Spending a hot afternoon painting...

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...)

A story in images... I like it! In fact, let me spin a tale to tie these paintings together!

 

We must begun with a depiction of the peaceful, beautiful life we are willing to do battle and possibly die to protect: gentle snow falls; early blossom shows a brave face to the end of winter, and a sense of almost spiritual tranquillity separates our village from the adjacent city. Here, home, heritage means as much to us as advancement...

The hero who has worked lifelong for the skills to protect this wonderful place -- the fifteenth generation of his family to undertake this commission; his grandfathers were samurai, many hundreds of years ago, and even when he walks the streets of the nearby city, his heart remains in the village that is his heritage, his one great love --

And here is the villain, the rogue son of the village who fled to the city after some heinous crime and never returned -- for he knows that judgment will be harsh ... and the city promises untold riches for one with this man's complete lack of scruple. Now, he's been hired to tear down everything we hold dear, and he arrives back with skills and powers few could hope to match --

He comes to the village, bringing his city ways, city violence, leaving a track of destruction and grief which is the bait in his trap, guaranteed to bring the hero home to face him in a terrible confrontation, on streets as old as time, where peace and halcyon spirituality dwelt only a day before...

The fight is terrible -- swords, guns, energy weapons, in the end, even magic which will take a toll even of the victor, while the loser in this battle plunges into the abyss, from which no power can bring him back. That battle will be fought from the village into the city, and before it's done, all is a chaos of fire and smoke, in which not only the villain but also the one who hired him are destroyed ...