent Blues: I know you enjoy painting your own works, and I can't imagine a happier gift than to be able to bring your own words to life visually. But when you can't illustrate your own stories, do you have any particular writer whose work you enjoy illustrating?

Janny Wurts -- Continued