Watercolor, 14 x 20"; Winsor & Newton paints and sable brushes; Arches hot-pressed 100% rag paper, 160 lb.. Begun 6/26/10, completed 7/3/10. This was the second painting I attempted for this cover. The first one had a different idea for the sky, and was not working, so I abandoned it (I love ripping an expensive piece of watercolor paper into little pieces!) and started again on a fresh sheet. Second time was the charm, and the execution went quickly. I still have to get the painting professionally photographed. This one was done with my little Kodak digital. (P.S.: no rubber cement or mastic were used in the creation of this painting!).
I have all of the stories either already in original digital format or scanned from their original magazine appearances, and am currently going through each of them, line by line, copyediting to homogenize my ellipses, em dashes, italics, etc. This is the hardest and most time-consuming part, I think, but it is also fun to revisit these stories, some written while I was still in my 20s and early 30s! I was pleased to see they held up. A few published stories did not, though, so they did not make the cut. It will be an eclectic mix of SF (6 stories), fantasy (3), horror (6) and dark suspense (4), and hopefully I will be able to sell a few copies.
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Ahhh. Back in the 1987 I sold a story called "The Prince's Birthday" to Dragon Magazine, owned by TSR. That is an RPG.net connection.
]]>Welcome to Philadelphia in 1983, and Detective Sergeant Francis Lomax's nightmares:
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My daughter, son-in-law, and son are creating a non-profit company called "PlayTime" to put Nintendo Wii systems on carts into hospital pediatric wards and ICUs to make the hospital experience for kids a little more bearable. The web site is still under construction, and I volunteered to do some appropriate illustrations for it. Here is one, a watercolor and ink number with some Photoshop tweaking.]]>
A few more tweaks for detail, but this one is about done.
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Tackling the porch and the glider, and whatever bits of driveway and underbrush show through. As I darken the foreground and add texture and "age", this will hopefully come into focus. Maintaining the overall tonal values is key to making it all look "real". This will be done sometime this long weekend. I already have a FEDEX box ready to send it off to Virginia to be photographed. This weekend I will work on the interior illustrations, beginning with the endpapers. The signature sheet illustration, with the all-important Elmo, was done a few weeks ago and delivered to the publisher so they could get that project going. I am really looking forward to drawing a portrait of Brian's dog Steve, a meta-illustration for a meta-novel.
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There is another two feet of snow falling, and a Snow Emergency in my town and all of the surrounding towns, which means I get to play hooky legally and have a weekday to get more work done on this cover painting. I am wrestling in the underbrush, trying to tone it down to mainly a raw umber color, with shadows I will also be adding texture to the gravel driveway surface in the foreground. The splattering of paint I did earlier will serve for this texture in the distance. The trees seem too dark, so I might do some scraping with a single-edge razor blade. The painting overall seems too "tight", and I will need to loosen it up with more free, broad brushwork.
I decided that the paint scheme of the glider will be a colonial blue with white trim. Plus rust. The deck will be painted grey, and the house trim will remain white. I anticipate Gail Cross, or whoever does the typographical design for the title and byline, will use a rich orange. Gold embossing would be good too, but that is pricey due to the fact that an embossing die set would have to be created.
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Progress. I masked some areas so I could splatter paint on the underbrush and trees. More splattering will be necessary, including more detail work to the trees on the right, but the work moves forward in the picture plane, and I am starting to add washes to the foreground. I had to take yesterday off to shovel snow with my neighbors (we got two feet) as well as do an ink drawing for a story by Graham Masterton scheduled for CD #65.
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