When they handed out talent, Kindrie Grove came back for seconds. And thirds.
The Alberta import and two-decade OK Falls resident wasn't satisfied being a darned good painter. So she became a darned good sculptor too.
And when that wasn't enough, she stole a little from her painting and a little from her sculpting, added a heaping helping of imagination and a healthy dash of "downloading" and became an author.
And now she's ready to show the world the fruits of her book-authorship labours.
This September, she'll officially launch the hardcover, fully-illustrated edition of the debut volume in her immersive fantasy series "The Stone Guardians."
It's called "The Stone Guardians: The Messenger from Myris Dar," and Grove says it's a "dream come true."
"We're really excited about it because it’s the culmination of a dream – to create a book that has the illustrations I drew along with the story," said Grove during a recent author/artist talk at Frog City Cafe in Kaleden.
"It's a really beautiful layout. All the illustrations are full bleed (full page) and some will be two-page spreads."
If sales stay true to Grove's expectations, she'll be releasing, one at a time over the course of several years, all six books she's completed thus far in The Stone Guardians series.
And that won’t be the end of it. She's already working on a seventh.
"It's about overcoming adversity," explained Grove. "It’s about finding love and compassion with a found family.
"It's about a really strong woman and the men who support her. It's about standing up for equality. It's about overcoming loss."
As an immersive fantasy, it's also…fantastical.
"It's not on Earth," said Grove, telling us what immersive fantasy fans already know. "It's in a totally new world I've created from the ground up.
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"And it's very character driven. There's action, there's adventure, but there's no technology. No guns.
"But there are swords and magic."
Accompanying Grove at the author talk was her "mascot," a clay sculpture she created several years ago and has kept nearby ever since.
"This is Jophiel," she said. "She's based on Rowan, the main character of my book.
"Rowan comes from an egalitarian nation and is a warrior of the highest caliber. But she ends up traveling to a land that's very patriarchal, where it’s survival of the fittest. And she creates waves because she's very atypical.
"And this sculpture (which one day will be cast into bronze) represents her spirit."
Also with Grove at her talk, and in fact introducing her, was good friend and colleague Renee Matheson.
Matheson and Grove are past partners in downtown Penticton art gallery "Matheson & Grove." These days Matheson runs Penticton's Aurora Matheson Fine Arts Gallery and a new seasonal gallery at Frog City Cafe, and happily carries Grove's artwork at both.
But on this night it was all about Grove, raised on a horse farm near Calgary, a graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design and a professional artist even before she left school.
"I made a modest amount of money right through school and afterwards, mainly painting," she smiled.
"But when I finally got into sculpture, it felt like I’d been sculpting my whole life. It was so perfectly me. And then casting the work into bronze, it’s been wonderful."
Grove has since made a pretty fine living primarily by selling her bronze sculptures to buyers situated all over the globe.
But then came the concept of books.
Her first foray was strictly non-fiction ("A Field Guide to Horses"), but her real passion lay in the fantasy genre. She was a voracious reader of it and she felt she had the artistic strengths to be a complete package.
''I've been working on this project for quite a while now," she explained. "But it's been part-time. But just over the last two or three years we've been promoting and getting the word out."
And she has no issues at all describing, in her own unique way, how all this book stuff comes to her.
"In that little space between sleep and wake, I saw these characters meeting for the first time," she told us. "And I decided to write it down so I wouldn't forget.
"But instead of that, something was cracked open and the entire book just streamed through, like a download. I was basically reading the book as I was writing it."
The illustrations came to her the same way.
"When I was nearing the completion of the drawn-out process of editing and revising, the artwork started to show up (in my mind)," she said.
"I could feel the inspiration coming, and I’d go and get in front of the canvas and it would arrive and I would paint. And then as I was painting I realized that was a scene in the book. And then I'd go and write that scene. So there was a lot of cross-pollination."
Grove believes the series will appeal to a wide range of people.
"It's a broad age range interested in epic fantasy," she said. "I think 30-somethings will read it. But I've also had people read it who are in their fifties and sixties and they just love it. So it should appeal to readers of old-time fantasy too.
"And it has a lot of deep concepts. There's a surface level you can read the book at, but there's always deeper meaning you can find."
Initially, The Stone Guardians: The Messenger from Myris Dar will be available only through Kickstarter here at this link.
But once the train is rolling – Grove estimates a few months after Kickstarter availability – it and all succeeding books in the series will be sold in bookstores too.
"They're printed in high enough quality that they can be distributed worldwide," she said.
For more info on Kindrie Grove and her artwork, check out her website here. For more on The Stone Guardians book series, go here.
