Announcements, Crossposted

Line Art for the Bristlecone Coin

The Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter closes Friday at 8pm Eastern time. Today, with just 30 hours left, I finished the line art for the Bristlecone ship coin.

I’ve cleaned this up a bit in Photoshop, but most of what you see is ink on paper (and some white paint on ink.) The next step is to send this off to Travis Walton for coloring, and then it’s off to the coin design folks.

Yesterday I did some repair work on the cover, because the spacecraft streaking past in the background isn’t the right version of that ship.

Here’s the original (with blue lines)

And here, complete with paint smears, is the corrected version.

Travis gave me the colored version in time for me to re-lay the cover this morning, so as of this writing, this is what the front cover of the book looks like:

Every time we produce a new book we get a little bit better at it, so it doesn’t surprise me that this is our best book yet. The absence of surprise is not the absence of “wow,” though.

Wow.

This book is going to be great.

Announcements, Crossposted

Book 13 — Pre-orders Close on Friday!

The Kickstarter project for Random Access Memorabilia: Schlock Mercenary Book 13 closes this Friday. Today I finished the first real draft of the cover:

There are a bazillion tiny tweaks yet to make, including color nudging every element, and then re-laying the entire thing in InDesign, but as of right now, the image above is a very fair estimate of what the final cover will look like.

All the details about this book project can be found here.

Announcements, Crossposted

Designing the Bristlecone Ship Coin

As part of the Random Access Memorabilia (Book 13) Kickstarter we’ll be doing a ship coin for Bristlecone, which featured prominently in books 12, 13, and 14.  I’ll be drawing this ship again for the coin, and doing so for the first time in a couple of years at least.

In order to get it right, I made a model sheet from some of my favorite drawings of the ship.

The image in the upper left was rendered by Jeff Zugale¹, who did all the ship design work for Planet Mercenary. Everything else was my line art.

I’ll probably be drawing the ship using a camera angle similar to the upper center, but with more detail, like the images in the lower left (in front of the tufted wing shark¹) and lower right corners.

In the Planet Mercenary RPG, Bristlecone is defined as a Celeschul Orbital Foundries Wyvern-class vessel. The hull and A.I. were built and integrated in the 26th century, but improvements in annie-plant tech led to numerous upgrades. The full history of the ship won’t fit on the coin, but we’ll hit the highlights.

The tufted wing shark² won’t appear on the coin anywhere.

¹ Jeff “Starshipwright” Zugale is doing an art book Kickstarter WITH SPACESHIP TOYS right now, and you should go look at it.
² McConger named the tufted wing shark “Kong,” but xenobiologists ignored the precedent he attempted to set and went with something more descriptive.³
³ At least to humans, who know what the word “shark” means. 

Crossposted, Reviews

Blade Runner 2049

I watched the theatrical version of 1982’s Blade Runner on Friday morning to prep for a 12:30pm showing of Blade Runner 2049. I did this on a whim, but I’m very glad I did, because it made the parallels between the two films stand out, and not in a bad way.

It also meant I spent 5 hours in the Blade Runner universe, and that place weighs pretty heavily on the soul. Even the shiny parts of that future are unsettling, like blood on chrome, and the non-shiny parts are deeply bleak, like broken bones in sand.

But the parallels? Wow. Sure, there were plenty of obvious callbacks, like eyeball imagery, constant rain, and telling the computer to enhance images, but there were also thematic links in the camera angles, color palettes, and the pacing. Even the soundtrack, which was not the work of Vangelis, sounded to me like music which, under decades of environmental pressure, was driven to evolve from Vangelis¹. It’s different, but Vangelis is still there, like mitochondrial DNA.

I was amazed by the film, and I liked it, but Blade Runner 2049 still doesn’t clear my personal Threshold of Awesome. Mostly because I prefer to have a bit more fun at the movies. Setting that aside, however, it is an awesome film².

¹ My library contains several albums of Vangelis music, including at least one version of the original Blade Runner soundtrack. I suspect that Zimmer and Wallfisch spent many hours with a similar library before laying down anything in the studio.
²In the interest of letting moviegoers know what they’re in for: Blade Runner 2049 has more nudity and violence than the original film, and at two hours and 47 minutes it runs kind of long.

Writer, Illustrator, Consumer