Intermission: modeling a new retro rocket for Retropolis

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

So after months of nearly nonstop picture-making for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom I’m taking a short break before I start weeks of picture-fixing for the same thing, and with the same pictures. Because the whole weeks/months issue gets a little wearing, no matter what the work’s for, and it’s almost always more fun to build stuff than it is to turn that stuff into pictures.

So I’m modeling a rocket. You can’t go wrong with rockets. And it’s been quite a while since I built a new one.

Like most of my rockets, this one’s in the style of the personal rocketing devices we first saw back in the late 1920’s, in the earliest pages of the Buck Rogers comic strip.

Those open-cockpit flying roadsters were not much like the real rockets we came to know (and often fear) a decade or so later. No, these are "rockets" in the sense that they’re flying vehicles whose workings are mysterious to us, but which ought to look something like this.

You ask me, they still ought to.

Anyway, this one needs more surface detail, especially on the dashboard, and actual materials before I’ll use it anyplace. But it’s ready for those finishing touches whenever I figure I need it. Truth to tell, I should probably be adding to my library of Retropolitan buildings instead; but I just felt like making a rocket. So there.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, on the sort of final stretch

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

This morning marks the milestone that at least one of us has been clamoring for: I think I just finished the first pass on my illustrations for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. I’m hedging my bets there because, a.) sometimes I change my mind, a day or so later; and, b.) the last one – the illustration for Chapter 1 – has been kicking me up and down the street and I can’t be sure that it won’t continue to abuse me.

For those reasons, that’s not the illustration for Chapter 1 that we see up above. What we do see – and what the reckless among us may click on, to see embiggified – is what I call “Pseudoendpapers A (Front)”.

In the unlikely event of a hardcover edition this would make one half of a pair of endpaper spreads; in the rather more likely trade paperback edition the pseudoendpapers would become simple two-page spreads at the beginning and end of the book.

The pseudoendpapers are (still) crying out for taglines. The text you see at the top here will probably not make the cut because it’s a kind of spoiler. It has the right tone of melodrama tempered by farce. It’s just not quite what I need.

So the taglines are one thing I still need to do. The other things add up to revisions to six of the chapter illustrations. The revisions range from mistakes (“Oops! I forgot to put the shazbrogenator in there, when it’s clearly described in the text”) to enhancements (“That’s not crowded enough for a crowd scene”) to potential explosions (“What the heck was I thinking there, anyway?”). I’ll probably be working through those issues for the next few weeks.

So I’m a couple of weeks behind schedule. I guess that’s not too bad, percentage-wise, when the schedule covers about six months. Back in my days of art direction I’d always pad a schedule by about 20%; but I can’t fool myself that way because I am myself: too canny to be taken in by that sort of subterfuge.

The only bit that’s running seriously behind is the next book. I expected to be pounding the keyboard by now, but I’m still thinking some things through and dreaming of index cards. As one does.

Unsuspecting gallery-goers submit to the power of the Pulp-O-Mizer

Filed under Works in Progress

They thought they were supporting the arts. They believed their perspectives would be broadened by an exposure to mid-century illustrative art. They probably expected some Chablis and cheese.

They never expected the Pulp-O-Mizer.

Dehn Gallery curator Jane Rainwater admits in a rueful email that her brain, temporarily hijacked by thought worms from space, concocted a hellish plan through which the visitors to her Planet Pulp exhibit were subjected to the horrors of Pulp-O-Mization in what had appeared to be an innocent gallery opening. As yet there is no reliable report on casualties due to the many tentacles and cocoons that now obscure the site of the tragedy.

Dissenting journalists may report this differently. What’s known – and I mean here, what is known for certain – is that the Planet Pulp exhibit opened last night at the Dehn Gallery in Manchester, Connecticut. As part of the festivities, the gallery’s visitors were exposed to the Pulp-O-Mizer and they… played with it. And claimed that it was fun.

In the interest of public safety, the Pulp-O-Mizer has been removed from the premises and as a result it should be completely safe for visitors to view the thirty pulp science fiction covers in the exhibit. It should be safe.

No blame should be assigned to the paintings themselves, which are a part of the Robert Lesser Collection (New Britain Museum of American Art) and have, until now, never knowingly exposed viewers to Pulp-O-Mization or thought worms from space. The paintings are well behaved; they have no criminal records; and they’ll be in display at the Dehn Gallery through November 1.

These paintings have experienced a terrible trauma. Anyone in the area should pay them a visit and express their condolences.

A Gallery of Ed Emshwiller covers from the 50’s and 60’s

Filed under Found on the Web

Theres’a a large gallery of Ed Emshwiller covers over at The Geeky Nerfherder. I found them this morning through Charlie Jane Anders’ helpful link at i09.

Emshwiller is probably best remembered for the Christmas covers he used to paint for Galaxy magazine. (In fact I’ve been meaning to do a sort of homage to those for the Pulp-O-Mizer; just haven’t gotten around to it.)

But he painted plenty of covers that didn’t feature a four-armed Santa Claus, and it’s nice to see so many of them collected together.

These are a little too modern for my taste; that might be because some, like the Andre Norton book covers, are things that I can actually remember. But – all questions of anti-nostalgia and decade prejudice aside – there’s some fine work in there.

Once you’re done browsing, you can read a bit more about Emshwiller at The Field Guide To Wild American Pulp Artists.

Out on the roof with Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom

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

Here’s the latest illustration for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: this one’s for the final chapter in the book, though this isn’t the last illustration in the set.

One reason this picture took longer than most of the others was the little pigeon-like ornithopter in the foreground. The ornithopters show up many times in the story, but up to now I didn’t need them in any of the scenes I set out to illustrate. So here I was, nearly at the end of the long, long series, and I found that I needed an ornithopter after all. I spent several days building one.

The other reason this took awhile is that it’s not the picture I planned to do next. I thought I was going to work on the illustration for the first chapter. I continued to think that through three—or maybe even four—false starts, until I realized that I ought to set that one aside to simmer for a bit and do this one, instead.

It may be that I’d spent so much time thinking about the first chapter’s illustration that my brain had decided that This Is Really Important, and brains shouldn’t be allowed to think things like that, because when they do, things like this happen.

But my brain and I need to come to some kind of understanding about that now; the first chapter is the only one left to go. After that, I want to do some rework on about six of the existing illustrations, and after that, I have a pair of two page spreads to do. Those are meant to be sort of like endpapers: one at the start, and one at the end, and between them they should show us all the major characters in the book. Even with twenty-one illustrations there are a lot of people, both human and mechanical, who didn’t get their close-up. Or their long shot, for that matter.

And then (finally!) all the illustration work should be done and I can get back to worrying about what’ll become of the book. Because, you know, I haven’t been thinking about that. At all. Not me. Oh, no.

Amiga Dreams: my first computer graphic images, from 1987

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

Back in September of 1987 I bought my first Amiga computer. It was an Amiga 500 – the least expensive Amiga, but with a whole megabyte of RAM. Less than a year later I’d use it to win the BADGE Killer Demo Contest, whose first prize was an Amiga 2000.

In the Fall of ’87, though, that was still a ways off. A long ways, as far as I could see: because although I wanted make pictures and animations, I was having some trouble learning to draw with a mouse. So I sent some of my pencil sketches off to a service bureau, where they were digitized with a video camera, after which I planned to paint them on my new computer. But before the scanned images came back I went to an eye-opening presentation by Jim Sachs at AmiExpo. Jim was doing fantastic artwork… and all of it with a mouse.

So I returned home and went back to drawing with what felt like a small brick, and I’d gotten the hang of it by the time my digitized sketches arrived, in the mail, on a floppy disc.

In October and November I got pretty busy with my mouse and Deluxe Paint II – and my scanned sketches – and I turned out a bunch of pictures. I put them all together with a shareware slideshow program, and zipped them up, and uploaded the slideshow to BBS systems across the country. Because that’s what we did in 1987, with our modems. On our landlines. After walking six miles through a snowstorm.

The Amiga Dreams slideshow was a portfolio that I used to approach game companies. It spread pretty far across the BBS’s and it introduced me to a whole lot of people, some of whom I still know.

I recently ran across a copy of the original slideshow at Aminet and I downloaded it. (I didn’t even have a complete copy any more.)

Now, it’s hard to simply show you the original images – mostly in 16 or 32 colors – because the aspect ratio of the Amiga’s pixels was different from the square pixels that computers use today. I had to scale these to get the images themselves into the correct aspect. So what you see here isn’t a literal version of what I did then, but the pictures look the same.

Treasure (1987)

These days, people call this "pixel art" – which is a pretty silly label – because one often worked with individual pixels, in solid colors, and from a limited palette. I used to say that I knew all my pixels by name. I almost wasn’t kidding.

Like most of the Amiga Dreams pictures the original resolution of the one above was 320 by 400 pixels, and I painted it with a palette of 32 colors. It was based on a little pencil sketch from my sketchbook.

The North Light (1987)

Here I took an old drawing for a watercolor and painted it over again in Deluxe Paint. This one was also 320 by 400 pixels. You can see that I managed pretty decent gradients for the sky and the beam of light; but it cost me quite a few of my 32 colors.

Lady Otway (1987)

Part of this picture was originally a pen and ink drawing.The digital version became better known a year or so later when I did a new, expanded version (in portrait aspect) for the cover of Amiga World magazine. Once again, this one was 320 by 400 pixels in 32 colors.

To do the portrait aspect version I rotated the image 90 degrees and turned my video monitor on its side. The monitor wasn’t too happy about that, but it was nothing a little degaussing couldn’t cure.

Tower (1987)

The Amiga’s Hold and Modify graphics mode was made up of equal parts of inspiration and dementia. You could use up to 4096 colors, but the color values were stored as the difference between the current pixel and the pixel to its left. Because the early Amigas used video displays there were limits on how many of these changes could happen on a given scanline, and how large the color changes could be from one pixel to the next.

If you used a HAM paint program you had to deal with strange color fringes shooting off to the right while you worked. This caused undesirable mental effects in laboratory mice, and in me.

I almost never painted in HAM after this one. HAM turned out to be great, later on, for 3D rendering, or for images that were painted in 24 bit color and converted down. But painting in HAM? It was possible: I just never liked it. I painted this picture in HAM with Digi-Paint.

Interesting note: another HAM paint program showed up a few years later. It was called Photon Paint, and it was written by the young Oren Peli – better known in this century as the writer/director of Paranormal Activity. It’s a small world.

Serpent (1987)

I can’t quite remember the provenance of this one. It’s possible, and maybe even likely, that this was the first thing I drew from scratch with a mouse. The original was once again 320 by 400 in 32 colors.

The Dragon (1987)

Here’s another 32 color image, this time based on a couple of my pencil sketches. My original drawing of the dragon turned into a forgettable oil painting: I think it’s better off here.

The Viking (1987)

This picture’s claim to fame is that it was the beginning of a dithering technique I finally mastered in the following year (more here).

At 640 by 400 pixels I could only have a 16 color palette. So I used part of that palette for a range of warm greys, and the rest for hues.

I used these colors in a checkerboard dithering pattern: the greys for values, and the hues for color. It worked pretty well, especially on a video monitor where the alternating pixels tended to bleed together. Here’s a literal detail at twice its original size.

In practice, I painted areas with solid hues and then drew diagonal grey lines through them. I’d go over the grey lines with lighter and darker greys, either pixel-by-pixel, or in shorter diagonal lines. I also defined checker fill patterns with the 50% grey and one color, filled an area with that pattern, and then retouched the values from there.

The reason this all seemed worth it? Resolution. A 320 x 200 or a 320 x 400 image had big, visible pixels. At 640 by 400 I managed to get cleaner lines with the illusion of a large palette of colors.

The End (1987)

And this was the end, of course, in a Celtic knotwork border. I had pages and pages of knotwork designs for my drawings and paintings, earlier in the decade: I turned a lot of them into Amiga graphics in limited palettes, as we see here.

Years later, when I was building my first web site, I turned many of my early Amiga knotwork patterns into web-friendly clip art; those pages are still up. There’s even an animated Celtic knot that I painted in 1988 for the Charon demo that won me my second Amiga.

So these are my very first computer graphic images. It’s strange to see them again. Things were so different in 1987 that it seems like somebody else’s ancient history. I can’t even recall what treasures I myself found through the BBS systems of the day; there was wonderful art and freeware and shareware. It was a pre-web world, but our data still got around.

And I haven’t even mentioned the computer user groups, like VAUX, SFVAUG, and the others I used to visit, back when using a computer – or a particular kind of computer – made you an honorary member of unsecret societies across the globe.

Back to the illustrations for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom

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

My brain’s polygon-melting beam of inspiration has turned back to the illustrations for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. Which is to say, I’ve had my coffee.

The whole polygon-melting thing, which admittedly is a little much, really happened a few days ago. But it’s only now – now that I have new stuff to show for it – that I feel like it’s official.

This illustration for Chapter 11 gives us a view of a robot showroom, where the indentures for new robots are sold to the public. Indentures? Robots are persons, and we don’t approve of owning persons. Unless we’re a villain, I mean. So an indenture is like a loan that finances the robot’s manufacture: when the robot works off the loan, he or she becomes a free agent. And, usually, a member of the Fraternal League of Robotic Persons.

This is one of three illustrations that needed a whole bunch of robots; I’m working now on the third of those. Looking back, it seems that I modeled about a dozen new robots for the story. That’s a little hard to measure because I built one of them far in advance, so he’s shown up in a few places already; and then there’s another who turned out to be a specific character I want to use later, so he’s gone back on the shelf. But technically? About a dozen.

I have just four more chapter illustrations to do. I also have six that will be taking a trip back to the shop for a little more work. After that, a pair of two-page spreads of character portraits; and then the illustrations will be done.

When? Probably some time in September. I think.

So it’s some time in September (I think) when I’ll try to figure out how Phase Two of the project is going. Early indications are good, but not conclusive.

The book has two chapters that still worry me a little. Chapter Two probably wants my attention in an editorial, voicey, copy editing kind of way. But the eleventh chapter….

There are times when you want it to be possible for a reader to understand something in advance. To make that happen, it can’t be impossible to get it; but it should also be possible to miss it. I’ve handled one or two of those elsewhere in the book, but Chapter Eleven still worries me a bit. I reworked that chapter quite a bit in my latest (fifth) draft. I’m a lousy tester for the problem because I already know what the reader might start to suspect . That’s an area where I hope for some new feedback during Phase Two.

I just can’t pretend that I’m a new reader any more. The fix for that? New readers.

But in the meantime: more art!

Roundtable discussion at Locus: James Morrow and Daryl Gregory

Filed under Reading / Watching / Consuming

Over at Locus there’s an interesting emailed conversation between two writers I’ve discovered and enjoyed lately. They’re James Morrow (The Madonna and the Starship) and Daryl Gregory (Afterparty and the upcoming We Are All Completely Fine).

Their two recent books each deal in some way with faith or religion, but not from a standpoint you might expect. Neither book hands you a conclusion on the tension between faith and reason. But the authors take you to some pretty interesting places along the way.

I’m very fond of Henry Kuttner’s humorous stories. The Madonna and the Starship is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a modern work in the vein of Kuttner’s Gallegher or Hogben stories: Morrow gives us bizarre aliens with bizarre intentions, and frenzied protagonists who have to find a way to deal with them. The book is straight out of Kuttner’s era, too, since it’s set in the live television studios of the 1950’s. It is about the most fun you can have in a philosophical novel, with or without big blue lobsters.

And that’s really what it is: a story about warring philosophies. If "warring" sounds like an exaggeration, I have two words for you: death rays.

Afterparty isn’t that kind of screwball comedy. Afterparty introduces a drug that makes your brain experience religious certainty: it’s like the way that psychedelic drugs fire off the synapses that tell you you’ve just had a profound insight. ("Doughnuts… and zebras! Of course!")

People who take this drug are certain that there is a god, though that god varies from person to person. That certainty stays with them unless they stop taking the drug: this makes withdrawal a pretty serious matter. It’s not a good thing for an extremely religious person to find that god’s vanished.

And if you overdose? You actually see and hear your god, your angel, or your demon. All the time. Forever.

The drug’s been buried under patents that should prevent it from ever escaping into the world. But of course that’s not what happens. What does happen is very interesting.

Anyway, these are two great books that you should read right now, and there’s a discussion by their authors at Locus.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: the Terror of the Slush Pile, and More Robots

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

Here’s an updated shot from the Illustration Green Room, where a growing mob of robot characters are more or less patiently waiting for their appearances. We’re running out of magazines in there.

For those who came in late: after several self-published books, I’ve been experimenting with that whole (very) long process that we’ve come to know as "traditional publishing".

That process usually starts with a writer contacting a bunch of literary agents (in this case, twenty-one). That was my Phase One. Apart from a terrific response from my first choice, the results of my agent search went pretty much the way they go for everybody else. I do have one unusual hold-out who’s still planning to read the book even though he’s encouraged me to embark on Stage Two.

In Stage Two, instead of risking humiliation and despair at the hands of literary agents I go directly to the source of humiliation and despair: editors!

Even those writers who pass the trials of what I’ve called Phase One still have a Phase Two to face; in their case it’s the agent who submits to editors. Those of us who still don’t have agents end up in a slush pile of manuscripts that, for editors, is kind of like the Augean stables. Possibly in more ways than one. But – importantly – a slush pile resembles the Augean stables because it can never be exhausted. It just keeps piling up.

You really don’t want your book in slush pile: there’s no way of knowing when it may come out. But I begin Phase One with a leg up, since an editor who noticed my posts about the book has asked to see it. So, for the moment, no slush pile for me. Just another, but completely different, long wait until there may or may not be news. That’s an encapsulated description of traditional publishing, and also of trench warfare.

The agent search ran for a good six months, or… a six months, anyway, and Phase Two has a timetable that’s at least that horrifying. Especially if it turns out that I do have a slush pile in my future. But in the meantime I’m still working on that freelance job I mentioned earlier, and so my work on the illustrations for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom has been delayed. I’ve been building the robot models I need for some of the remaining pictures, but it would be difficult to work on the illustrations themselves until this side job is behind me. Hence: the state of the Green Room, above.

Send magazines.

More robots, less thrust for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom

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

Here are Dash Kent and Nola Gardner in the cockpit of Dash’s Actaeon rocket, in an illustration for Chapter 19 of Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. This is almost exactly like the office I wish I had.

In the office I really do have, of course, something else is going on. A freelance project is slowing down my work on Switchboard‘s illustrations. I’ve been able to use the odd stray hour to build new robot models for several of the remaining illustrations – about six robots, so far – and Chapter 18 is looking pretty good, too, in its not really ready yet state.

The clock is running out on Stage One of my experiment with traditional publishing. Before I start Stage Two I want to make some minor revisions to the manuscript, based on some of the feedback I’ve gotten from readers (including me).

I haven’t mentioned one really gratifying response from a Real Live Author who enjoyed the heck out of the book, and asked if he could show it around to his high-falutin’ friends (yes, please!)

The thing I enjoyed most about this was that he planned to ask them "Am I crazy for loving this book?" and although I didn’t tell him so I had this very clear mental image of him standing around with, you know, AUTHORS, in front of a fridge. He had a milk carton full of my book in his hand, and he was saying "Does this smell bad to you? It doesn’t smell bad to me. Does it smell bad to you?"

This is the way my mind works. I’m not saying it’s a good way. It’s just the way I’ve got.

Anyway, freelance work may prevent me from finishing the illustrations quite as soon as I planned: but Stage Two will be its own shambling horror show of excruciating slowness. Slowth? So I’ve probably got the time to spare.