Spending another hot afternoon painting (also unpacking a lot of photographs from (!) November. Shows you how far behind I am!). Here's another touch-up on Chino -- a character I love, and a story I'd like to go back to eventually. It has been professionally published, incidentally, but it as a "hard sell," because it's what's termed a "frame story." In other words, a story told by a raconteur. Every single Sherlock Holmes story barring one is told in the words of John Watson ... that's a frame story. Well, the format might have been popular in Sir Arthur's day, but -- not today. Which made The Gates of Petheris a very, very hard sell indeed. Still, it sold in the end, and I do believe there's enough meat and potatoes in it to make a short novel, which can happen in the fullness of time --
Or perhaps it would make a better graphic novel than a text-driven piece? Now, there's a thought. And it's a thought I'd been playing with more and more lately, which is why I've been running experiment after experiment, trying to find a way to produce the sheer volume of art required to publish an 80 - 100pp graphic novel. It could easily take 250 pieces of art, and since I don't expect to make much, if any, money out of it, I can't afford to spend a year working on it!
Bottom line: I have indeed found a way to churn out a lot of art in a short enough time. It comes down to taking insanely fast renders, plus some photo montages that are largely based on my own images, shoving them through a bundle of complex Facebook processes, then painting the result by hand. The end product is pretty decent. Good enough, I think. And since Chino is already finished (and a dang good story, to boot), it would make better sense to run with this than to try to finish a looooong story like The Forgotten songs, and then illustrate it, all for no income. Ha.
So here's the fruit of a hot afternoon's messing about. The SF render is a twelve-year-old raytrace which has just had a fresh rebalance and tweak, and looks the better for it. That's Neil Travers in the cockpit of the Capricorn ... reminding me of how much I love the Hellgate novels. I could live in that universe. Must go back and read the whole thing again, total immersion, and will probably end up doing a load of new artwork for it! I was utterly immersed in this universe in 2011-2014, and a lot of the work I did back then was Neil Travers and Curtis Marin, Mark Sherrat, Mick Vidal, Richard Vaurien ... oooooh, I miss them! I feel a Hellgate binge coming on! (If you're even vaguely interested...)
