Paksworld

Sometimes I doodle for awhile.  Sometimes a doodle is inspired by something some real artist put up online, that I saw while doing *legitimate* research.  In this case there was an image of a hill, a giant hump on the image, with fields going straight up and down and little doohickies representng different crops in different stripes.   And a tree or two at the top of the hill.  My doodle was also based on previous doodles when I outlined a space (sometimes square, sometimes triangular, sometimes octagonal, sometimes, as here, a rectangle) and filled it with other shapes and then treated the other shapes with textural notation (dots or lines) to suggest…something.  Occasionally color.  The recent re-organization of the office meant that my colored pencils were now…handy.  I love colored pencils.  (And inks, and paints and so on, but the PENCILS were handy.  Sp were some 3 x 5 cards, pastel colored, lined on one side and plain on the other.    I had already, a previous week, doodled another of my filled shapes with what suddenly looked to me like the English countryside views I see when indulging in horse videos.    And that B&W doodle inspired this one, which isn’t quite complete but was a “could this work for a landscape, given the limitations of size, media, the green card instead of a white background and so on.   I got to draw fiddly lines , play with the colored pencils, regret some of the lines, and then figure out what to do with the sky so it would look hot and summery and like there was a nice rainstorm over there on the far side of the near hills.  Then I had to get the thing into a camera (cellphone camera, n this case) and fiddle around until I remembered the fairly cockamamie way my cellphone can have images sucked out by the computer.

I”m not thrilled with it (why it’s not completely colored in, among other things) but I like the concept, and I like working in a small, well-defined space.  Yes, there’s a river, and a reservoir, and a variety of crops, and some woods, but…even finishing the coloring won’t fix its fundamental problems on the right side, and my white pencil barely shows the cumulus cloud structure, thanks to the green background.  OTOH it was fun and made good “breaks” in the writing work now and then.   I’d fill one section then let it sit, then later another one.  Other doodles of the week were all scratchy B&W, inspired by fighting with a ballpoint until it agreed to write again and then seeing what I could make of the strong up-and-down-slanted strokes of the “YOU WILL WRITE!” argument.  As soon as I “crossed” them with scribbles they looked like a coniferous woods (sort of!).

None of this is great art.  It’s mind-cleansing when stuck, though, and that works for me.

Today’s the day Orbit UK is releasing the cover art for COLD WELCOME so here it is.  If you want to see it in a larger format, it’s over at the Universes blog.

The Universes post has both this cover and the US cover in a larger format, plus my amateurish “concept” sketch in crayon, that looks nothing like either of them.  For a good reason.  I’m not a professional artist <G>.

Coming in March 2017 Read the rest of this entry »

As I told you awhile back, I met a talented artist at KeyCon (Winnipeg) back in May of this year and commissioned her to do a portrait of Admiral Kylara Evangeline Dominique Vatta, or Ky as most of us know her.   I think she did a great job.  It took awhile, because she had to finish the school year (she teaches in a high school) and then had something else to finish, and various other things happened, but here it is.

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The talented Canadian artist who’s working on a portrait of Ky tor the website needs to know what Space Defense Force insignia looks like.  I don’t recall if I ever specified, but if I did, someone will notice if it’s wrong in the picture.   I know Stella got involved at some point, but I can’t remember which book even, let alone where in it (Stella helped design Ky’s uniforms, but they already had a logo they got in…um…that place they were before the battle at Boxtop whatever-its-number-was.)     It’s probably in Command Decision or Victory Conditions, but I can’t even find a copy of Victory Conditions right now (since I’m at a critical point of the new one…which has eaten most of my processing capacity…)

If anyone has time to do some rummaging in the books, that would help immensely.    Realsoonnow would be great.   Negative data ideal (artist & I can make it up de novo.)

Thanks to anyone who can throw a crumb to us so Lana can get this done.  (I saw her work and met her at KeyCon in Winnipeg.  And she was able to get a screen capture off an TV ad that had pretty much the perfect Ky in it. )

Looks like the powers that be have approved a cover design, and I like it.

So, here ’tis.    There might still be changes, but I suspect this is it.

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First, the warning:  This is not the final, approved cover design.   We may be tweaking it in several ways before sending it off for approval (which may not be given.)   Shifting things up, down, sideways a few pixels.    Fiddling with the “shine” on the letters.   Etc.   People should not get attached to it yet.   For that reason, I’m putting it below the cut, and I’m not calling attention to this post on Twitter.    Although this is my design idea,  working with Illustrator ™ is not in my skillset, so all the actual manipulations of design elements to get to this point were done by my very talented friend Ruta, at Willowbrook Designs.   So this is not a picture to be shared widely.   I’ll post a final cover design when it’s all tweaked and has been approved.

What you’re getting is a Private  Preview Director’s Cut kind of design. Read the rest of this entry »

Years back, when I first set up the Paksworld website,  I drew the border design I wanted as a header for it, and then–because I didn’t know how–hired a friend of mine who had worked for Richard Garriott on Ultima Online to render it as a vector image I could use in various ways.   When the notion of doing some short-fiction collections related to Paksworld came up, I immediately wanted to use that design–modified to be a book cover design, not a website header design–on the covers. Read the rest of this entry »

Nadine Bowlus sent me pictures of a pillow cover she made that might have been found in Paksworld.

Photo credit:  Nadine Bowlus Read the rest of this entry »

This post would have gone up last week, except for a power outage, a stubborn computer, and two speaking gigs for which prep had to be done.

Yes!  The cover of Shattered Shields in which I have a story, “First Blood.”  Those of  you who haunt Amazon.com have already seen it, no doubt, but last week was my first sight of it, when the editor sent it out to all of us.   Read the rest of this entry »