Reusable Water Bottles at the Retropolis Transit Authority

Filed under Works in Progress

Hey! Just in time for you to equip yourself for that trip across the plains of Barsoom or the deserts of Arrakis, I’ve added a collection of aluminum water bottles to my t-shirt shop, the Retropolis Transit Authority.

I never grokked that whole cultural upheaval that started us carrying plastic water bottles with us everywhere. You use them once, and then neo-Bronze Age farmers will be turning them up with their plows for thousands of years, wondering what the heck we were thinking. With good reason.

So I’m glad to see the addition of reusable, durable water bottles like these that’ll stop us from getting embarrassed when our descendants revive our frozen heads. And I’m happy to slap the slogans, memes and designs of my retro future all over them to tempt you into shoveling shekels my way, too.

[tags]retropolis transit authority, retro future, science fiction, sf, water bottles, stop using all that dratted plastic[/tags]

The latest illustration from Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

So here’s another illustration from my Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual project. It’s a good example of a bad thing I’ve been doing.

It’s been years since I’ve had to pump out work on a difficult schedule – well, except for smaller projects, anyway – and I keep running up against that eternal problem: the picture wants to be as good as possible, but it has to get done today. Or tomorrow, anyway.

So what I keep finding myself doing is fooling myself into believing that an illustration is good, or at least good enough, and that I should wrap it and move on to the next one. Then, after a day or a week, I know that I was wrong about that, and I end up doing it over again. Like I said, this one’s an example.

It’s usually the lighting that suffers the most, since especially in the more complex scenes just rendering out the slightly different previews can take awhile. As those minutes add up, my its-done-o-meter begins to malfunction.

On the other hand, I’ve got over thirty of these done now and there are only a few (remaining) that I think I’ll be reworking. So that’s progress, anyway. When I wrote the script for this story I created a number of story nodes that share the same illustrations – but I didn’t total those up as I went, so at this point I don’t even know how many illustrations I need to make. I could tally them up now – but what a waste of time! It’s less than 105, anyway – probably around 80. Which would make me over a third done.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

More Mad Science from the Retro Future

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Nope: it’s not a self portrait of me in the Secret Laboratory. I still have lots of hair. Though in fact there was a time when I did work in a place that looked a lot like this, even though the turbines were bigger there.

No, this is yet another illustration for my ongoing project Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

The pattern seems to be that I work for a whole week on an environment and then I (more or less) quickly produce a series of pictures in that environment. Still three or four more to go in here, which is the machine room under the Tower of Doctor Rognvald.

The payoff is – this is what I keep telling myself – that later in the story, and in its two following chapters, I’ll be able to use this same scene again and again. It’s a good theory, and I think it’s even true. But I should have another twenty to thirty days of image making before I can even think about opening the new site up to the public.

But scenes like this remind me why I think it’s a good idea to go through all of that.

If you haven’t figured it out, click on the picture to see it embiggified.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

In which I pause for breath before stapling myself back to my desk

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’m continuing my marathon with a series of illustrations for an online + print project based on my pulpish, imaginary magazine Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

This has quite a bit in common with a sprawling retro future comics project I was struggling with for a long time, and this one, though it’s much smaller in scale, shares many of the same difficulties that broke my ship on the rocks of that other project. Chief among those is the sheer volume of objects and illustrations that I need to produce.

Once I’d done ten of these, I was surprised to see that in spite of the long time I’d spent on some new environments and other objects I was still averaging about a day and a quarter per illustration. It didn’t feel that fast, believe me. And to you, that might not even sound fast. For me, though, that’s blazingly quick.

But I feel an unusual amount of pressure to produce the images quickly, and I don’t think that the results are as even as I’d like. There’s at least one illustration I mean to go back to and rework completely.

So I’m still wresting with fit and finish issues. Still, working on sequences like this one has let me experiment with all sorts of things, as we see here – where the story has gone from the broad to the narrow, and I’m starting to use wide angle "lenses" to reinforce the idea that the action here is largely internal in a character who’s become isolated. Neat stuff.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

2010 Calendars now at Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design

Filed under Works in Progress

It’s that time of year again: the time when we realize that we’re going to get tired of looking at the "December" page of our calendars when January rolls around, I think.

If not that, it’s definitely some time of year, and therefore not a bad one to roll out my new calendars. So here they are!

The 2010 Retropolis Wall Calendar features twelve solid months of the retro future – full of faithful robots, death rays, and retro rockets. Highlights for the new year are "Space Piracy" and "Prairie Moon".

While on the other hand, or maybe on the other side of what I like to think of as "My Brain", we have the 2010 Celtic Art Wall Calendar – full of entirely different, although I hope not less interesting, things. Check out the knotwork spin on familiar symbols like the skull and crossbones, the Biohazard symbol, and the Chaos Star – along with some more traditional bits and bobs of Celtic design.

…Still flying high in the Future That Never Was

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Still throwing up the girders and lofting the rocket fins, here in the Secret Laboratory. There’s stuff.

A little retro futuristic preview illustration

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Just an illustration I think I’ve finally finished, from that second project I kept alluding to down below. This one, as simple and small as it seems, has shown me neither mercy nor quarter. If there’s a difference.

Though it means nothing to you, we have here Gwen Hopkins in front of the Icelandic tower of mad Doctor Rognvald. She’s about to deliver his… toaster. Honest. I wouldn’t make that up.

Okay, in point of fact I did make that up, but I didn’t make up the fact that I made it up. Previously. In good faith.

Everything Old Is New Again – a new, old Retro Rocket

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

Here’s something I don’t often do. No, not the rocket. I often do that. Nope, what I’ve done is to go back to an old rocket model I made back in 2002 (I think!) and I’ve reworked it in a higher resolution and with higher resolution textures and better materials – so it’ll look like it belongs in the same universe as my more recent rockets, characters, and other objects.

It was an interesting process. My recent models and materials are way, way better than what I was doing seven or so years back – and processors are so much faster – and addressing larger amounts of memory is so much easier – that I spend a lot more resources these days on an object like this. So whereas the old model used a bit less than 80,000 polygons, the new one weighs in at over 417,000. There’s Moore’s law for you.But quite a bit of the difference is in my self, not in my stars. I did see clearly that there was a lot about 3DS Max materials that I didn’t know yet when I built the first one.

The Hepmobile, I’ve found, is a vintage rocket in Retropolis. Although it always seems to be 2039 there, the Hepmobile is older than that: it’s pretty much the Volkswagen Beetle or the Morris Minor of the retro future. Everyone’s owned one, and they just keep going forever with a little TLC.

They’re still produced (in 2039) in limited numbers – mainly because some agencies, like the Retropolis Civilian Conservation Corps, continue to use them for their official vehicles. And how do I know that? Well, for now, I just know.

In Which I Explore the Phenomenon of Women in Tubes

Filed under Works in Progress

Retropolis offers a wide variety of accommodations to the tourist or traveler: from five star suites in the floating Galacticon hotel, through the more utilitarian, blastproof rooms made available to the conventioneers of The Society of Demented Research Technicians – and finally, to these modern and streamlined sleeping tubes at hotels like downtown’s "Tubular Belle’s".

Sleek and affordable, these tubes bathe the guest in a sonic shower that cleans both sleeper and clothing. Visitors awake refreshed and ready for a new tomorrow – helped along by the hot, strong coffee that tops off the hotel’s complimentary breakfast.

This all happened because of a series of blog posts at the Posthuman Blues blog …there, for example.

Though I’d never spent a lot of time thinking about Women In Tubes – and really, I haven’t, at least not since the seventies – once I did think about them, I realized that they’re all over the covers of pulp science fiction magazines from the Golden Age of, well, pulp science fiction magazines.

And I started to feel like less of a man because I’d never put women in tubes into my own pictures. I mean, obviously, it’s fundamental, right?

But it’s not enough to just stick a women in a tube. Not even if it were the seventies. What the heck are they doing in there? How did they get into a freaking tube, in the first place? It can’t be like that ship in a bottle thing: that would be disgusting. How do they get out? And, as always, who stands to benefit from keeping all these women in tubes?

So I’ve tried to answer these questions, and while in the act, I made the tubes coeducational. Because that’s how I roll.

The title’s from a song of 1933, by Olive Levine & Beany Miller. Because that’s also how I roll.

Available on posters, archival prints, and postcards.

In Progress: An Ominous Hallway of… Tubes

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

So this whole “women in tubes” thing was preying on my mind, and apparently my mind wasn’t careful enough down by the waterhole… judging by this in-progress scene.

What I’m liking in here (though you can’t really see why, yet) is that it’s a setting that’s guaranteed to seem ominous and sinister, but it won’t be. In fact it’ll be sort of cozy, in an unlikely way. And so, much more Retropolitan in character.

Just a pretty rough layout so far, though I have been experimenting with the lighting because that’s going to be pretty important to the picture. It’s a slow rendering already even though I’m not including the more distant tubes that’ll stretch down the hallway, which will just get composited in at the end. Many lights. Many reflections. Much glass.

I’ve already chosen a title, which is the name of a 1936 song by Milton Pascal and Edgar Fairchild.