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.

Raygun Gothic Rocketship counts down to its launch

Filed under Found on the Web

As I write, the countdown timer on its web site tells me that less than 13 days remain till the arrival of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship at its destination, which is either Burning Man or someplace a bit more interstellar.

If you’ve missed it, this is an impressive feat of construction – at forty feet tall! – by the same group of demented designers that brought us the Steampunk Treehouse.

Much as I like treehouses, this one’s probably a little nearer the mark for me.

They describe it in this way:

The Raygun Gothic Rocketship is intended to creatively explore our ideas about evolution and technology as they relate to our notions about progress and The Future. This project exists at the blurry edge where science and fiction blend and become both our reality, and the stories we tell ourselves about that reality.

For those of us who haven’t been to art school, my Disingenuizing Deconstructor translates that as:

We though this would be so cool to make! But we’re afraid that you won’t respect us unless we come up with some sort of ridiculous prevarication that makes us sound all… sort of intellectual, you know?

But disregard the pretensions. It is a richer world that has scenes in it like the one below.

A little Lewis Wickes Hine, a little Buck Rogers. Just the way I like it.

And with this post I’ve caught up a bit with the cool things that have been piling up while I worked away almost tirelessly in the Secret Laboratory: in the past three days I’ve written posts about robots, ray guns, and rocket ships. It’s the trifecta of retro futurism!

Nice retro future ray gun by Steven Melendez

Filed under Found on the Web

Steven Melendez is another visitor to the Retropolis Transit Authority who sent me a link to this cool video of the raygun he built recently. Neat!

He says he built it "…incorporating scratch building, laser engraving, and conventional machining with a mill and lathe. It has an auto enamel copper and silver finish with patina."

And it is indeed sweet.

As far as me updates go, I have at least mailed off a mysterious packet for one of those two super secret things I’m doing, though odds are I’ll need to do something else before the whole shebang is ready for its pitch. Back to super secret thing #2, I guess. More anon.

Robot assemblage sculptures from Lipson Robotics

Filed under Found on the Web

I’m still stapled to my desk, but cool things keep flying out of my monitor at me even though I’m doing my best to ignore them. I’m just that dedicated.

But I’m going to try to catch up a bit before the cool things pile up and spill into my coffee cup. So here’s one:

Retropolis Transit Authority customer Tim Hammell sends me this link to some wonderful retro robots built out of found objects from thrift stores and, for all I know, time traveling midden heaps – they’re by Lipson Robotics, and I envy Tim because he’s the happy owner of one of them.

The sculptures are assembled completely with nuts and bolts, which seem so much more fitting than adhesives. It’s as though they’re who they are, through and through, and I like that about them. Come to think of it, I like that about anybody.

The robots are up to 30 inches tall, and weigh up to 20 pounds.

Lipson Robotics is the brainchild of an animation director and producer with years of experience on stuff you’ve probably seen. But I prefer to think that his true calling is scavenging for robot parts, and putting them together. It’s destiny.

[tags]robot, robotics, lipson robotics, art, sculpture, assemblage, found objects[/tags]

Where the heck have I been? Plus ‘The Mercury Men’, an online movie serial

Filed under Found on the Web

I just realized that August is half over, and I’ve yet to post anything at all for the month. There are terrific reasons for that; I’ve been working very hard on two Really Interesting Things that I can’t discuss for now.

Honestly, I’ve hardly looked up. Like I said, Really Interesting.

So in the meantime, here’s something I stumbled over which is also Really Interesting, not to mention Really Spiffy. It’s the trailer for an online retro movie serial called The Mercury Men.

Enjoy the trailer, and then pop over to the web site. Subscribe. Have some popcorn. Enjoy.

I’ll be back before long.

Truly Awesome Retro Future Sculptures by Gary Haas

Filed under Hodgepodge

I’ve just unpacked a wonderful acrylic sculpture by Gary Haas – it is not the one you see pictured here, but it’s very similar – and it’s an amazing and beautiful piece of work. More pictures of this one are at his Deviant Art page, and the sculpture pictured here is currently for sale at Etsy.

Gary carves these from solid blocks of acrylic using tools that I’m trying to picture in my mind. I know that they’re rotary tools (which describes a heck of a lot of powered tools, when you think about it) but in order to do the undercuts it seems as though a cutting bit would have to deploy whirling flanges of death after it was already inserted. Which, you know, is really cool. In fact I’ll continue to believe in retractable whirling flanges of death even after I find out I’m totally wrong.

Because some things just ought to exist. And to get back on topic, this sculpture is one of ’em.

Gary seems to think I’m inspirational, and I sure won’t argue with him ("Whirling flanges of Death!") Either way I’m awfully glad to have this in my office. My advice: you should have one too.

Update: he’s just posted a photo of mine at Deviant art. It’s here.

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.

Tee Junction declares that I’ve designed 3.5% of the best Steampunk-Inspired T-Shirts

Filed under Hodgepodge

Tee Junction has posted its list of the 50 Best Steampunk-Inspired T-Shirts, of which there are actually 56, and of which 3.5% are from my Retropolis Transit Authority shop. Even though, as I’ve mentioned before, this ain’t Steampunk.

But heck, it’s an honor just to be nominated. Now how did he miss those "Airship Ballast" shirts?

[tags]t-shirts, mad scientist, steampunk, 50 best steampunk tees, retro future[/tags]

Artist Adele Lorienne S. puts my book of knotwork borders to good use

Filed under Hodgepodge

Artist Adele Lorienne S. (Saimain at Deviant Art) has posted this wonderful drawing in which she used my book of knotwork borders in exactly the way that I’d hoped people would.

She chose one of the art nouveau flavored designs, for obvious reasons: if Mucha had been an Irishman, we might have seen more like this!

I’m just so pleased to see this. It’s exactly what I hoped for when I was working on the book.