Author Archives: skook

New Worlds Relaunch

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This was a quick design done for one of Warren Ellis’s redesign challenges over at his Whitechapel forums. The basics of the challenge were –

You are an artist/designer.

You have to put together the cover for #223 of something called NEW WORLDS.

You have been told that NEW WORLDS is the most groundbreaking, forward-looking, ambitious and original science fiction magazine in the world.

And that’s it.

This was back in May of 2010. I was being kept really busy at the Day Job and I was mostly exhausted by the time I got home. Getting a new illustration done, no matter how fun the project, was just not going to happen. So I cheated. I grabbed an old piece from my Epilogue.net gallery, colorized it and did a quick type treatment for the logo.

I like the results but there are many, much more impressive pieces to be found on the original thread.

The Oz Squad

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Simpler is often better, or at least easier, when it comes to cover designs. Especially when it comes to elements of cover designs. Compare and contrast these two sets of Oz Squad portraits.

The top set is richer in colors and tones. Each portrait tells (or at least suggests) a story. I like each one individually. As a group, however, they don’t really work. Each has elements that clash with at least one of the others. With Nick’s portrait the amount of action in the background makes that picture really stand out from the others. With the Lion’s portrait the lack of a background makes it seem a bit unfinished, like it hasn’t gotten the same attention as the others. Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s portraits go together pretty well. The lack of any human figures in their backgrounds make those backgrounds seem more harmonious even though one features a tornado and the other a sunlit field. A human figure would tend to draw the (human) eye to it so by not having a human in that background the figure in the foreground stands out more. That very harmony between the portraits of Dorothy and the Scarecrow makes Nick and the Lion’s portraits clash more.

The second set of portraits are, individually, less exciting than the first set but they definitely fit together better. They use the same background colors. They feature approximately the same portion of each character in each portrait. For the purposes they’re going to be used (elements on the cover of a book and not the main elements) they work pretty well.

Just for the fun of it I’m tossing in one more compare and contrast set.

And here, because of the simplicity of their design the portraits of the Scarecrow and the Lion go together best. With Dorothy and Nick the exciting backgrounds in the first portraits makes the lack of backgrounds in the second portraits really noticeable.

Anyway. Hopefully this lesson will stick with me the next time I work on a complex cover design.

Coloring Oz – Nick 4

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I quite like how this turned out. As an individual illustration I think the color and the composition work well. I like the tin Nick in the foreground and Rebecca, Amy and meat Nick acting out their destinies in the background.

Unfortunately I’d intended this portrait (and those of Dorothy, Scarecrow and Lion) to be part of a composition on the back cover of a book and this illustration doesn’t work with the rest of the art at all. The portraits of the other characters work okay but this one is just too darned busy. There’s too much action and the red in it clashes with the reds in the rest of the cover.

It looks like I’ll need to do new versions of these portraits. Keeping them simple this time. And working with the colors already established. Sigh.

Coloring Oz – Nick 3

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It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Nick and the process of coloring this illustration. It’s that I’ve got a lot of paperwork to fill out in order to make sure I get into the spring classes at Seattle Central Community College. The paperwork from the college itself is minor – it’s the financial aid forms that eat time and kill the brain.

Coloring Oz – Nick 1

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Nick Chopper could be considered a tragic figure. He’s a man who, piece by piece, had all his human parts replaced with tin substitutes. A witch enchanted his axe and it chopped off his parts. A tinsmith fashioned replacements for the missing limbs. Eventually all of Nick got excised and he became a completely tin man.

In the original Oz novels Nick is pretty satisfied with that. He felt the lack of a heart for a while but the Wizard gave him a suitable substitute. There’s no tragedy to that version of Nick. He and the Scarecrow hang out, often congratulating themselves that they aren’t subject to the need to eat or sleep or breathe like ordinary meat people.

The Nick in Oz Squad? He’s had a few more bumps than the Nick in the original novels. He doesn’t seem to miss being human much more than the earlier Nick did. At least not most of the time.

Coloring Oz – Lion 4

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And here is the final colored version of the Lion for the secret Oz Squad project. With the other character portraits I’ve done in this series I’ve put some scene in the background that refers to that character’s past. Except for a little bit of green, suggesting the forest, I didn’t do that for the Lion. Partly that’s because the Lion’s past isn’t described in any detail. (I could have draw him pouncing on Toto but I honestly didn’t think of that until just now.) Partly I wanted him to fill up the illustration space to demonstrate his size. The Lion isn’t some little Earth lion. He’s huge, the size of a horse. Not a creature you want to mess with.

Coloring Oz – Lion 3

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After the various past posts I’ve done on my Photoshop coloring process I’m not sure what I could say today that would be new. I’m continuing to post different stages in the process because I find it fun when other artists do the same thing with their work. If you happen to have any questions about my process feel free to ask.

Coloring Oz – Lion 2

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In a land of intelligent, talking animals what do the predators eat? In more than one of the Oz books, Baum, the author, suggests that they eat each other. But he only suggests, vaguely implies, it. None of the main character predators: the Hungry Tiger, the Cowardly Lion, Toto the dog or Eureka the pink kitten, are ever show actually eating. A few bad animals, dragons, Kalidahs, the Skoodlers and other BAD folks threaten to eat our heroes but they never succeed.

In Gregory Macguire’s Wicked Years series there are both animals (the dumb sorts we’re used to) and Animals (who can think and talk). Animals eat animals.

In Skipp and Levinthal’s The Emerald Burrito of Oz there’s a brainless animal called a goomer that serves as the food source for all Oz predators.

I’m not sure what the predators eat in Steve Ahlquist’s version of Oz.

Coloring Oz – Lion 1

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Of Dorothy’s three companions in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz the Cowardly Lion is my favorite. I suspect that this has more to do with my affinity for underdogs and neglected characters than because he’s necessarily more interesting than the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. It seems like Baum, the author of the Oz books, didn’t know what to do with the Lion. After Wizard the Lion gets very little page time. I don’t think he’s even mentioned in Land of Oz, the first Oz sequel. He shows up again, along with the Hungry Tiger, in Ozma of Oz, the third Oz book, but mostly he’s around to pull Ozma’s chariot. In most of the subsequent novels that his primary function. The only Baum written book that I remember him having a significant part in, post-Wizard, is The Lost Princess of Oz. And in Princess he’s one of many characters searching for the kidnapped Ozma.

I have to admit that the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are more unusual than the Lion. One is a living scarecrow. The other is a tin simulacrum of a man named Nick Chopper. The two are good friends and hang out together. Baum obviously enjoyed writing about them. Once they fulfilled their quests for brains and a heart they were still unique characters. Once the Lion got his courage? Then he was basically just a talking lion. You’d think that would make him interesting enough, wouldn’t you?