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]

Quantum Universe Bifurcation for your iPhone

Filed under Found on the Web

Now you – yes, you! – can turn your iPhone into a Quantum Universe Splitter, enabling you to branch into alternate universes whenever you’re faced with a problem that has two possible solutions. Chocolate, or vanilla? World Peace, or World Domination? Fritters, or bagels?

Because as they tell us, every one of these choices splits off a branching alternate reality, right? So here you go. Just what Walter Bishop on Fringe wishes he’d invented, except that he, like your humble correspondent, seems like a landline kind of guy. This App does not run on a 1947 Stromberg-Carlson, or I’d have one myself.

As you may learn on its web site, the Universe Splitter App connects directly to a quantum random number generator in a Geneva laboratory – which helpfully tells you which of the two possible universes you are in and – therefore – decides which of the two courses you’re meant to take. Don’t take the other one, or it’ll be raining frog-flavored ice cream in Peru on Thursday. Flight 815 will crash again. And more. Just don’t go there, okay?

This helpful App is the brainchild of my old friend Eric Daniels, animator and Quantum Bifurcator. And it’s only $1.99, which on the bell curve of Quantum Mechanics devices is, you know, subatomic.

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

The Curious Circumstance of the Rocket that Devolved in the Night

Filed under Found on the Web

The unshaven, rum-addled crew* over at TOR Books’ web site has declared that October shall be a month of Steampunk. And so shall it be, inasmuch as anything having to do with tor.com is concerned, anyway.

But that as interesting as that may be, it’s not what I enjoyed most today at their site.

In order to celebrate the Month of Steampunk they restyled their already retro rocket logo to suit – and then posted an article showing the concepts and describing their process of narrowing down from way too many neat ideas to the one neat idea they really needed. I had a great time wandering through that process even though "iterate" is a word I learned to dread in my long years as an indentured servant.

The art’s by Gregory Manchess; art direction by Irene Gallo.

So here‘s your chance to thrill at the fighter planes, the finnified rockets, and the various airships that they didn’t use. Neat! Or, you know, edifyingly uplifting!

*I mean that in the best possible way, you know.

“Neo City”, an animated short film by Hao Ai Qiang

Filed under Computer Graphics, Found on the Web

Neo City is a wandering, beautifully visualized animation by Hao Ai Qiang (and company) that seems to show us what a futuristic city might be like if it had decided, one way or another, that we weren’t all that necessary. Or maybe we callously took off for parts unknown, leaving the city to evolve and amuse itself in ways that make sense to a futuristic city when it’s on its own. I couldn’t say, but I enjoyed viewing it anyway.

It’s a student film, and I haven’t had much luck digging up any more information about it. But the image below apears to be by the same artist, and it’s a lovely one.

A Collection of Roy G. Krenkel Illustrations at “Golden Age Comic Book Stories”

Filed under Found on the Web

Golden Age Comic Book Stories has collected a great selection of work by Roy G. Krenkel – some of it’s quite early work, like the one shown here, and interests me because the inking is so different from the distinctive style I remember from my days of whippersnapperhood.

There’s even a complete version of the only solo story Krenkel drew for EC Comics – it reads today like the paranoid, dystopian dream that a Libertarian might have after too much Welsh Rarebit.

Wonderful stuff throughout. I often wish that I’d held on to all my old copies of Amra, to which Krenkel contributed so many illustrations.

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.