Saturday, August 8, 2015

Darkover Swordsman


I moved to the Metro DC area in 1988. DarkoverCon, in its eleventh year, also moved, to the location north of Baltimore that it still inhabits even under its current name, "ChessieCon." I was still doing the program covers and this is the one for 1988. It shows a left-handed swordsman waiting for his enemy to come out of hiding. I vaguely remember that the author MZ Bradley made her Darkovan humans left-hand dominant rather than Earth's right-hand majority. The architecture is taken from a photograph of an Italian mountain village. 

After I finished with DarkoverCon 1988 I took the original drawing and dropped the type panel and painted it in with color. Nowadays I'd just do it in Photoshop and leave the black and white drawing as an original.


Black ink on illustration board, colored in acrylic, 7" x 10", July 1988. If you've seen this before here on the By-Product, you're more devoted to this Blog than I am.

1 comment:

Mike (Altus) said...

I love the architecture and ochre hues in this piece. There's something about it that really excites my imagination.