A Psychochronography in Chrome - Addendum

Well, yes, I suppose I should write another blog post, given that it's been over a month since my last. Why so lax of late? The usual; Just been busy, and blogging ranks fairly low on my list of priorities (right above Cleaning the Toilet, which is something I do more regularly - I didn't say it was a list of most fun things!). So this puts me about a year behind on the sketching posts (not actually that bad, since I've not been sketching much either, which is worse than not blogging about it), and two months behind on Speedpaint posts. I have at least three other things to write about too, so hopefully things will calm down a bit soon so I can catch up...

This post actually returns to something I've posted about before - one of Dr. Sandifer's book covers. I wrote about the cover, but I also mentioned that while the cover was done, the full illustration was not. I've rectified that over the last week, so now I can close out this chapter with a write-up. See what I did there? Chapter? See, it's a post about a book? Oh, never mind. If you need to recap about the other half of the following painting you can read about it, and the book, here.

Okay, so the cover was finished, and probably nobody would have minded if I'd done no more work on it, except me, and I did mind.  I thought it might turn out to be a great painting, and really it did turn out fairly well.  I was busy for a while after Christmas (still am - see above), but I really wanted to get this done so I could clear it from my mind and move onto something else, so I got ArtRage running again and got back to it.

The first thing to do was to work out how I wanted it to look.  I did this by going back to the original speedpaint and layout sketch, and then doing some more work on it.  This part was in Photoshop rather than ArtRage. I also used this as a test bed for some of the lighting I wanted to do.  I knew I wanted the woman lit mainly by diffuse light, except for some points where the light was breaking through the leaf cover, and he was half in and out of the shade.  This was enough to proceed on, but since I was busy it was a few weeks before I sat down to work on it properly.

Step one was laying down the flat values on which the rest of the painting would be built.  Not very exciting, so I've skipped that here and shown the second stage, which was filling out some of the detail on the tree.  Here I've also filled in some of the coverage behind the woman.  I intended to do a lot more work back there when I was done, but in the end I barely touched it, as I didn't want additional detail to draw away from the woman herself.

Next was painting the rocks, which turned out to be harder than I thought in this style ( I have trouble with Rock generally - I should do some studies).  I got to a point where I was happy with it though, and started on the man. I should mention that the Man is mainly based on this image, by the always incredible mjranum-stock, but I didn't adhere to it as much as I usually might, using it more as inspiration than trying to replicate it exactly.  I've based speedpaints on both the photographer's work, and on this exact model before, so don't be surprised if either of those links look familiar.

Not much to add here that wouldn't equate to 'Draw the rest of the owl', so we can skip on pretty quickly.

Unlike the man, I didn't have one solid reference for the woman.  I had one woman that was half a pose reference, and another two for the rest (photographed from different angles, of wildly different body types, clothed and unclothed, with different lighting), and then another handful of images as reference for her robe, none of which were remotely close to the pose or lighting.

This was a little intimidating, but I thought I'd give it my best shot anyway.  You'll note that her leg changed angles between this image and the next - I realised that her foot was at completely the wrong angle for her leg here, and it was easier to redo the leg than work out how to repaint her foot (I hate doing feet).  The man also got mostly finished here - The predominant thing of note was that I shortened his neck from the layouts as it looked a bit odd in actual practice.

More owl (no actual owl, obviously, though in retrospect that would have been cool).  Her head and hair were painted with no reference at all though, hopefully that's not completely obvious.

Originally I was going to be quite careful with the sun dappling, making each patch match the contour and shading of the surface the sun was hitting.  After a couple of them I realised you couldn't really tell, so I just splodged on some brighter areas, and that more or less did the trick.  I'm halfway through doing the bloke's head here so it does rather look like someone just threw scrambled egg at him.  I also refined the end of the stump on the tree, right above the man's head.  A subtle thing really, but it makes a difference.

After that, to reach the initial image in this post, I finished up the sun dappling, refined  the rocks immediately in front of his feet, added strappy sandals to both of them and arm jewelry to her, added a new tree, and some branches to the right of the main tree trunk, refined her hair and the belts, painted his staff and signed it.  That sounds like a lot, but really it went by quickly enough that I didn't save an in between image other than the tree appearing in the background.

The lighting is probably a little off, as for the sun to have them in the shade the way I've depicted you would either have the sun higher in the sky than the way the reflection appears on the rocket, or there would be greenery poking in along the top edge of the painting.  That would change the composition a fair bit though, so I'll go with the questionable lighting for the overall effect (and I'll bet until I mentioned it you didn't notice, and now you have you can't unsee it - bugger).

Finally, here's 4 closeups of the final piece, that you can better understand how loosely the whole thing was painted.  This is similar to the Rodeo Girl I did before Christmas, and obviously the previous part of this painting I'd done for the cover.  It's quite a different look from the style I usually use, and actually takes longer even though it looks less refined, because I don't yet know exactly what the result will be when I make a stroke - I like it though, so it will probably join my list of things I do on occasion when the intended result best suits it.

A Psychochronography in Chrome

Well, this is a little awkward.  Usually I write these posts and time them to coincide with the launch of the book they're about.  In this case though the good Doctor Sandifer released it on Boxing Day (That's December 26th for those of you who don't know), which is also the day after Christmas, so I forgot.  Sorry.

Anyway, we're here now, so lets get on with it.  As ever you can catch up on the previous Psychochronography posts by clicking here and working your way back to the beginning.  You don't need to do that though; the short story is that I do occasional book covers for Philip Sandifer, who writes critical analysis of (usually pretty geeky) things.  This is one of those.  The explanation for using the word Psychochronography I'll let you dig out for yourself.

So back in June Phil contacts me about doing the next cover in his TARDIS Eruditorum series, and just as an aside he mentions this other book of essays he's working on called  Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Thoughts on Science Fiction in 2015.  Do I want to do the cover?

After some general back and forth this was my reply.  I think I've already included this in the speedpaint posts over the last couple of months (since it was one), but that was without the text; this is the one I actually sent Phil.  He wasn't keen.  Well, maybe he was, but he wasn't keen on it for this book in particular. I was busy on the Eruditorum 6 cover then, so it sort of sat on the back burner.  He pointed out that the ship in the background looked like a Cyberman, was this intentional?  It wasn't, but in retrospect it really does.

A while later I had an idea of something to speedpaint and thought "If this works, it might make a good cover", so I did the speedpaint about three times the size I usually do them, and ended up with the above, but bigger - a lot bigger.  Slapped some text on it and mailed Phil the following.

He was keener, but felt the colours and layout were too similar to Eruditorum 5.

Well, easily fixed thanks to the magic of computers.  Phil seemed happy, I was reasonably happy.  I Did a new custom logo this time too.  I don't remember the genesis of it, except that the rougher paint style suggested wear and tear to me, so I wanted the letters of 'Weapons' to look a little chipped and worn.

Months pass, and I decide I should take another crack at the idea for the cover.  It's not that I dislike what I'd done before, just that I didn't feel it fit as well with the theme of the title essay as it could (The effect of the Sad  and Rabid Puppies on 2015's Hugo Awards.  Look it up, it was quite a mess).  The above was the first go at it - took about 35 minutes I guess.

And then I did this revision before cropping it and sending it to Phil.  More enthused than before!  Got what I was going for! The Hugo award is traditionally a Chrome Rocket (based on a 1950's hood ornament).  This doesn't look exactly like one, but close enough, and he liked that.  So all I had to do now was make it ten times larger and we're good to go!

This is the sad image.  I was going to extend the piece into a wraparound illustration, but for reasons I'll get to it didn't happen (yet).  Other than that this is basically the quick painting above (which I'm also counting as a speedpaint by the way), but with a little more work on the rocket design.  That left part may yet happen incidentally, but obviously not for the book, since it's available to buy.

I got busy at this point.  I had a lot on at work, and a trip to Russia to plan, and Fallout 4 came out, which basically evaporated a week of my life (I don't game as much as I used to, so 20 hours in a game is a big deal these days.  I've played a lot more since, but not with quite so much focus).

Right before I was going to head to Russia Phil emailed me.  Could he get the cover in two weeks?  Not the whole thing, just the front, for the Digital edition.  For some reason if you don't get your final cover set a few weeks before they cancel your preorders, and there were some.  The slight ridiculousness of the Digital version needing to be finished before the Print version is not lost on either me or Phil (since, in theory at least, a print version is more immutable than a digital one).

I wrote off the back cover part of the painting at that point.  I realised there was just no way I could get that much done in time.  I hoped I could get it done for the print version, but realistically it wasn't going to happen. With that in mind I knew I should focus all my attention only on what was on the front.

One thing I wasn't terribly keen on in my sketch was how the rocket was lit, or more technically how it was reflecting (pure metal has no diffuse response y'see?  It's all just reflections).  To combat this I made a rough rocket and made it chrome.  Took about half an hour, and gave me a rough lighting reference (this was from Marmoset, using one of the default environments).

Then I started on the trees.  The colours were taken directly from the rough, and I built them up in three layers.  I knew there were going to be more trees in front of them, so I deliberately kept them sketchy so as not to take too much time or to draw to much attention to them.  With the background trees done I turned my attention to the rocket, adapting the rough to the sketch I had, and to the environment, and to the colour scheme I was using.

Then I went to Russia.

I could write a lot about Russia - Saint Petersburg to be more precise.  I'm not going to though (at least in this post), but suffice to say I had a lot of preconceived notions about what Russia was going to be like, and other than the Airport (which was very much as I expected) I was wrong.  The city and it's people were all wonderful (at least that I spoke to), and the food was amazing.  Also a shocking number of people speak flawless English, and even those who speak less still speak it very well (and they'll tell you "My English, it's not so good," when it's clearly exceptional).  Anyway, digression over.

Jetlag is no fun.  I've had Jetlag a number of times over the years.  Usually on a Trip to the UK I'll get it for a few days, then relax and enjoy myself, and then get it again on the way back.  Well, Saint Petersburg is three hours further away, and turned a fairly unpleasant  thing into the most crushing fatigue I've ever had, and just as I got over it I came back and had it all over again.  And I had a front cover to get finished, now within 48 hours.

I had planned on the Jetlag being the same, more or less, as what I get coming from the UK, just lasting longer.  Well, that was wrong. It was hellish. Did the cover anyway. I just can't remember much about it to relay to you.  You'll want to click on that image to enlarge it by the way - you can do that for most of the other images in the post too.

The only thing I can really remember about the process, as shown above, was that I used a technique and setup much closer to that I use when I paint Acrylics with real media.  I'm fairly confident I could paint something pretty close to this on a canvas; just much, much more slowly.  In ArtRage (which I used) this basically means taking the Oil Paint tool and lowering the pressure and the amount of thinners, then making the brush a lot harder.  The result felt a lot like the real thing to me, except I could sample colours from the image, instead of needing a palette (the initial colour scheme being defined in the rough of course).

After that lot, all that needed doing was adding the birds, and them putting it in Photoshop to apply the rest of the cover trappings before cropping it and sending it off to Phil for publishing.

So I got it done on time, with a few more days to spend on the rest of the cover for the Print version (most of which I spent at work or asleep, because Jetlag).

It was only after this that I noticed that due to my being drowsy while working on this version of it the logo had an issue with spacing and I wanted to get it fixed for the print cover.  It's minimal, but it bugs me, and will probably bug me every time I see the Digital cover - or maybe I'll forget and bever notice it again.

And here is the final cover for the print version.  The shape of the rocket ended up being a motif elsewhere, especially on the spine, but also as part of the area for the Barcode, and as a silhouette on the rear cover.  Other than that there are some minor layout differences to the version shown in progress above, and for the first time (since it's not era inappropriate) there's the address of Phil's site on the back, as well as a credit for me.  Overall I quite like the result - the cover painting has just enough retro to it to evoke what I was going for, but the overall design of the logo and the cover feels pretty modern and fairly fresh (IMO).  Mission accomplished.

Now I just need to get around to finishing the rest of the painting...

You can by the book from the following locations:

US Kindle   US Print
UK Kindle  UK Print
Smashwords (epub version)

And Phil's launch post is here.

Covers so far for Philip Sandifer:

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 6)

I think, by now, you probably know the drill.  On the chance that you're a newcomer to these here shores you can read the previous entries in this series by clicking here. You don't need to in order to follow along, but the option is there if you need it.

So, new cover for a new Phil Sandifer joint, this one being the 6th of the main series of TARDIS Eruditorum, 'The Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who' (because Phil loaths a short subtitle).  To see Phil's post on the subject, click here.

By all rights, this should have been my personal favorite of the series to do, as it lands smack dab in the middle of an era I hold dear.  Oddly though that very fact made it less satisfying, as nothing I could do would ever live up to the memories of the ridiculous gaudy graphic excesses of the mid-80's (the prime example of the theme being the 6th Doctor's much maligned coat).  I did my best though, in line with Phil's preferences, and quite like the result.

You may note that it looks a bit like a book cover, but also ever so slightly like a cover from a video game.  There are reasons (other than just myself and Dr. Sandifer being colossal nerds), but we'll get to that later.  If we follow Dylan Thomas' advice to begin at the beginning (which wasn't actually advice), then we track back all the way to a set of thumbnails.  Ideas and options for further exploration.

This is actually the second set of thumbnails I'd sent, the first consisting of only the first row.  Let's break down the thought process in picking the 'right' one (you'll note none of these tally exactly with the final cover - we'll get there).  The cover had an additional difficulty this time, since it had to cover two Doctors instead of one, complicating the amount of information the cover had to relay.

The first two were dismissed because Phil thought they might be too 90's - they're not, being pretty strongly mid 80's, but if Phil's memories were throwing him off he wouldn't be the only one, so they were out (I think there's some potential in the second one for some other things though).

The last one was dismissed because it might be too obscure (It's based on Queen's Kind of Magic album cover), and raise questions in those who got it as to why the book didn't contain an essay on Highlander, which then raises the question, why wasn't there an essay on Highlander?

This left the other two as the only strong contenders in the first batch.  From the rest, Phil liked the Rubix Cube TARDIS (And I've now forgotten why we didn't push another round with those, because they are sort of fun), ruled out the neon faces and crest, and liked some of the Logos.  The C64 ASCII art TARDIS was deemed too plain, but it did bring up that we both have associations with the era and the Commodore 64 computer.  Some logos were liked, and some were not.  Somehow, through the discussions, the following resulted.

In these you can see the first real signs of what would become the final cover.  It also raised a lot of points for discussion, such as how noisy the cover could be in terms of looking like a photograph of a graphic over just being the graphic, and how the books apparent age is worked out (this wasn't an issue before, but this one has two Doctors, and the next covers time outside the airing of the show on TV).  For the record, the book covers are intended to be era appropriate for the end of the time covered within them.  And I just realised that this is the first book without the dates it covers marked. Bugger. Not the end of the world though.  Moving on.

So from that we arrived at these two, which are minor variants of the same (one was ironing out some things I wasn't sure I could do, like making it look as though the image was a photograph of a CRT television), including the heavily sloped A, because nothing says 80's like a heavily sloped letter or two - just ask Jean Michele Jarre.  Phil approved the first, and then went radio silent on the second because he was busy - this may have had the longest gestation period of the covers since we were both tremendously busy at various times during it.  The last book technically took longer, but most of that time it wasn't under discussion, so much as sitting on my hard drive doing nothing.  The first email on the subject of this one was back at the beginning of June.

Anyway, he didn't respond for a while, which gave me time to mull things over - always a dangerous occurrence.

Phil also writes Last War in Albion as you possibly know.  Last War in Albion is about the mystical war between the writers Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.  That sounds weirder than it is, but it uses that to explore the history of the two and all sorts of asides in a similar way that TARDIS Eruditorum uses the alchemical aspects of Doctor Who as a springboard to other diverse topics of discussion.  Anyway, that's all by the by, the important thing is that that reading it reminded me of the rear cover to Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke, which is a playing card featuring Batman and The Joker.

Since we were already discussing the possibility of the cover containing a computer style illustration it made sense to make the playing card idea following that sensibility, and furthermore, once I did it the whole thing looked to me like the cover to a video game from Rainbird or Firebird; things like Elite, Starglider or Morpheus (I may be showing my age here).  Based on that I wanted a screenshot on the box.  A screenshot of the non-existent TARDIS Eruditorum game.

I may have nerded out a little over this cover.  Again.

So since we're in nerdville I may as well go a little further and cover some things I did for the cover that most people will never notice or care about.  If you really don't want to know any of this, scan on down past the red framed text.  If you're a hopeless saddo like me, then it's time to get (gently) technical, a little personal and somewhat old school.  Reminiscence is likely to happen.

Geek Starts Here

So I got my start in digital art a long time ago in a country far far away.  We'd borrowed my grandfather's Dragon 32 computer for a few weeks, and so my dad, being a hopeless geek himself, decided to learn to program it.  I was 8, and Oh My God That's My Son's Age!  I only remember one thing he did, which was a graphics package called Doodle.  It was pretty amazing, featuring such advanced things (for the time) as rubber banding & limited animation.

It should have sold thousands of copies and funded the next version (which he started on but never finished - pixel editing and zoom were on the cards); it sold about 10 copies.  After that we gave the computer back, and eventually got a Commodore Plus/4.

Nobody remembers that computer it seems, but I rather liked it.  I learned to program a bit myself, and worked out how to do art on it.  This involved working a picture out on graph paper and entering the colours and co-ordinates as a program.  Eventually my dad bought me an art package for it - I don't remember the name of it sadly, but it was a start.  For old times sake here's a link to a video of the C+4 rip-off of Boulderdash; Icicle Works.

Eventually we got a Commodore 64 (I think I was 11 or 12) and a copy of OCP Art Studio and that was pretty much it for me, I was hooked.  Eventually I got an Amiga with Deluxe Paint, and then a PC with Photoshop, and then a tablet for it and so on and so on.

But I did a lot of work on the C64.  A lot.  In fact my GCSE art project was done on one (this was a combination of original art and loading screens from various games copied pixel by pixel from games magazines.  Yes it was partially plagiarism, but I didn't appreciate that at the time since I was doing it the hard way, and learning a lot at the same time. You'll note I credit pretty much everything when I can these days - Guilt from when I was 15.

But this does mean I have a pretty solid understanding of the limitations of computers, specifically the C64, circa 1986.  With that in mind I decided to be as accurate as I could.

Firstly, I did it the dumb way.  I should have looked for something like HermIRES, which purports to simulate the C64 limitations on other systems (I just found that while looking for something unrelated, and I'm totally going to snag it in case I need to do something like this again).  Instead I set Photoshop to use double wide aspect pixels and did it in there with the pencil tool and the C64's 16 colour palette and resolution.  Yes, the C64 had double wide pixels on it's multicolour mode - it also had a limitation on 4 colours per 4x8 'square'; I couldn't simulate that limitation, but I did my best to stick to it anyway.

So that got me the Game screen and the Playing card, but back in days of old the way you'd get things from the computer into a magazine or on to a gamebox was to photograph the screen, which gave such shots a fairly distinctive look.  Here's a couple of scans from the old Zzap 64 magazine -1, 2 - note the screenshots are slightly blurry and slightly distorted and you can see the pattern of the TV's electron mask.  Sometimes you'd have the slight shadow of the screen's redraw too, if the photographer messed up the exposure.

So I wanted to simulate all of that, even though it would be quite likely nobody would have any idea that I had.

Short of buying a CRT, and working out how to hook the PC up to it, and then photographing it (yeah... no thanks), I had to simulate it.  I did this by creating a small mask pattern and then repeating that for each pixel in the simulated screen.  For the low resolution CRT display (400 x 480i) this worked out at a whopping image of 12240x8160.  Into this I would paste my simulated C64 resolution image, and then scale it up using Nearest Neighbor mode (which doesn't blur or sharpen the pixels).  Some additional fiddling with blend modes and offsets and such gave me a pretty reasonable CRT look.  Then that was duplicated, flattened, and the next step was simulating the photography of an actual screen, which involved distorting the previous image, adding  some vignetting and some reflection off the curvature as well as a little bit of a redraw shadow.

Yes, that was a bit long winded, but I think the results are pretty good.

Geek Ends Here

After that it was predominantly a case of finalising the layout, adding the text, doing the wear, lightening the blue, that sort of thing.  Stuff I've covered in many of the posts about the previous covers.  I did go back and add 'rounded' corners to the playing card, and give it a little perspective and a reflection though, because 80's, and I also cut it out of its 'screen' a little less accurately because back then people did such things by hand (you'll never notice, it's really subtle).  I also cut out the torn label by hand, but it's basically using the exact same technique as I use to do the wearing on the cover, and I covered that back on Book 2.

One thing that's worth covering here though is the Chrome logo.  Because 80's chrome is the best chrome.

I've done a lot of chrome over the years, firstly because I was actually around during the 80's, when everything had some chrome, but then because I was doing vehicle logos for things like Saints Row (now there's a Before the Blog post I should do).  Usually I can do a pretty reasonable job by hand, or with filters or by using layer FX.  None of that would work here (at least on its own) because the logo was too big.

So it's all done with vectors, other than a drop shadow and slight bevel overlay using the Layer FX options.   This was actually pretty easy - a couple of gradient shapes, an outline, another gradient, done.  Not terribly in depth, but worth noting that I did something I'm very familiar with in a very different way.

Once Phil had the final page count I decided to put the original Pixelated Doctors image on the spine, because the spine was huge, and I liked the image.  Phil submitted and there was a mistake somewhere that meant I had to reduce the size of the spine again, but the image still fitted just fine.  Both myself and Phil were a little surprised the cover didn't get rejected due to some of the text being upside down.  That actually answered a question we had over a previous cover, but didn't  have the guts to try back then.  This wasn't done as a test for this cover - we just forgot it might be an issue until it wasn't one.

And there you have it.  This is the second and last 1980's cover, since the next book covers up until 1995, so I'll have to brush up on my 90's before then.  I promise the next one won't have a huge influence from era specific home computers though.  Well... maybe not.

For Psychochronography, Turn to Page 5

Well, I'm writing this at the last minute because of things and stuff.  Not going into details, though I will say I'm writing it with cold hands because our furnace is out for the second time this year.  Fantastic! It's been that sort of week (as in the last 7 days, not as in the week beginning on Monday, because it is Monday, so I would say it's been that sort of day instead).

So, since it's so cold, and I'd like to go and do warmer things than type a blog entry I'll try and keep it short (Ha, like that ever happens!  Well, it did last post, so there).

Oh, this is a Phil Sandifer cover post, if you hadn't already guessed from the title.

That's the latest cover.  You can click on it to make it larger as usual, as you can with many images on this post.  The format of the cover might be reminiscent of a series of books from your childhood. Or, if you're British, the competitor to the far cooler series of books from your childhood (in my opinion).  If you're as old as I am anyway.

The origins of this go way back to the Tom Baker Doctor Who essays Phil wrote.  No, not the ones from the last two books, but the original blog entries those books are based on.  Phil likes to have fun with posts occasionally, such as in his more recent ones where he offset the episodes he was covering depending on whether the character River Song was in them or not. Thus his 'final' post was several months ago, while his actual final post a couple of weeks ago covered her first appearance in the show with Silence in the Library. Actually, it didn't, instead it covered the entire series, and therefore the entire blog, in a 99,000 word extravaganza.  Like I said, he likes to have fun with it.

So back in the Tom Baker days of old he covered the serial Logopolis as though it was a non-linear gamebook, not dissimilar to a Choose Your Own Adventure.

Time passed and there was that Kickstarter for the Second Edition of Volume 1 (if you're hopelessly confused at this point scroll down to the labels and click Philip Sandifer, that will give you all the relevant posts - start at the beginning, it might take a while - look, I just linked his name there too, to make it easier).  One of the extra goals of that Kickstarter was to do the Logopolis entry as its own book.  Phil being Phil, he planned on expanding it,  but ended up rewriting it almost entirely, though it still had the temporary title of Logopolis.

Phil sent me the final text a while back, and I worked through it, and then tried to come up with an image for it.  The nod to the book series was a given (Phil requested it), but the image to go on it was less obvious.  You see the text was so dense in imagery, and so wide ranging in scope, that there really wasn't a central key thing to latch on to, so I flailed around a bit.  Hated all of them, and Phil wasn't terribly impressed either.  I think it amusing that the worse drawn of these (the one in the top left, which my son could do better than) ended up as the source of the little sketch on the back cover.  Phil did make life a bit easier after seeing these though - he suggested something based around the Tree of Life, and said I didn't have to be too slavish to the actual style of the old cover illustrations.  Great.

This is what we ended up with.  Originally I was going to go for something more complex, looking down the platform with the map in perspective, but I went with this instead because it's more easily readable, it's more graphic, and it's simpler to do.  On seeing it Phil immediately emailed me back:

So, amusing fact - Alan Moore’s Promethea... introduces the Tree of Life with a copy of this map: http://www.johncoulthart.com/pantechnicon/kabbalah.html

I have absolutely no problem with this. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a lovely and entirely apropos homage, and the synchronicity of you coming up with a map in the same style as Promethea is fantastic. I love the design.

Which of course is exactly the sort of thing the good Doctor knows off the top of his head.  So we went ahead with it, though in deference to Mr. Coulthart, and his having the idea first, I named a station after him, and gave him due credit on the map - alas this may not actually be visible on the cover, so here's the map I then created so you can actually read it (if you enlarge it at least).

Lots of Doctor Who references in there if you know what to look for.  The crisscrossing branching theme also ties in quite nicely with the book thematically.

Of course with that done I still needed the rest of the cover.  Much of it was fairly simple - the thumbnail layout was all done with vectors, so it just needed scaling up and it all remained crisp and sharp.  The illustration was a little more complicated though, and had to be recreated from scratch.

So the image on the left was created in Photoshop using gradients and shapes and the like.  Next over we have the version with the shadows being cast.  For those I originally did them in Photoshop but I wasn't happy with the result, so I modeled a rough form in a 3D package and then rendered it with a couple of lights casting the shadow onto a white wall.  A little bit of distorting here and there in Photoshop and it all looked of a piece when overlaid on the initial image. I wasn't happy with the top of it though (it looked too 'rendered' to me), so I recreated it in Photoshop; now I had something as a guide that was fairly simple, and can be seen next to the rendered version - it's also had the levels fiddled with. On the right is the final image used on the cover with extra colours and graphics, and the map added.

Next I needed to add the spine and the rear cover along with some wear and tear.  None of this was terribly taxing, though the cover was a different size from the previous books (it's a classic paperback size rather than the usual larger format, to stay in keeping with the type of book it's referencing).  Nothing very exciting to know here that I've not covered in previous entries, except for the illustration and the big logo.  That logo is taken from Volume Two of the Eruditorum book series, it was replaced by the Eruditorum Press logo on all of Phil's subsequent books, so I thought it may as well get one more airing before being retired forever.  Plus I needed something to fill the space that wasn't text (The submission process automatically rejects any text obscured by the barcode 'sticker')

As for the upper illustration; given the quality of the usual illustrations on the back of such books (not terrible, but simple and charming), I didn't want to spend too long on it. I did a fairly quick pen illustration of the man (that hand is terrible, I fought the urge to redo it), and then to save time I created the spiral in Photoshop - something that's actually very simple to do if you know the trick (you draw slightly angled lines across the image, then run the Polar Coordinates filter, and then warp it around a little).  Painting out the bits where the guy was supposed to go took longer than the rest of the background, as of course you could see the background right through his line art.  Finally, the shading on the figure, and gradient to black in the background were done by painting them in grey, and then using the Photoshop Graphic Pen filter.  It's not perfect, but at this size it's hard to tell it was partially faked.

At this point Phil had given me the page count and the new title of the book, along with the blurb for the rear cover.  You may note something about the title if you're paying attention.  It's wrong!  In my opinion the spine also looks better with the large logo, but I'll come back to that in a moment.  So Phil gave me the correct title, but in his blurb he has mistyped it (not my fault for once!), so when I added the blurb I thought I must have misread the title he'd sent me, and used his mistyped version.  He picked up on it of course, and it was easily fixed.

The change in the spine though was a little more irritating.  I'd done it that way so it would look like a graphic choice if the spine wrapped slightly around to the front or back cover; Some nice dashes in the darker blue line, and an interesting look to the spine itself.  I kept this format when I corrected the spelling, but unfortunately the auto-check in the submissions process kicked it.  It doesn't give an option to override such things for those who want to deliberately buck the trend.

I made the  changes, and fixed up a few other minor details to arrive at the final cover.  And if you look at the final title on the spine you may note it looks a little blurred.  It's actually because the title is recursively occluding itself, and fading away with each repetition to the side, but I like that it also looks blurred.  For some reason the Auto-Submit didn't decide to have an issue with that.

Phil's launch post on Recursive Occlusion can be found here, and the book itself is available from this page now.


 

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 5)

A little over 16 months ago I sent the following words to Philip Sandifer, the author of the Tardis Eruditorum books, for which I regularly do the covers.

"Just had an idea for the first Tom Baker cover. If I can pull it off it will be a most magnificent cover, if I can't then it'll be an okay painting on it's own. For now though I'll leave you with the words Chris Foss"

The first Tom Baker cover ended up featuring Jelly Babies, so the words Chris Foss were held over for the second Tom Baker book. If you've not seen the first, or any of the other covers I've done for Phil you can see them by clicking on the related number 1, 2, 3, 4, and also check out the tangentially related A Golden thread, and Last War in Albion cover posts.

Now, I know, you may be thinking "'Most magnificent?' this seems rather out of character for our usually predictable blogger." Well, I did add a caveat. But honestly, I'm the least qualified person to say if I succeeded in hitting those lofty goals. I do know it was one of the more challenging things I've ever done, and that you can decide if I did indeed pull it off by reviewing the image of the cover below.

Clicking most of the images gets you a larger view, as usual.

Chris Foss, if you're unaware, refers to the staggeringly influential and prolific science fiction painter of the 60's, 70's and 80's (mostly the latter two).  He's still working today, and I own a book of works by him.  He didn't just do Sci-Fi covers (he also illustrated The Joy of Sex), but it's what he's best known for.

So, anyway, as I've said, the history of this cover starts before quite a few of the others.  Before Volume 4 (and 1, oddly enough), before A Golden Thread, and before Last War in Albion.   The day I sent Phil the email quoted above I sketched out the following thumbnail.

This is the first time anyone but be has seen this.  You can probably guess why I'd not shown anyone the picture before (it's bloody awful).  But I had an image of what I wanted for the cover in my head, and I needed to get that down as swiftly as possible before I started second guessing myself.  This may be a craptacular mess, but it does capture all the major elements of the final cover, albeit with a couple of extra bits (the mooring tower and the 'belt' bridge) and without the planet.  The whole thing took less than 10 minutes with no reference, and served its function admirably.  In retrospect I wish I'd stuck closer to the palette, but that's a relatively small thing.

The next step was to work it out in more detail, so I spent a couple of hours building a ship and towers in SketchUp.  This would prove very useful for when it came time to light the painting (or should that be paint the lighting?), and lay things out.  You're probably thinking I traced the ship for the final image.  You would be wrong, but I did trace the towers.

I have no recollection as to why I didn't trace the SketchUp version of the ship because I didn't do so over a year ago (I'll get to why I'm not calling it a TARDIS in a minute), I even questioned myself on whether I incorrectly remembered not doing so when I was prepping the images for the blog, so I opened the original PSD (Photoshop image file) for this and took a look.  There's the render of the towers, neatly traced, and there's the ship, not remotely aligning to the one in the image here.  Lots of perspective reference lines though.  I've even got the perspective on the far side of the front wrong.

Really, I was making work for myself - I have no idea why.

The rest of this is near enough the final layout of the cover.  I cut the moon from the back cover, and removed the bridge between the towers (ok, by 'removed' I mean forgot all about it), and at this point I'd already decided I didn't want to mooring tower connected to the ship.  Other than the towers there was no tracing here - though I did use a reference photo of Mr. Baker - not that it was all that much use, since I had to modify it a lot so he'd line up with the towers.

This was it a month later (I wasn't in much of a rush).  Obviously I had a long way to go.  The planet was painted using the airbrush tool and a couple of masks, while the rest was all done with the Oil Paint tool.   Each element was on it's own layer (Mountains, Towers, Ship, Clouds, Planet), this was because I wasn't sure of how much 'atmosphere' I wanted on each element, or if I was going to need to repaint things (as I obviously had to do with the clouds here).  As a result you'll see the mountains and the Ship vary in intensity through all the following as I try to dial in a good balance for them.

So this seems as good a place as any to speak to why I'm calling the ship 'the ship' instead of a TARDIS.  Simple reason is that it's not the TARDIS, It's a spacecraft with a passing resemblance to the beloved icon, but also with lots of differences.  One of my rules for the covers has been that I never simply put a picture of the TARDIS on them.  Partly because that would be too easy, and partly because that way lies... issues, with trademarks and copyrights; the closest I've ever come to breaking that was with the silhouette of Pertwee's box on book 3, and even that wasn't exact.  I'm pushing it a lot with this one, and I know that, and because I knew I was pushing things I went out of my way to make it as inaccurate as possible while still having it be clear what it was based on.  Obviously there are design differences, but I also used no reference to the real thing when I was building the SketchUp model.

I also used no real reference to Tom Baker beyond the one mentioned above (and that was the only time that was used), as one of the other rules is that I never just copy a picture of an actor on the covers.  Again, I've come close, but there are always changes, and the closest I've come was Pertwee's silhouette on Book 3, except I drew that with a lot of guesswork as I couldn't find a good profile shot of him.  So in this case I'm painting some clouds that have a  passing resemblance to Tom Baker as the Doctor, but I didn't work from any particular photograph (though I did have some as general reference).  That's why there are three main attempts before I was happy that it was sort of recognisable (and this wasn't the final revision either).

So once I got all that done I took the cover to Book 1 (which I had started working on at this point), threw the painting behind the grime and wear and graphic elements, added a text box to the back, threw on a logo and sent the whole thing off to Phil for his opinion.

He swore in his reply. Phil never swears in emails (I'm guessing you don't spend a fortune and years of your time and effort on English doctorates just so you can swear in emails and spoil it all), so I took that as a good sign I should continue.

And then I didn't.  I decided that this style was far more in keeping with later in the decade as covers go, and that it didn't really suit the gothic horror tone of the Hinchcliffe era.  So I went and did something else for that, which also didn't have anything to do with Gothic Horror, but did feature Jelly Babies, and I felt we really needed Jelly Babies, because they are delicious.  I didn't even look at this cover again for a year.

Actually, looking at the dates again, it was exactly a year between that cover mockup and my returning to work on it.  That's... Weird.

When I did come back to it I decided I didn't like the Ship being such a dingy blue, and wanted something with a little more pop.  So this is where I started to switch over to a new blue, and really start to integrate the lighting. Before I was done though I realised it would be beneficial to have some sort of reference to work from other than the washed out looking SketchUp render.  I was still avoiding actual photo reference of the TARDIS like the plague, so I went online and found photographs of blue construction equipment, transport containers, buildings and doors.

I just took a look through my reference folder and they break down like this (These things interest me, you can move on down if you don't care):

Blue Industrial Things/Buildings: 43     Clouds: 16
Mountains and deserts: 58                      Chris Foss Covers and Paintings: 60
Foss inspired paintings: 25                     Other book covers: 35
Photos of Tom Baker: 5                          Pictures of the TARDIS: 0

That wasn't enough though, so I went into Photoshop, took the SketchUp image and started to throw things onto it to get a more specific representation of what I was going for.  You may wonder why I didn't just do the whole thing like this and completely replace the one I was painting in ArtRage.  Well, back when CG 3D modelling was first blossoming, Foss was still a large enough influence that everyone and their dog was building spacecraft in his style, and they had a very particular look.   That look was not entirely dissimilar to this rough mockup.  Not a look I wanted.  I could have worked on it a lot more, but I liked the look I was starting to get in ArtRage, so this became just reference.

Once I'd blocked in the lighting and base colours in ArtRage I decided I didn't like the blue after all, so I toned it down.  I didn't repaint the whole thing of course, I just twiddled with the saturation option, and pulled it back to something more reasonable.  Then I started painting in details.  Panel lines, paint discolouration, text, that sort of thing.  I think I spent about a week just adding detail to the thing.  The trick was balancing it so there was enough to look natural, but not so much in one spot that the eye was always drawn to one area.

At this point I'd added the mooring lines going from the ship to the towers, with the accompanying scaffold.  I kept putting off working on the Bridge (on the TARDIS this would be the lamp), and instead I used the airbrush tool to paint in the thrusters.  I wasn't happy with the result of that, but rather than just remove it I decided to have a think and get on with the Bridge while I did.

I also added a couple of references to other Sci-Fi things I quite like. The star on the side is a reference to Asimov's Foundation series (it's based on the Empire's logo, described as the "Spaceship and sun"), and very faint at the top of the white strip is an inaccurate map of Targ from the Mercenary series.  TE-TB-02 stands for TARDIS Eruditorum-Tom Baker-Two of course.

Oh, and I added windows as part of the detailing pass.  Not terribly exciting.

Did another mockup of the full cover at this point, and decided that the logo just wasn't going to work the way I'd envisaged it, so I needed to come up with something else.  While I was thinking my eye was drawn to a book of "Extreme Science Fiction", a collection I've had for a while.  It occurred to me that when I was a kid there were loads of these Sci-Fi collection books on the shelves (many of them with Chris Foss covers), so I thought I'd try replicating that sort of logo.

Instead of looking any up, I just used a reference I already had - a cover for Herbert W. Franke's The Orchid Cage.  The logo there isn't orange, but it's big bold text with a line underneath followed by the author's name.  I rearranged the elements, and then went with the orange based on a painting of a sun on a different cover as it really popped (and if I'd bothered thinking about my colour theory knowledge I would have known that to be the case anyway).  I was concerned with dropping "Volume Five" and going with just the 5 in the logo, but Phil has never commented on the change, so I guess he's fine with it, and Amazon didn't spit it back at him either.

I don't show it here, because it's boring, but that 5 went through several revisions too, the final one being hand drawn, rather than taken from an existing font.  Also, you may note that the image on the cover mockup has a lot more contrast than the ArtRage painting.  that's because I know from experience that the grime pass has a habit of washing out the underlying image, so this is a post process intended to combat that a little (I actually want it to happen a little bit).

With all that in place I felt it was finally time to take a crack at the mountains.  I had assumed this would be an easy task, which was why I left it so long, but it turned out to be the hardest part of the painting!  Even with a number of references nearly equal to the number of Chris Foss ones I still had a surprising amount of difficulty getting the mountain to look the way I wanted, while also giving it some details that might be found on a coat.  In the end I just said "Good enough!" and moved on, but I really need to look into better ways of doing that.  I do tweak them a little later on too.

The last image in this strip shows my solution to not liking the thrust flames.  I'll cover that in more detail below though.

So here's the almost finished painting.  Actually, I sent it to Phil saying I was done, but then I couldn't leave it alone.  There is one element done in Photoshop rather than ArtRage, and that's the smoke from the thrusters.  I did that in Photoshop because I have a brush that's originally designed as an oil smear for grime passes on texture maps, but I realised it might work well as airbrushed smoke or cloud too, and what do you know, it worked really well!

I've also added rings to the planet.  These were done in ArtRage, but the masks for them were done in Photoshop as it's easier to manipulate shapes there.  Originally I was going to stick with the moon, but I liked the idea of planetary rings spilling onto the front cover from the back.

I realise now that I've not covered the detailing of the towers.  Really though, that was one of the quickest things I did, and it's basically the same process as that used on the ship.

As I said, I couldn't leave it alone, so I went back in and took a final pass at the mountain and the clouds.  I think the result helps, although probably no-one but me will ever notice.  I also added some additional text and small details to the Ship, but you'd have to look very close to see them.

There follows an image showing a snippet of the painting at the size I actually did it (haven't done that for a while), and at Phil's request there's a link to some wallpapers if you happen to want this as your desktop background (if you want other sizes let me know in the comments or I'll have no way of knowing).

Phil's post on the launch is here 
The book is available here (there are more options in Phil's post too)

Wallpapers
Follow the link, then hit 'Download' or 'Actions>Download' to copy it to your machine - Sadly there seems to be no way to set it automatically as the wallpaper:
640x480      800x600
1024x768    1280x720
1280x800    1366x768
1440x900    1600x1200
1680x1050  1856x1392
1920x1080  1920x1200
1920x1440  2048x1536

And that's basically it; another cover done.  The longest I've spent on one of Phil's covers (in actual hours, not just because it took over a year), and since I do work for him at a flat rate this one is the greatest value for money too.  Nice :)

ADDENDUMS
Firstly, a spelling mistake made it through the first batch of copies - I'd written Wondeful instead of Wonderful in the quote.  So that was mortifying.  The mistake was corrected though (causing Phil some terrible problems - Yet more mortification), so new copies have no error.  If you got one with the error (I did!) consider it a special limited edition for early adopters.

Secondly, after writing the post, I did find a picture of Tom Baker in a completely different folder that looks remarkably like the one I painted.  I don't recall copying it (and if I had it should have been in the same reference folder as everything else), but it's conceivable I did and forgot (this was over a year before I wrote the post you'll recall), and entirely likely that it strongly influenced the result subconsciously if I didn't.  Given that my no copying rule has been around from the start, it's probably the later.