All New Year Old Sketching: July to September '14

Despite having quite a lot to post about, I do seem to have fallen behind on the actual posting bit.  This means that for the first time in a while I have quite a few pieces that need posting about, rather than just a handful of speedpaints.  I'm not going to be doing much catching up today though, instead I'll be doing some catch up a little on the other posts I've fallen behind on - the monthly sketch update.

From here on things will be done a little differently.  Usually I scan the sketchbook pages, and then cut out things of note for the month and compose them into a new image.  This has two disadvantages though.  Firstly, it takes bloody ages, and I don't think there's really enough feedback to warrant all the work I put into it (this time sink aspect is the main reason I've fallen behind so badly).  Secondly, it means that consciously or not I end up cutting out a lot of the stuff that's crap.  This gives a false impression of my current progress (actually, my progress about 11 months ago because I'm so far behind).

To combat these issues I'm going to take to just posting the sketchbook pages mostly as they are when scanned.  There will still be some minor edits, and the colour and contrast adjusted for legibility, but instead of a couple of hours per sheet, it's more like a couple of hours per post, which is  a lot more manageable.

Edits will happen for the following reasons:

• I drew something that's directly or indirectly linked with my day job, and might get me into trouble for posting (even if you don't know that it's associated and there are no clues that it might be), or is something I'm working on outside of that job and I want to save the sketch for the final review post.
• Something I like is upside down or at some other odd angle, and I want to show it off better (this will not apply to things that are crap).
• I am so unspeakably ashamed of something I've drawn that I just can't bare to share it (this will be far rarer than editing by omission as mentioned above).
• A piece I like got cropped off during the scan (the sketchbook is larger than the scan bed by an irritatingly small amount), and I want to include it in the main image.

Other than that, you'll get the lot - including the ones where the cat sat on my arm while I was sketching, or my son injured himself headbutting the coffee table and I had to stop, or I was half awake at the time, and so on.  I won't be giving explanations (unless it's an amusing tale, which I doubt), so if it's crap, just accept that it's crap and move on - there are occasionally good things.

JULY 2014

 

 

 

Notes:  None really. This was a fair time ago, so I don't recall a lot of what I was thinking when drawing these.  There's a head profile in the middle of one of them that may be the worst profile I've drawn in recent memory though.  Yuck.  The spaceman planting a flag right at the bottom is sort of adorable though.

AUGUST 2014

 

 

 

Notes: That page with the Minotaurs might be the best single sketch page I've ever done.  No references either, which amazes me when I look at the head on the right side and the decaying fellow next to them.  Other than that, nothing terribly exciting, but quite a lot of it.

SEPTEMBER 2014

 

Notes: A very disappointing month.  I drew more than this (finishing off that half page for one), but it was mostly things for work, so you don't get to see it.  Quite like some things on the full page, such as the chubby businessman the girl in the dress and so on, but it's not exactly exceptional stuff. 

5 years at speed! 2010 - 2015

As promised this post will be a brief recap of the Speedpaints I've been doing over the past 5 years.   Some confusion has occasionally come up because of my use of the term speedpaint though, so before we review let's first define.

A speedpaint is a painting, usually digital, whereby the piece is created in a limited amount of time. It's a painting, done at speed. Simple.  Sometimes the time is decided upon before starting, sometimes there's a general maximum time beyond which it's not considered a speed painting, sometimes it's just the frame of mind the piece is created in.  Sometimes these are termed as Studies (and I do so myself in some places to reduce confusion), except a study can actually take a really long time, yet remain a study.

What they aren't, in my useage at least, are timelapses.  This is where someone records themselves painting and then they play that back at an accelerated rate. So you can see someone painting something that took 20 hours in a mere 5 minutes (or whatever).  Sometimes those are timelapses of speedpaints, and I've done a handful of those myself.  I think it's because of this that the timelapses have also become popularly known as Speedpaints (seeing someone paint, at speed),  but that's not what I mean by it.

OK, so now that's sorted out, lets go look at some, small ones, briefly.

The above is the complete record of the 198 'finished' speedpaints I've done in the last  4 years and 7 months.  I consider ones unfinished if I just gave up on them completely, or got interrupted while painting and never went back to them (I don't mind still calling something a speedpaint even if I took a break halfway through, as long as it took less than X time of actual painting.  usually they're done in one sitting though).

I've included the 'Christmas Paints' I did in the first year in the lineup, since in retrospect they fall well within the window of what I now consider speedpaints, but I'm not including the facebook portraits I did a while back because of the fairly arbitrary reasoning that they're in a different folder on my hard drive.

I was tempted to include a couple of the unfinished ones (there are only about 6), just to bring the number up to 200, but I then decided I'd rather do something different for the 200th paint (You'll see it next month, unless you're here from facebook or DeviantArt, in which case you've already seen it).  Many of those unfinished 6 have already appeared on the blog in one capacity or another, and have usually been labeled as such.

The shortest took 5 minutes (or less!  I always round to the closest 5 minutes), the longest 190 (that's about 3hrs and 10 minutes, if your maths are as bad as mine), but that was an unusual case, and I mentioned it at the time.  Usually I try to keep them at under 2 hours, and usually feel increasingly guilty as the time gets close to that.  Sometimes I just get into painting though, and don't really notice the time passing until my butt gets sore, which generally seems to be at about the 1 hour and 45 minute mark.

The majority of the paintings were done in ArtRage, with the first use of something else (Photoshop) being in the third year.  Since then I've used it more and more (especially since I created a brush similar to the one I like in AR), but still regularly use ArtRage.  To date  26 Speedpaints have been in Photoshop, and 169 in ArtRage, with a mere 3 being in Sketchbook pro (I'm not a fan).

One of the images in the lineups is one I've never uploaded before (for reasons I won't go into, because they're boring), so its thumbnail here is the first time I've shown it - there will be no prize for picking it out of the lineup, but feel free if you want to challenge yourself.

Year One

One minor problem with the method I used to compile these images is that they aren't in any particular order other than the 12 month block they were created in.  I would have liked to sort by when they were done, but I also didn't want to spend the time doing it manually.  That's the case for all of these collective images, but this is as good a place to mention it as any.

So year one stretched from October 2010, through to May 2011, and in that time I did 50 paintings.  Some of them weren't terrible!  In fact the first I did (girl in a blue dress, second row down), is still one of my favourite pieces.  Oh, sure, I can do better now, but I'm not sure I can do better in half an hour!  Well, OK, maybe - I should make an effort to do some rougher speedier paints more often to find out.

Most of these took an hour or less, with only 3 going over that time (The Die Hard one and the girl in the pirate outfit on the first row, and the Two Ronnies, which is the first image on the second row).  There's an average of 1.72 paintings a week.  If I had decided to work out the years based on the October start date then the first year would have had 74 paintings, making it by far the most productive (even keeping up my current rate this next year is only going to end up with 48... maybe a handful more if I'm feeling particularly inspired).  But then, at the time I was doing less comission work (none in fact), and fewer 'bigger' pieces in general.

Year Two

More pictures, but less to talk about.  The pieces averaged out at one picture a week, which is actually better than I'm aiming for this year.  This is especially surprising to see given that the first image on this sheet was part of my "Stress doesn't help when speedpainting" post, so I think there was a fair chunk in there when I didn't paint anything.

There are two self portraits in this lot, both of which I'm still fairly happy with, and both of which I think I was coincidentally wearing the same T-shirt for.  There are also two pictures of my son, though you'd never know in at least one case, because it's an awful likeness.  Another awful likeness is that of George Clooney, three rows from the bottom.  Oh, you can't see George Clooney on that row?  Point made then.  Even now likenesses in portraits are extremely hit or miss for me to get.

Incidentally, the 100th speedpaint I did was the second portrait on the last line, though I didn't know that at the time, since I wasn't really counting back then.

Year Three

This year was by far my least productive, but also contains a lot of my favourite works.  In fact, from a quality vs quantity perspective this may have been the most fruitful year, as the ratio of ones I'm pleased with to those that I'm not might be higher than at any other time.

Not much else to say about this year, although it does contain the first Photoshop and Sketchbook Pro speedpaintings; The monotone portrait at the end of the second row down, and the parrot at the start of the next, respectively.

Year Four

Not much to say about this year either really - Productivity was up, while quality was... well, about the same, I guess.  fewer pieces I like compared to those I don't, but those I like I might like a little more?

This year also contained the longest speedpaint featured in this post - the blue haired girl in headphones - at a colossal 190 minutes.  I almost didn't count it as a speedpaint. I ended up doing so. since it was done with a speedpaint mentality at the time, and 3 hours and 10 minutes is still pretty quick by the standards I've held other pieces to.  That was also one of my most liked pieces by other people until recently - I'm still quite fond of it myself; I think the hair came out really well.

Year Five

This one brings us up to almost the current day (Since this image was compiled I've done another two paints, which I'll post about next month).  This last year has seen a sharp rise in the number of Photoshop paints, for no particular reason that I'm consciously aware of (maybe I'm just getting more comfortable using it for painting, or it could be because of the aforementioned ArtRage like brush, or maybe even that they finally overhauled their Color panel to be slightly useable).

If I had continued at the rate I began the year it would have been the slimmest yet, but a resolution has kept up a  steady flow since  January, with my forcing out a paint a week even when I've been otherwise busy, though as a result some of them are very rough and ready, like the Sumo Wrestler looking fellow on the 4th row down, or the final image in this set.

Those pieces are also examples of pieces I've not used reference for, or at least haven't used a direct reference for (three of the ten original pieces had plenty of reference, but it was referred to, not copied), which is something else I've done more of in the last year, though the quality is way behind those I've based more directly off photographs.

Lastly, this year also saw a huge increase in the number of environment pieces, rather than those based on people or animals (twice as many as the previous highest - 8 instead of 4).

And The Rest

These of course were not the only art related things I've done outside of work since the blog began, but they are the only ones I'm counting as speedpaints.  Apparently this means I've done a speedpaint every 1.2 weeks for the past 5 years (alright, 4 and a half years), which is actually a lot more than I would have thought, especially with the other pieces I've done in that time (I'm not going to calculate the averages there, at least not tonight.

So there we have it!  If this were one of those fancy popular blogs that people earn a living off these days I would say something like "Which was your favorite?  Leave a comment below and let us know!"  But since it's a perfectly ordinary blog, and I get a comment less often than I get a haircut, you can just make a vague decision in your head and keep it there if you'd like.  Oh, I neglected to mention it before, but you can click on those compiled images above to enlarge them.

A Missing Month of Speed

You may have noticed a distinct lack of posts last month.  I have no real reason why that occurred; last month was one of those strange ones that seemed to last a long time but also go by extremely quickly due to my being really busy.  Odd thing though, I don't actually remember particularly what it was I was busy doing.  Never mind, such things are bound to occur occasionally (the last time was 4 years ago), and as a result of some of that busyness (this part I remember) I have plenty to keep me busy with posts for this month, and possibly next month too.  Which is good, because it's anniversary time!

Technically the blog's anniversary was the end of last month, but that post was just saying I was going to do a blog. It wasn't until May that I actually posted any art, so I consider May 2nd the blog's birthday.  Also, even though I didn't start speedpainting for a few months after that, I count the same day as the tickover day between one year's speedpainting and the next, because I suck at remembering dates, so may as well collate them.

So today I'll go over the speedpaints I did this last month, and in the next post do an overall review of the last 5 years (actually 4.5) of speedpainting, unless I don't because I decide to do something else instead (5 Years!  Where'd the time go?)

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: The character of Sam Vimes form Discworld

As you may know, back in March author Terry Pratchett died.  This hit me reasonably hard as he was, without any hesitation, my favourite author.  Not as hard as when close friends or family have passed (and I've covered that happening on the blog before), but hard enough for someone I only met twice (at book signings, so I don't know that it really counts).  Anyway, I spent some time the day after hearing the news sketching a couple of his characters, but I didn't get to this one who is my favourite of all of them.  The character came up in a thread over on io9 a while later, and I thought "I should paint him.  Why haven't I done that yet?"

He's Blackboard Monitor, His Grace, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, or Sam to his family (usually Mr. Vimes to his friends).  He likely doesn't look like a Duke in the picture, I suspect that's just how he'd like it.  If you ever start reading Pratchett's Guards series, or have just begun, you may be confused why the drunk lying in the gutter in the first few pages is here referred to by such a ridiculous title.  That would be spoiling things, although to be called 'Blackboard monitor' is now an honor (or possibly an insult) in Dwarf politics.

None of that has anything to do with painting the picture, which wasn't terribly exciting.  I did gather some reference, but didn't work from any of it explicitly, mostly laying it by ear (or more accurately by stylus, because painting with your ear when you have no cause to is just silly).  I used a range of brushes, and right at the end decided it didn't look like it was either raining, or night time, and so used colour adjustments to increase the cool tones of the image, and motion blur to make the rain strokes look more rain like.  It is almost a certainty that I'll paint more of Pratchett's characters eventually, possibly even Vimes himself.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4, Photoshop
Based on: This image by Alraunie-stock

 Nothing special about this one really.  I was more concerned about lighting than accuracy, in that I wanted to capture the detail in the shadows, something I've often struggled with.  I was also trying out a new painting technique, that actually might work for laying down rough areas - it's very scribbly. Clearly the detail in dark shadows thing is something I need to work at more, but this came out alright, if you shrink the thumbnail down enough anyway.

A fairly by the numbers process too.  I wasn't using a grid or anything for this one, and her face ended up being a little wonky, which bothered me even though I wasn't going for accuracy in that area, so for the last stage here I took it into Photoshop and spent a couple of minutes shifting the proportions a little, though it's hard to say which bits were the adjustments, and which were bits I painted in between these two stages (such as bulking up her skirt and hair).

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese in The Terminator

You know how it is; I'm scrolling through Pinterest and see a photo I've not seen before of a character I love, and immediately want to paint them?  No? Well, that's what happened here.  Only thing was I really wanted smoke in the background rather than the nightclub depicted in the reference photo, and I didn't have a suitable brush (I could have painted that with a standard brush of course, but it would have taken too long probably, and not looked quite as, well, smokey).  So the time taken on this one includes the time taken to make a smoke brush (which was a combination of smoke photographs and the Photoshop cloud filter).  Making the brush took somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes I guess, I wasn't paying that much attention to the time at that stage.

My original intention was to switch from the smoke brush to a more standard one once I'd done the background, but I roughed in the figure with it and liked how it looked, so I ended up using that one brush for the entire painting.  When reduced it gives a nice pastel look, although it's a little hard to predict exactly what it's going to do with each stroke.  I used a 3 across grid for this one to aid with the composition - usually that's not enough to get it particularly accurate when I'm whizzing through a speedpaint, but in this particular case it's really close.  Either I'm getting better at it, or it was a happy accident.

Strangely, while this is one of the most popular images I've ever posted to facebook (44 likes), it didn't do terribly well when I posted the same thing to DeviantArt.  I can never predict what will be well received.

Time Taken: 105 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: This photograph I found on Pinterest, original source unknown.

The photo this was based on was all over pinterest for a few days.  It seemed to pop up every time I scrolled, posted by someone else.  Not terribly surprising, because it's a gorgeous photograph, while this paint based on it... isn't.

Part of the issue is that I decided to adjust the palette when I was painting it. The intention was to go with very blue desaturated tones in order that the orange of her hair would pop more.  Sadly I made those blues too close in value to the orange.  If I'd made them darker, or even lighter, the result would have been what I was aiming for, but of course I realised that to late (increasing the saturation of the orange may also have worked, as it would have altered the apparent value of  her hair), but last time I used a lot of orange it ended up being overpowering, and I didn't want to head down that road again just yet).

The other issue was that I just didn't work out the proportions very well.  I have a tendency to make the side of the face on the far side of the nose too wide, and this time was no exception.  You'd think by now I would know well enough to make the face far narrower than my brain is telling me it is, and then make it wider if I need to, rather than the opposite.  I swear I will remember this next time I do a 3/4 view because I then spend far too long fixing the issue rather than spending it on places that are more enjoyable.  You can see I also had some issues with her chin in the first image of the bottom row, but I got that sorted out fairly quickly.  She also looks as though she has a giant left breast, which is because I was trying to make it look less pointed, and inadvertently added to the size of it instead.  For what it's worth I quite like the way her face ended up, but overall this was not a great success.

All the speed, none of the finesse

Well, it's been a heck of a month, and somewhat exhausting.  I'll spare you all the little details, but they are much the same as ever, with the addition of three bereavements.  Again, I'll not go into details, this being more a reminder to my future self as to what I was doing when they left us than any seeking of sympathy.

In other areas things have been going better.  I did a portrait that I can't show you for some time (for reasons murky and unfathomable - I don't really understand them myself), and managed, with a bit of modification, to keep up with my New Years resolution.

This modification was simply to change the goal from one speedpaint a week to the equivalent of four speedpaints a month.  This has the advantage of requiring fewer speedpaints (3 less, since I'd already excluded the first week of the year), and also meaning that if any were missed I could catch up on them at another time, something I have had to do, somehow managing to miss one in January I made up for in March.

All of which is to say, there's a bumper fun packed* collection Speedpaints to follow.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: This image, original photographer unknown.

For this following bunch of speedpaints there's a reasonable amount of experimentation with the types of brushes and settings I'm using in the software.  In this instance I was experimenting with wet on wet oils - something I've done on occasion, but never, to my recollection, on a more graphical scene.  The original photograph is of Torino Italy, and was found, as many of my subjects are, on Pinterest.  Sadly I've not been able to track down the original photographer to credit them properly, so if you know, mention it in the comments below.

As you can see, the majority of it was just building up details over time.  The majority of the composition was worked out in the second image here, with much of the colour being introduced in the third.  All that remained was adding the details and nailing down the minor red and green hues dotted around.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based On: The first image of Armstrong under the Visual References of this page.

I found this image on Valentine's Day, and was struck by how much the composition looked like the heart associated with the day, and decided to paint it.  I didn't actually get around to it until 5 days later, which rather reduced that significance.

Again, I'm playing with brushes a little here.  The  main brush used is the one I like that's based on the Oil Brush from ArtRage, but there are others intended to give it a rougher distressed photograph feel, adding noise and such. It doesn't look like there's a lot of change from the main shapes of the second step here to the end,(there's obviously a large difference from the first), but actually the shapes and border of the helmet were refined right up until the final black and white stage.  I find the face interesting as this is not usually how I refine them, but the technique clearly worked even despite the slightly nightmarish visage in the second stage.  The final sepia colouring was just a colour overlay roughly applied when the rest was complete.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: Artrage 4
Based on: This

Yes, another image with no original source credit.  I'm feeling less and less guilt over it as time goes by, given that I'm not claiming they're based on my original ideas, I'm not making any profit on them (It's primarily just practice), and I do make at least an initial effort to find where the image comes from, and link you too it, if possible, when I can't.  In this case the first 3 pages of google results are almost all Pinterest, which has issues with letting non members see pins, so this link is the best I can do.  I'm a bit miffed actually - the image on that page is about twice the size of the one I worked from.

Not much to say about the process on this one really.  I did use a cropped image and a crosshair 2x2 grid to get the centre point and composition, although the image was so small that didn't help nearly as much as I would have liked.  Also of note is that her expression changes marginally three times in the three stages shown at the bottom.  The one in the middle is the one I posted to facebook, and has her left eyebrow slightly raised from the one on the left, with the one on the right having an additional minute of work done to it to fix something I didn't like about her mouth and cheek.  If you're really eagle eyed you might be able to spot the difference.

Time Taken: 30 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: A Photograph of Bill Murray by Leif-Erik Nygårds

Can we just forgo reasons for this one? All this typing is making my hands tired, and really 'Bill Murray' is all the reason required.

I do find it amusing that he looks increasingly less like Bill Murray the further along I get.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: Personal photograph of a local cinema

The second of my Designated Area series.  I think I took the picture when I was going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy.  More an experiment in working with perspective than anything.

Y'know, I think I accidentally rescaled these using the wrong scaling method?  If you squint at the first few stages here (after clicking to enlarge) you can see the perspective guidelines, but they're really pixelated, and they shouldn't be.  That's unfortunate, but I'm not going back to do them again.  Not much else to say about this - it was as straight forward as it looks.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: This Stock by ChamberStock on DeviantArt

I'd been meaning to do something based on this photograph for ages, and I'm sort of sorry I ended up doing it as this experimental piece.  Basically I was mucking about creating a triangular brush on photoshop, and painted this to try it out.  It's an interesting look, and probably useful in places but not very refined (plus, I think the proportions are way off).

The whole painting was done using the same brush.  It has a sort of pixilated look if you use it correctly, which is also an interesting effect.  Other than the funky brush there's not much else of note to say about this piece.

Time Taken: 35 minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: N/A

So here I am mucking about with brushes, still.  Still not completely happy with them, but they are getting better I think, and closer to what I'm after.  Both this one and the next came about when I was scribbling with the various brushes as I tested them, and then saw a picture beginning to emerge and pursued it, so it's all a bit chaotic, and not remotely polished.

Time Taken: 30 minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: N/A

And here's the second one arrived at from the same basic technique of no technique at all.  More speed sketches than Speedpaints really.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes (+5 Minutes)
Software: ArtRage 4 + Photoshop
Based on: Various

This looks very different small, surprisingly so.  It also looks a bit different to the version I had 5 minutes prior:

Which was because in a rare turn of events I took the original ArtRage version and pulled it into Photoshop for some post action (oh man, does that ever sound filthy).

It's not based on anything specific, I just went into Pinterest and decided to pull out the first few things that seemed interesting to me, and base a painting on them.  They were, in no particular order:  A guy in a coat with a large collar, a woman in a shiny skin-tight top, and two asian women.  I'm not linking to most of them because, well, I thought I'd already pinned them all in the past, but in fact I'd only pinned the guy in the coat (or maybe I did pin them, but not where I thought I did - whatever, I can't find them now).

The woman with the skin tight top was the rough inspiration for the pose and the sleeves, the inspiration for the jacket comes from the guy's collar and the face is evidently from the asian ladies.  In a fairly rare move I actually roughed it out before starting (I do rough out speedpaints on occasion, but usually when I'm directly basing them on something).  The final version, pulled into Photoshop, was first cropped (because I made a real mess of her hand - really, it's deformed, ill proportioned and generally wretched, and didn't want to do any more painting - 2 hour time limit was up, but I gave it the extra 5 all the same) and then some color tweaks and blurring the background.  Nothing terribly surprising here.

One thing of note though - her head looks slightly twisted at an odd angle.  that's not intentional, I just messed up the perspective.  Also, her neck is not well done, at all. I couldn't crop that out like the hand though.

And there we have it - nine speedpaints.  I'm not sure it's a record, but it's more than I usually post at a time.  Maybe I shouldn't wait two months before posting the next lot.

* I lied about it being fun packed.

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.