Tag Archives: Schlock Mercenary

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. 

Announcements, Crossposted

Final Week for Book 13 Pre-Orders

The Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter closes on Friday, October 13th. As of this writing there are about 200 sketch editions left, and we’ve cleared all but one of our stretch goals.

We’re doing the final layout work now, and the book is looking SO NICE. You can expect an updated cover reveal on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

We’re also designing the Bristlecone ship coin, per the stretch goal which we cleared early this week. We’ll reveal that design soon, but it’s not quite ready.

Do you want Schlock Mercenary t-shirts? Consider buying a book!

This may sound a bit counter-intuitive, but in order to make the right shirts, in order to make really nice ones, we need to spend some money up front. We need to do R&D. If the Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter reaches its next stretch goal, we will spend a portion of this project’s proceeds (probably between $1,000 and $5,000) developing and prototyping t-shirts. We will then Kickstart a proper t-shirt project in February of 2018.

This is the final week of the Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter. We know there are a lot of demands on your discretionary income right now, and we’re very grateful for those portions of it you choose to spend with us.