It was slightly more than
six years ago when I began participating at the
deviantART online community. During the past 6 years, I have been slowly developing my skills for illustrating science fiction stories. Some of my illustrations end up on deviantArt (about 80 so far), but more of them are on
Google Photos (over 600).
Change Challenge
There is currently a contest at deviantArt that challenges deviants to make alternate versions of a drawing created by user
Loish. Once in a while I create my own "
change challenges" here at this blog. One of the "challenges" that is hanging over me for the past year, uncompleted, is the task of making a
new banner image for this blog.
Most of my story illustrations are made by using Photoshop to make photo-manipulated composite images. I often find myself trying to capture some of the look-and-feel of mid-20th century pulp magazine science fiction cover illustrations.
One of the annoyances associated with old science fiction cover illustrations is that many of the depicted women are NOT DOING ANYTHING. The
damsel in distress was a popular theme back in the early days of science fiction, but I prefer stories in which the female characters are doing more than waiting to be rescued.
Here (to the left) is the "starter" image by
Loish for the deviantArt 20th year challenge. This image (to the left) got me thinking about one of the problems that I had with the first draft of my
new banner image: a failure of that image to include the kinds of interesting active poses that I want my illustrations to contain.
1. Lydya. When creating illustrations for stories, I often struggle to find useful photographs that depict people engaged in interesting activities. Another serious challenge for me is that I am often trying to depict strange imaginary events such as telepathic contact between two people's minds or a character using some alien technology such as a
Reality Viewer.
Isaac Asimov invented the
Prime Radiant, a device that could directly "project" vast amounts of information into the visual cortex of humans. It is nearly 50 years since I first became enthralled by the Prime Radiant and (as shown in the image to the right) I'm still struggling to find ways to visually depict people using this sort of Hi Tek™ device.
2. Femtobots. One of the more gruesome photo-composites that I ever made is shown in the image to the left. This rather whimsical cover image is meant to depict the surprising discovery that the lady with her head cut off is an artificial life form (composed of nanites), not an actual biological entity.
3. Fersony. Shown to the right is a cover image that I made about two years ago. I needed to depict a character who was climbing on a gigantic piece of alien equipment. This scene is happening far below the surface of the Earth, inside a vast chamber where the temperature is too high for comfort.
4. Nanites. Often my characters are themselves writing their own stories or reading books. The image shown to the left was posted on the deviantArt website about three and a half years ago.
5. Fersoni. The image to the right is the one that came to my mind when I saw the deviantArt 20th anniversary challenge. The little object in her hand is meant to be a control device for a Reality Viewer or some other type of Hi Tek™ equipment.
6. Alt-History. I had completely forgotten about the image shown to the left, proving that it is good to look back through my old blog posts after about five years have past! I like to imaging that in the
Ekcolir Reality,
Jack Vance was born as twins who both became science fiction story tellers. In different
Realities, the names of famous writers can be slightly different!
7. Robots. Earlier this year, I wanted to depict a robot who was involved with mining operations on the planet Chadho. I often struggle with how to depict humanoid robots (image to the right) and aliens as being just slightly different in appearance from we humans.
8. Zetana. One of the characters who often appears here in this blog is
Zeta Gohrlay. A few months ago I made the the image shown to the left which depicts Zeta discovering a vial of infites. I've used images shared by by
Gretchen Byers on deviantArt to make several different depictions of Zeta.
9. Gohrlay. The image shown to the right is from 2013. For many years I struggled with the distasteful idea that poor
Gohrlay would have to be killed in order to allow for the creation of positronic robots with telepathic abilities. However, I eventually discovered that Gohrlay had been saved at the last minute and not subjected to death by
destructive brain scan. Whew, that was close!
10. Fanish. Many of my stories are fan-fiction. The image to the left is cross-over science fiction with Losira from
Star Trek dropped into the Time Tunnel.
11. Viewing. The image to the right is one of my many depictions of how
Reality Viewing technology might be used.
This image (right) was made to illustrate
a story that I wrote in 2015, but it was made using
several images obtained from the deviantArt website.
12. Ariel. I'm currently writing
a series of related stories that feature a character named
Ariel Adler.
Ariel is a writer and I have been thinking about making an illustration that shows her at the point in time when she is writing the name "
Trysta Iwedon" in her notebook.
The Power of the Pen
My first thought was to make a depiction of Ariel working with
Marcia and Isaac, similar to the image shown above, to the left. However, Ariel is duplicated by teleportation at a time just before digital computers become available in the Ekcolir Reality.
When Trysta activates the teleportation equipment and makes the copy of Ariel (a copy who is needed to carry out a mission inside the
Hierion Domain), the original copy of Ariel (on Earth) is briefly linked to Trysta's thoughts and mind. Ariel is knocked unconscious by the teleportation beam and her friend
Joey must scoop her up and take Ariel back to her parent's table in the reception hall.
See Also: Image Attribution Project
Next:
Relda, the teleportation duplicate.
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