Atlas Shrugged Graphic page 2: The Mysterious Panhandler

In the opening scene sequence of Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED, one of the main characters is walking forlornly down a twilight New York street when a mysterious beggar approaches him for a handout. The dialogue in the scene is essentially what I've illustrated here. The character hands the beggar a dollar (in Rand's time, that was a dime) and walks on.

I have thought about this scene as if I were re-writing it or possibly directing the "unfilmable" movie of this book. It occurred to me that there was something mysterious about this beggar. Rand says that he had "intelligent eyes," which could mean that he might not be what he looked like. I don't think Rand would have had this in mind, but I believe that that beggar was really John Galt himself in disguise. Throughout the book, Galt has been hanging around in the shadows, spying on the main characters, hoping to eventually recruit them for his movement. Galt also has some of the qualities of the pulp-written adventurers that Rand read so much of in her youth, kind of like an industrial Doc Savage. It would be kind of neat if Galt, the towering hero of the book, appeared on the first page as well as the last.

I've brought that out in the illustration, or tried to; John Galt had a kind of superhuman beauty, power, and charisma, not to mention engineering genius. Not even stubble and dirty makeup or the disheveled garments of a street vagrant could completely cover up his aura. More to come in my graphic experiments with Randworld.

Post Number 500: Retro Space

From the same 1950s era that brought us glitzy motel signs, tailfins on cars, and rock 'n' roll, came colorful streamlined spaceships and rockets that looked like rockets. Even though they didn't have to go through an atmosphere. Here we are landed on some barren moonlike planet close to the center of our galaxy. The astronauts have silver spacesuits and perfect hair. I hope they have enough fuel, and a strong enough spacewarp, to get home.

I painted this in gouache on illustration board, 8" x 7", February 1984.

This is my 500th post to "Art By-Products." I'm a persistent blogger that's for sure.

Atlas Shrugged: First image

As some of you know, I have been re-reading Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED in a rather bits-and-pieces way, with the idea of illustrating some sequences from the book in a graphic novel style. I have been experimenting with another graphic illustration style, currently known as the "noir" style since it takes its inspiration from film noir. Rand was a screenwriter for Hollywood movies and she wrote ATLAS during the heyday of the film noir style. I think the graphic novel format can work for visualizing Rand's extremely wordy book.

I wouldn't try to do long sections, let alone the whole book. Ayn Rand's books are under serious copyright rules and any commercial publication of illustrations would involve a lot of legal negotiation. Any sequential art I do from ATLAS SHRUGGED (or other work of Rand's) is purely in the realm of experimentation. I've always wanted to to character portraits and concept studies as well, so you will see them here.

This scene is the very first scene in the book, where Eddie Willers, the assistant to the main character, walks on a New York street wondering why things look so bad. A homeless man (the shadow to the right) asks him for spare change. More of this sequence forthcoming. Drawing is ink on notebook paper, 6" x 7".

Commercial building, Route 7

Route 7 in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, is also known as Leesburg Pike. It goes all the way from Alexandria, on the waterfront, to Leesburg, well into the foothills of the Appalachians. It is one of the busiest thoroughfares in the region and has innumerable shopping centers, office and commercial buildings, and residential complexes along its path.

This is a drawing of one of the commercial buildings on Route 7. It currently houses a Mattress Discounters. You can see some vague reflections of the "futuristic" designs of the 1960s in this structure, with its slanted roof and dormer, its solid portico also with a slanted roof at the left end of the drawing, and the stacked up sign, now in disrepair, at the apex of the roof. I drew this on location, ink in sketchbook, about 10" x 7".

Steam-driven Photoshop

Some of my handful of readers have heard of "steampunk," which I mentioned in a couple of earlier posts. Basically, it's "neo-Victorian" or even "neo-Industrial" science fiction. The concept is an alternative world where technology consists of gears, dirigibles, pre-digital media and primitive but beautifully designed electric instruments. Graphic designers have been busy creating Photoshop "brushes" (like digital rubber stamps) of gear patterns and other Steampunky industrialia. Here's a composition using some of them. It's a study for a larger graphics project I'm working on, an album cover for an ambient band's upcoming release. Photoshoppe is the medium, marshalling all those electrons into glowing order.

I'm working in a much higher resolution than I usually do, and it gives my iMac the vapors. In fact, a lot of things, such as music synthesizer software (the disparagingly named "GarageBand") give this supposedly powerful computer the vapors. The machine slows down and gets wonky and I have to stop and let it cool down. I'll just have to consider it one of those pieces of pretty but fragile electrical equipment that glimmer inside hand-blown bulbs surrounded by brasswork.

A Message from Cloudworld

This is one of the best space pictures I've ever painted, even though it was tiny. It's called "A Message from Cloudworld," and I did it in February of 1984 as part of my annual art display at the group show at Boskone, the Boston science fiction convention. It's done with my airbrush, and I'm still using gouache. That difficult medium was once much more popular among space artists and science fiction illustrators, but is now almost completely out of use. Some artists still use acrylic and oil in actual paint media, but most science fiction and fantasy illustration is now done digitally. "Cloudworld" depicts just what the title suggests, a flash of light in a message pattern coming off the surface of a mysterious little planet near a nebula. It's not illustrating any specific story.

Not only was this picture a nice one, it also was unusually successful at Boskone. Paintings in the show are all at auction, where people bid up the value from a basic "minimum bid." My minimum for this picture was only $10, but it ended up going for more than $100 as two or more collectors fought over it. This is unusual for my art, and it has hardly ever happened again at any of my shows. I have no idea where this piece is now, though I do have the name and an old address of the buyer.

"A Message from Cloudworld" is 9" x 7", gouache on illustration board, February 1984.

Lemuridoo

This is a drawing of a Ring-tailed Lemur playing a tin whistle. The lemur is not playing a didgeridoo, but I like the idea of it hence a "lemuridoo." There are no lemurs in the wild in Australia where didgeridoos originated. I just made this drawing as part of an album cover I am doing for an ambient trio's upcoming music release. One of the band members just loves lemurs, hence this musical critter. "Lemuridoo" is ink on Bristol board, about 6" square.