Taral Wayne

Taral Wayne (real name Wayne MacDonald; born October 12, 1951, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), is an artist, with a career extending as far back as the pre-furry APA Vootie.

Fandom involvement
His art has been featured in Gallery and in the comic Tales of Beatrix Farmer, and was nominated for a Hugo Award eleven times for his illustration in science fiction fanzines. The most recent of these nominations is for the 2010 Worldcon in Reno, Nevada, USA.

He was a guest of honor at ConFurence 3 (1992) and was honored as the Fan Guest of Honour at Anticipation, the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal. In 2008 he was awarded the Rotsler Award for his long-time artistic achievement in amateur publications of the science fiction community by the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. He was in 2011 named the first recipient of the Canadian Fanzine Fanac Award as Best Canadian Fan Artist.

He produces consistent and refined line art, depicting figures in a stylized and rounded Franco-Belgian "ligne claire" (clear line) style. Taral has also had a modest career illustrating books, magazines, and any other sort of kipple that makes him a buck. Extensive selections of his art and writing can be found on Fur Affinity and deviantART.

In early 2017 he suffered a stroke, from which he subsequently began a slow recovery.

Art style
Many of his characters and the associated art is set in or around a fictional small town called Willow Run. His signature characters are a blue and white-furred, silver-eyed alien girl named Saara Mar, and another extraterrestrial girl named Tangel (short for Tangelwedsibel), a Teh Langgi girl featuring in a large number of Taral's drawings. She somewhat resembles a black and white furry dinosaur and hates being called a skunk.

Saara Mar
Saara Mar is the creation and protégé of sorts of Taral Wayne and dates back to his earliest work in the 1970s. She is a Kjola, an extraterrestrial, representing a species so fantastically advanced in science that her powers seem less like magic (as per Arthur C. Clarke's observation), they seem more like cartoons (as per Taral). One might go so far as to say she isn't a natural species at all, but a quantum powered, synthetic, solid-state being animated by force fields, yet nevertheless a very sympathetic human personality for all that. She "discovered" the Earth in April 1970, her first contact by some strange coincidence the artist.

Saara's appearance is that of a slim young woman who is a little over six feet tall, covered mainly in white fur but with peacock blue extremities and blue hair. The few places where it shows, her "skin" is chrome silver, as are the pupils of her eyes. Saara's hair is worn in a "page boy" cut and she is almost always barefoot. Nearly invulnerable and about 50 times stronger than a human being, her clothes are adornment rather than protection. Her usual costume is a variation of a chrome silver garment that is actually a "tool" -- it consists of a sort of force field and is continuous (through sub-space or a higher dimension) with the hull of her starship.

Among her non-human friends is Tangelwedsibel, a different species of extraterrestrial that somewhat resembles a skunk because of their tail and black and white fur. Naturally, Tangel resents being reminded of it. The Langgi is only one of a number of species belonging to the interstellar community known as Dalmirin.

The Illuriamimsi and Dnebrala are two others who sometimes visit Earth following its "discovery."

Media

 * Taral Wayne's GoH page on the Anticipation website (retrieved via the Wayback Internet Machine)