All finished in Photoshop. Rejected by Epilogue.net.
Category Archives: sketchbook
Wirepriest Before
The Wirepriests revere the connection, worship the flow – of information, of electricity, of power. They seek to contain it and to send it out. They don’t convert others to their religion, there’s no evangelism, they wire you in whether you’re interested or not. And then they go looking for the next connection.
Tomorrow I’ll present the finished version of this sketch.
Watching the Bats at Moonrise
Every picture tells a story, so it’s been said. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what the story is.
Man with a Suitcase
It’s a sketch of a man wearing a spacesuit standing on the outside of a spaceship or spacestation. I’m guessing that the case holds tools but maybe it holds a picnic lunch and he’s on his way to meet his sweetie so they can watch the sun rise over a planet. Or maybe the case holds his prize collection of fingerpuppets and he’s going to duct tape it to a secret part of the ship.
Be Careful What You Summon Up
Another sketch from the 2002 section of the sketchbook. Apparently this gentleman is summoning up something unpleasent. Whether the unpleasentness will be turned outward or reflected back I couldn’t say.
Burrabb Shepherd
I’ve imagined that the burrabb were a more generally carnivorous species that humans but I’d have to do some research before I committed to the idea. The more specialized the diet the less adaptable the species. Human civilization grew out of agriculture. The burrabb might have developed agriculture in order to feed their food animals rather than as a way to feed themselves. With the farm comes the town. With the town comes space travel. I’m probably hopping over a couple of steps here but you get the idea. A space faring culture is less likely to arise from a nomadic herding culture than an agrarian/industrial one.
Burrabb Marketplace
The burrabb have a social structure similiar to a lion pride – an individual of one sex is catered to by mulitple mates of the other sex. The first human analogy would seem to be societies where men have more than one wife. This would be a superficial analogy. In those societies the male sex has most of the public role and interacts with other males in running society. In a lion’s pride the women do most of the work. A lion’s pride is the society to the lions. Another pride in the same territory will result in a fight.
The burrabb have a society of “prides”. The smaller sex does most of the work. The smaller sex does most of the negotiation. Among some burrabb races and cultures members of the large sex are able to sit next to each other and have pleasant conversations. These cultures are the exceptions. In general, the larger burrabb sex finds it physically uncomfortable to be close to other members of its sex. Too much closeness will often lead to violence.
It
I have a fondness for swamp monsters – Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, the Glob, the Heap – things that walk like men but are now composed of plants and fungus rather than of flesh. They aren’t zombies exactly. They aren’t really alive, not like an animal is. This creature is my own unnamed take on the subject. It appears in some of my old sketchbooks, the ones old enough that I cringe when I look at the sketches in them. It was once a man. The man died (or perhaps was murdered) and his body sank into the swamp. His hatred lived. It lived to form a new body and to drive that mossy, slimy form to seek revenge on those who had wronged the man in life. Sometimes the monster was destroyed. Sometimes it killed all those the man had hated and, no longer having purpose, became still, grew roots and became one with the bog.
Prayers to Unknown Gods
Another case of me getting out of the way of the drawing. I don’t know what this is, what it is praying to or whether it’s actually praying. The image came to mind and I let my hands go to work.
The finished version can be found in my Epilogue gallery.
Great Hats!
You may have noticed that the future doesn’t look like anyone predicted. We’ve got an internet but no flying cars. Fashion looks like it always did except when it doesn’t. Take a snapshot of any culture and all you’ll get is a snapshot. It’s unlikely that you’ll know why the people in the picture are wearing those. You’ll only be able to guess at what they are discussing. The older I get the more I’m comfortable with not knowing, the more I’m okay with having an incomplete picture. I still love filling in the pieces, discovering what’s beyond the next bend, but the universe is vast and I am not.
Which is a long winded way of saying that even though I drew this sketch I can’t really tell you what’s going on with in it.
