From Belly Dancing to Cover Art!

This week I’m spotlighting the Artists of Luminous!  Tonight I’m going to introduce you to Abigail Sloan and tell you how the art featured on the cover of Luminous came about.  It was five and a half years ago that a dear friend and I decided to take a beginning belly dance class together.  The class was made up of maybe ten or twelve women and was taught by Fvorboda of Desert Journey School of Dance who is completely phenomenal and changed my whole perception of belly dancing and is a topic for a magical blog post at a later date.  Abigail was a sophomore in high school at the time and the youngest in the class.  I took several of Fvorboda’s classes that year including a few intermediate classes as well as a veil class which I loved and Abigail was also present in them.  We were friendly with each other in class but didn’t really get to know each other until two years later when Abigail, then a high school senior, asked me to attend a Regional Art Competition she had entered.  I went to support a budding young artist and was absolutely blown away by how amazing her watercolor painting was.  This was no budding artist, she was a rare talent and I commissioned her to do a portrait of Ilauria from my Psyne Series that spring.  She agreed to work with me and within the hour, she won not only first place in her category but first place overall!  Over the months that she worked on the Ilauria painting, we became fast friends and she did no less than pluck the image of Ilauria from my head and bring her to life in ‘living color’.  The portrait meant so much to me and fueled me to continue writing the Psyne Series.  Every time I’d look at the painting, Ilauria was telling me to keep writing her story, to keep persevering and to never give up.  I wouldn’t have had that motivation staring me in the face if it hadn’t been for Abigail Sloan’s immense talent.  She is a truly fantastic artist and a treasured friend.  Looking back on it, I can only shake my head because during all those months of shimmying in the same dance class with Abigail, I had no idea she was this phenomenally talented artist.  It just goes to show, you never really know what kind of extraordinary people are in your midst until you get to know them.  I’m excited to report that she and I have begun collaboration on the artwork for the cover of the sequel, Prism, due out next summer.  At present, Abigail is an art student at the University of Utah and you can follow her on Facebook at:

 https://www.facebook.com/A.SloanFineArt