Welcome to my Creative Domain!
My name is Mary VanAlstine! I've been writing like crazy since I was a kid, but when I was 13 I became pretty dedicated and started drawing graphic novels. Throughout middle school and high school, I completed 4 lengthy comic books with complicated storylines, elaborate characters, and a whole lot of heart. These were Nikkei, The Terror of Night (originally a sequel to Nikkei, then known as "So Much for That!" or "Redefining Evil"),Rebels, and Cadence, which was formerly known as ...Whispered the River. Moving into the end of high school and my college years, I shifted from graphic novels to real novels. I rewrote one of my graphic novels (Redefining Evil) and also completed four novels varying in length from 30,000 words to 100,000+ words. These were Farewell, Fairytale, Catcher, Sun-Walking, Unface, To Trust a Dragon, and Per Aspera ad Astra.This site documents my projects. Each page is headed by an image I did while I was working on each project (or else working on something for the project later on, as some of my earlier images are very small and I don't have larger originals anymore), and includes some story summaries and images I drew for them. They're listed in chronological order beginning with "Nikkei" and ending with "Lilydale."
The last page, "Recurring Characters," is about some of the characters from my projects that show up in most or all of my stories.
About the Layout
(3/19/22) For the first time since the birth of this site, I decided to remove some pages instead of adding them in. I've left the links live, but I haven't remade them into this newest layout. As time has passed from smaller projects such as The Catcher, Unface, and Per Aspera Ad Astra, I've realized some of them haven't been very impactful or significant to the scope of my work. So, because it's been a pain in the ass to save files on my website, I've just kind of been like...meh.Anyway, this layout was inspired by a song from Avril Lavigne's newest album which also features Blink-182's Mark Hoppus. The song is all about nostalgia so it seems suiting for My Mental Breakdown.
Actually though, this painting on the home page was inspired by my gang growing up enough to all go out and get drinks. Lucy, from Sun-Walking, is drinking a Moscow Mule even though that's in very poor taste in our current political climate. Danny, from Redefining Evil, is drinking a Blue Moon, because obviously he would be a basic bro drinking beer, but with a mystical twist? I don't know. Andrew is drinking some kind of whisky because he's the oldest man and also English. Ingrid is drinking a cosmopolitan because it's pretty and sophisticated.
I'd realized recently since my style of art has shifted significantly to lineless airbrushing that I needed to probably remake the crew and remake My Mental Breakdown. This is the first layout made totally on the ipad which has benefitted from size but saving images and uploading them purely on the ipad is an absolute bitch!
