Here’s one of Brian Despain’s wonderful paintings. He seems to be working on a series of "100 Robots", though there’s very little information about that at his web site; still, the Gallery is so enjoyable that I, for one, hope he won’t be stopping at 100.
His work’s featured in a show at the Roqla Rue Gallery in Seattle, through December 5th. (Found a little indirectly through i09)
This just in: I’ve got a great sale running on my Retropolis Transit Authority t-shirts: through Sunday, November 29, you can get up to 25% off on an order over $25 by using the coupon code SAVE25 during checkout.
The web site does a complex and mysterious calculation on your order. When I tried it with a typical dark colored t-shirt, for example, I got a discount of over 20%.
Go forth and beshirt yourself forthwith.
(If you’re of a twistier and more achaic bent, the same sale is running at my Saga Shirts Celtic T-Shirts site)
And lest I lose myself in a capitalistic orgy of self-congratulation – which, now that I’ve typed it, sounds a lot kinkier than I thought it would* – I’ve got to point you at Doc Atomic’s 2010 Ray Gun Calendar: twelve months of disintegrators! Muahahahahaha!
And ha!
* that means that I bet if you Googled it, you’d find something you’d rather not have found.
[tags]ray gun, raygun, calendar,retro, science fiction, sci fi, disintegrator, blaster, things not to take on an airplane[/tags]
The first in a series of articles that describe how I combined products from several different print on demand companies into a single web site at my own domain.
The design of a web site is always about several things, and only one of those things is "making it pretty". In fact the way you make it pretty all depends on the decisions you’ve made about what the purpose of the site will be (often not as obvious as you might think), what the content will be, how the user will find that content, and how the user will understand where he or she is within the site – and then be able to get elsewhere with as few clicks as you can manage.
The answers to those questions determine the framework within which you will make the site pretty. That’s because these answers tell you what you’re designing. If you leap off to figure out what it’s going to look like without answering those questions first you’re going to end up with something that (presumably) looks great, but whether it does the job it needs to do is left completely to chance.
(more…)
So… when last we saw our hero, who at that time was me, I was working on the second half of my illustrations for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.
Then, to all appearances, I vanished.
Here’s why:
In the annual ramp up to the holiday season – that happy, carefree and yet spiritual time when I turn you upside down and try to shake all the change out of your pockets – I took on a big project that’s been on my mind for the last couple of years.
There are a whole bunch of places on the web where I sell my work, as posters and prints, on the ever-popular t-shirts of the Retropolis Transit Authority and – new, this year – on customizable business cards and other nifty swag at the Retropolis Travel Bureau. The trouble is that although I do cross-link between them, where I’m able, there was no central clearing house for all these different things. A visitor to one would usually not realize that the others existed.
So I’ve just completed that very clearing house: an "Art of Retropolis" site where I combine the products I sell through different vendors so that they’re all available in one spot.
In order to do that I had to combine three different scripts to draw in the products, along with quite a few static pages, in such a way that (I hope) it’s not confusing to the user, and moreover – when the all powerful Googlebot sees it – the site does not look as though someone’s simply scraped existing content from my original online shops. Which is pretty much a death sentence where SEO’s concerned. These two issues were such important and interesting problems that I may write up the project later on.
But for now, IT’S ALIVE!!!!!
If it works as well as I hope it will, I’ll probably do the same thing with my scattered Celtic art shops. Sometime next year.
And Thrilling Tales? I was already aware that creating the illustrations for its first story was taking longer than I’d expected. So its launch – which I’d hoped would happen right about now, or soon after – will be taking place early next year.
I’ve had an account at DeviantArt for years now – that’s where my Retropolis archival prints come from – and though I don’t get very active on any of the social networking sites, I’ve always enjoyed the opportunity to stumble over really neat art that I’d otherwise never have seen.
So as I was doing test renderings this morning I just browsed through the artwork that I’ve faved there over the years, and I figured I’d share some of it with you.
I’m now at forty illustrations for my first Thrilling Tales project – which puts me more or less halfway done. There are still three or four pictures that I’ll be revisiting, but heck, I’ll take my milestones as I find ’em. No matter how long the setup for a set of pictures takes, I still seem to average 1.25 days per illustration. This is a constant source of wonder for me.
Along the way I’ve been tinkering with a random pulp sci fi title generator – also for the Thrilling Tales site – which has really gelled now. It was an interesting problem that involved getting the right flavor for the titles while also creating variety in the sentence structure and coming up with a pretty extensive vocabulary. I’ve been trying to make sure that the titles almost always make grammatical sense without restricting their logical sense. There’s a kind of magic that happens with unexpected combinations. The more you restrict the potential nonsense, the more you lose of the unexpected wonders.
Anyway that’s a diversion, but in fact it’s meant to be a diversion: one of a series of little playthings to flesh out the content for the site. I want to do more of those…. but many of the ideas I have would be best done in Flash, and I don’t want to take the time to learn Flash at the moment, since it’s the stories that are the main event.
Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com
The Life Magazine web site is displaying a gallery of box art from vintage space toys – lots of robots, of course, but there are all the other accessories that amateur spacemen needed back in the day: ray guns, rockets, radios, and even holsters. ‘Cause, you know, our motto was "be prepared". I think that was us, anyway.
They’re including links to buy prints of the images from Getty Images, but those links didn’t want to work for me. Your mileage may vary.
And for more in-depth and nonstop coverage of this sort of thing, I remind you to visit Doc Atomic’s Attic of Astounding Artifacts.
I found the Life gallery via i09, to whom my robotic minions and I offer our humble thanks.
[tags]vintage space toys, package art, robot, raygun, ray gun, rocket, retro, collectible[/tags]
Another week, another set of illustrations for the first story at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. This week I’ve started working on a different branch of the story (which is Part One of The Toaster with TWO BRAINS!) – because the format for Thrilling Tales is designed for (mildly) interactive, illustrated stories. In the course of illustrating these stories, I get to explore how different characters experience the same events, or events that are linked to those events in the other interactive branches.
That’s one way of looking at it. The other one is "Cripes! How many illustrations does this thing need, anyway?!"
A question that we very nearly explored last week.
But I digress. This branch of the story becomes something like a detective story: a crime’s been committed, and a couple of our heroes spend the day investigating it. It’s a puzzler, and no mistake. What’s fun about this for me is that because our future here is based on the 1920s and 1930s, the dialogue and the situation are flavored with a little Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. (If I could conjure up a weird stew of writers’ brains, these stories would be looking for a recipe that included Damon Runyon, Dashiell Hammett, Ring Lardner and Terry Pratchett.)
So without banging the viewer over the head with it (I hope!) I’ve used lighting here that’s a clear callback to film noir – the strong light and dark areas, and the Venetian blnds with their shadows and dusty beams of light. It’s pretty fun, or at least it was for me. It’d be easy to drive that over the top, but I hope I haven’t.
Anyway, I’ve wrapped up the scene that takes place in this office and in the coming week I’ll be building something else – someplace we’ll actually see just before this.
Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com
