Game art from 2003

It is not true that I have never done art for role playing games. I illustrated an entire game booklet for a game producer in 2003. This was a game set in a fantasy Renaissance. The game developer gave me all the descriptions I needed for characters, environments, and scenarios. I did a series of character portraits and a lot of black and white drawings, too. This game was only published online and sank into oblivion within a year. This character is an idealistic, naive Prince who naturally gets involved in bad politics.

I drew the original drawing in ink, then scanned it in and colored it with what I had at the time, which was Corel Painter 7. This program was buggy and every so often instead of saving your work, it destroyed it so you had to have a lot of backup copies. I did the coloring for the drawings the wrong way. I used the space-finding tool, the "Magic Wand," to find an area and did it all in one layer. You're supposed to overlay the colors in many layers, leaving the drawing untouched. But I didn't have any problems with the art, so I continued doing it that way.

This type of computer-colored ink drawing is standard for comic books nowadays but I don't find it in game art, which is rendered in a more "painting" - like style. I'm amazed I was able to do so well in 2003, right now I don't feel as though I could draw a damn thing except someone's shabby roadside building. I need and want to draw human figures and portraits but I have lost my confidence that I can draw them.

"Prince Kargil" is a Painter-colored ink drawing, 4" x 5", March 2003.

The World Jones Made

As I continued working my way through illustrating Philip Dick's books, they became crazier and more depressing and I became crazier and more depressed. This one, "The World Jones Made," had something to do with mutants in a post-nuclear-war world, alien spores, precognition, colonizing the planet Venus, and a religious cult led by a clairvoyant named Jones. The book was published in 1956 but again, Dick's vision was disturbingly true. In 1979 the mass suicide of Jim Jones' cult in Guyana (in late 1978) was still a new and horrific memory. There were mass deaths in this book and I tied them together with the suicide cult by copying images of the piled-up corpses from Jonestown. I modeled Jones (the big face with glasses) on myself. You'd have to pay me a lot to read this book again. I have a copy of it in the Gregg Press edition but I am glad to have it gather dust until I move to Venus.

"The World Jones Made" is ink on illustration board, about 7" x 10", summer 1979.

Wine Festival Crowd

I visited "Great Grapes," a wine festival in Reston, Virginia on Saturday. It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny and winey. People milled around the wine tasting tables. There were food and trinket and craft vendors, too. I found the tasting setup for the Davis Valley Winery, which I visited in August. I find their wines outstanding, even the reds which are hard for Virginia winemakers to get right. I bought a bottle of one of their lighter reds. I am now thinking of what to cook which will go well with this wine.

The top drawing shows the people gathering for tasting at Davis Valley's tent top pavilion. The bottom drawing shows the plastic archway shelter, under which a rock band hacks out covers of everyone's greatest hits.

Pitt black drawing pen on sketchbook page, about 10" x 7". Click on image for a larger view.

Vulcan's Hammer

In the summer of 1979 I did another set of frontispiece illustrations of Philip Dick books, again for Gregg Press. This is one of the set, for PKD's "Vulcan's Hammer." This tale combines artificial intelligences that become sentient, video surveillance, androids, terrorists, killer drones, and a pervading sense of paranoia. All of this is so like our modern world that this book, written in 1960, could have been written yesterday. I hated the book, as I remember. But I did my best to capture the feeling of the text in my pen drawing, including, of course, the obligatory nasty sexy girl. Every PhilKDick book has at least one of these. I had to put a sexy girl in each picture. Nothing has changed. I'd like to put a sexy girl in every one of my pictures, if it brought me more viewers and money. What, you think I do art for the love of it? Sorry, I have to shut up now.

"Vulcan's Hammer," ink on illustration board, 7" x 10", summer 1979.

Maintenance Machines

There's a road off Leesburg Pike near Falls Church which I have frequented for years because it is where the neighborhood recycling bins are. This is an industrial area and it abounds in interesting things to draw. I've drawn most of the buildings, along with the iconic "Sheet Metal Cowboy" and the historic "Home Paramount Exterminators." But after I dropped the recycling into the bin today, I drew another sight on the street, the shed housing Falls Church maintenance machines. This is where they keep snowplow trucks and earth movers and diggers. I love this sort of machine and I've done many drawings of them. There they sit in the quiet September sun, awaiting the...arggh...hard work of....winter....Note the rainwater collection gutters leading into the tank at the side of the shed.

Pen on sketchbook paper, about 11" x 7".

Launch before Dawn

This is sort of reminiscent of Florida, when you see a spacecraft rise from distant Cape Canaveral. I didn't actually visit Florida and see a distant launch until many years later, but this is what I came up with as a visualization. My records state that this was exhibited and sold at Chattacon 1992, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I also noted that it won "third place prize, astronomical," in the art show judging. I keep hoping that I can return to Florida someday. Acrylic, 7" x 10", November 1991.

My "Satellite Dragon," alas, did not get picked for the top 25 in its contest, and I'm out of the running there. But my constant visits to deviantART have now convinced me that just about anything is possible using digital media. That brings the question back to me and my quest to return to professional illustration. Basically: what should I paint that shows my work at its best to possible art directors and buyers? This may sound like a stupid question, but other artists seem to be much more coherent in their work than I am. For instance, most of the digital art in deviantART has human/humanoid females in it. Most artists paint girls. They know what to paint. My friend Tristan always knows what to paint: beautiful boys and anthropomorphic animal/humans.

So, really: what should I paint? Everyone predictably says: "paint what you like." OK, from me you get endless scenes of the Virginia countryside plus farmhouse porches and kittens. Not much excitement there, unless I wanna be the Thomas Kinkade of Virginia without the big money business. I like challenges. But I also need to paint something that will really impress'em in the art director's office. At this point I want to build a portfolio that's stylistically consistent but also shows that I can do diverse things, not just one type of character or one scene. I know that my specialty is buildings and fantasy architecture, but I am up for other assignments. Got any ideas to challenge me? No one is paying me to do any art (other than Trader Joe's) so anything goes.

Time Out of Joint

In Philip Dick's book TIME OUT OF JOINT, published in 1959, the main character slowly realizes that he is living in a world that is artificially constructed just to keep him captive within it. He had been a revolutionary figure in a space rebellion, and now he was being used by the military to solve puzzles that predicted attacks from the rebels. The puzzles were part of the artificial environment. All the people he interacts with are actors, and he cannot escape because (at least before his discoveries) he has no knowledge that he is being held captive.

This very same idea was used for the plot of the 1998 Peter Weir movie THE TRUMAN SHOW, where the main character's entire life has been lived in a constructed reality TV environment. It also has echoes in the "Matrix" trilogy. The basic idea for this comes from Gnosticism, which believes that the "real world" is a malignant illusion, constructed by evil entities, in which we are held captive, and only the Knowledge ("Gnosis") will set us free from it.

"Time Out of Joint" was a Gregg Press frontispiece published in 1979. Original art is ink on illustration board, 7" x 10", winter 1979.