This is a 100% black and white image. Any changes in brightness and color are due entirely to glitches in your visual processing system.
Illustrator, about ten minutes.
This is a 100% black and white image. Any changes in brightness and color are due entirely to glitches in your visual processing system.
Illustrator, about ten minutes.
A week ago, I had an idea: What if I did a set of covers for Zelazny’s Amber books? One week later, I have this.
Here’s some closeups. There’s some progress shots after them. And sketches for the rest of the covers.
It’s taken me about 21 hours spread out over the past week. Plus time spent reading the books and taking notes.
Lots of layers. Lots of graphic styles.
Lots of paths. Illustrator keeps crashing when I go to Document Info to find out how many there are and it takes a few minutes to render all the effects when I reopen it. Updating to the latest version doesn’t let me find out either. One of the folks in the Astute Graphics Slack was able to load the file and tells me it’s about 12k paths.
It’s come a pretty long way from a quick doodle on the title page of my copy of the omnibus.
I started reading it with the intent of looking for cover ideas and this one leapt out from the book at me – you’re sixteen pages in, and Corwin has just found a pack of the family’s magical Tarot cards that let them talk to each other no matter how many alternate worlds are between them, and he lays them out on a table and thinks a few sentences about each of them. As I sketched that out I had the additional idea of having everyone reaching out of their cards towards Corwin and that felt so incredibly obvious that someone has to have done that before, but I can only find a few editions that even have cards on the cover at all, and only one lonely audiobook that actually draws more than one of them!
Actually it was grandpa who fucked a unicorn, I couldn’t get a good Latin “translation” out of Google so I left that off the crest when I put it on the tablecloth.
I kept on reading. Got as far as the third book before I stopped. The image for Book 2 initially appeared in my head with the same unnerving alacrity as the idea for book 1, but nobody seems to have done it either. Book 3’s a bit messy but it’s very much a Middle Book and that’s not surprising, I guess. This got me far enough to be able to say “Brand should have a hint of the Courts of Chaos behind him as foreshadowing” though. (Spoilers for a fifty-year-old book, I guess? It’s not like Corwin doesn’t straight up say he doesn’t trust Brand in the two pages of looking at all the cards.)
The crown was one of the last things I finished. As far as I can tell Roger never actually described it in the books beyond saying it’s seven-pointed. I started with a seven-pointed ring of amber and that was good enough but I knew I’d need to come back to it before the picture was finished; I ended up with seven unicorn horns carved out of amber, and a guest appearance of Marigold Heavenly Nostrils from my friend Dana’s comic as the Royal Unicorn Of Amber.
If I do an animated or comics adaptation of this series, I would like the crown to constantly be saying things like “now kids, be nice to each other” in any scene she shows up in. Little orange word balloons with white text. Nobody ever pays any attention to her, at least not in terms of actually talking to her, but there’s definitely room for some humor around the edges here.
Corwin was the first to get drawn, after I’d set up the card borders and the tablecloth.
And then one more bit of inspiration struck: the shadow of Oberon, the absent king of Amber, hangs over the whole saga. Why not make this literal? I put Corwin’s card in front of his shadow and that looked super good. I sketched seven points on his crown’s shadow, and realized: the cartoon sweat drops I’d drawn around Corwin should number seven, too. That’s why there’s pearls accenting the crown, too. To echo those sweat drops.
I started drawing everyone else. Just quick little things, taking note of what little detail Roger gave, and trying to enjoy filling in the other ones.
I mean it is like 90% likely that Roger imagined every single Amberite as a person of Northern European ancestry, all the book covers certainly went down that road, but he doesn’t explicitly specify that Corwin and his sister Deirdre weren’t Black and I think that this is a perfectly fine choice illustrative choice to make. I let Julian manifest with a sort of Japanese samurai vibe, too. Went back in and changed his face to push it a little more later on.
Random’s mustache is incredibly regrettable. I am proud of this. I ended up making deliberately regrettable hairstyle choices for most of the princes I drew after this one.
why how curious, look at that strange background, that is surely some kind of metaphorical Tarot reference and not a foreshadowing of the influence of any opposing organization who lives under strange skies that are both daylight and night-time at once, not at all
Roger is very explicit in the text: “sleepy hollow, man, you ever seen that cartoon? yeah, benedict is one ichabod crane looking motherfucker and he’s a good egg.” Well. Not quite that explicit. But close. My first version had more regrettable hair – he had the same Caesar curls that Mark Zuckerberg affected until recently. Then I read the description and didn’t feel like it would fit.
I generally wanted the feeling that almost every single one of these guys has made hilariously awful hairstyle decisions. I was laughing my ass off at Gérard’s little fringe beard. Nobody around him is willing to tell him that it really isn’t working. Nobody around any of these guys is willing to tell them it isn’t really working. Because they all have a lot of money and the ability to walk to worlds where a major religion is focused on worshipping them as a deity and willing to follow them to death, never mind the ability to find places where everyone is gonna indulge their petty urges like casino employees making sure that high roller gets whatever they wants.
Anyway. This one’s probably done. Writing this up, I saw a few things I might want to go back in and tweak – Julian could be more Japanese, Benedict could be more Ichabod, Random’s shirt could really use a regrettable pattern of parrots or something for that Jimmy Buffett vibe – but this feels like a good place to stop, and either get back to my other projects or turn one of those other two sketches into a cover.
If you want to see the source file, it’s over on Patreon.
edit. I’ve got sketches for all the rest of the Corwin chronicles now.
This one’s actually in progress, I spent a few hours fooling with it and it’s really coming together nicely. The idea came flashing to me pretty early in reading this one and got refined due to the fact that Corwin doesn’t actually fix the Pattern until much later in the series. The central idea of a shadow across the Pattern that blossoms into the monsters of the Black Road felt like something I have to have seen before and yet I can’t find any examples of it.
This is the first one that doesn’t really have a clear image. It’s a messy middle book and hard to pin down into a single image. Doodling this gave me the inspiration to have the Courts of Chaos lurking on Brand’s card though so it was certainly worth my while even if the final piece bears no resemblance to this sketch.
The title is the Hand of Oberon but here I am with the hands of Corwin and Dworkin instead. I feel like there is something to be done to hint more clearly at the “hi I’m your grandpa and I fucked the Unicorn to make your dad” revelation, we will see.
I definitely like this idea though. There’s two layers. Maybe three. A mosaic of views of the castle of Amber in a grid of cards, being blown away by the wind to reveal Chaos beneath it. It needs some kind of human element that’s clearly neither layer and I’m not sure what. I think my idea of a silhouette of Corwin tracing his new Pattern, with the tree branch he planted at its start, and some of the Pattern, all inside his silhouette, is a decent one. Lots to fit into one image though. We will see what happens.
Illustrator, 1h.
I decided to fool around again with the “big swooshy line with a parallel line brush” technique I played with yesterday.
I’d drawn this big swoosh in the same file before I closed it yesterday. I duplicated it and started fooling around – I rotated it, stuffed it in a distortion mesh, rotated the mesh back, and made two new mesh lines close together in the middle, then pulled it apart. And made a bunch more mesh lines to let me wave it around.
It looked vaguely like a figure so I added a few more mesh lines to make a rectangle around the head area, and another mesh line down the middle of that area to create some points to pull around.
The parts coming up and around kinda felt like a hand holding something, so I drew a stylized post-horn and some hands.
I really wanted this to just be B&W but I was lazy and used a second color to knock that hand back. Then it started to look like an old super-designey Penguin Books cover so I looked online for the grid they structured everything around for a few decades, dropped it in, and moved things around until it looked good.
And then I rendered it out and posted it and now you are looking at it.
If you got this far down maybe you would like to support my patreon if you’re not doing that already and have more money than you know what to do with.
Illustrator, 1h.
I answered a “how would you achieve this effect” question on the Illustrator subreddit and decided to fool around with the results for a while.
so today I got stoned and saw the results of someone doing a gemstone tutorial on the front page of furaffinity, and I decided that trying to replicate it procedurally in illustrator sounded like fun
this isn’t a direct reproduction, I went off in my own direction after a little while, but each of these gems is drawn entirely with one graphic style, overlaid on itself
they’ve all got the same underlying paths, they just have different stacks of appearances applied to them
I ended up making three variations of these styles, with different amounts of sparkle; this one combines some of them. Same paths though.
Then I used these styles to draw a horny witch and her fox spirit friend. I tried organizing my work on this one via grouping stuff instead of layering, and I’m still not a fan. Really I think the one thing layerers have is that they can select an entire group with one click on the canvas and I have to do a fiddlier thing to select a whole layer. A select tool that selected the entire layer containing it would be useful here.
I might post the source to this on Patreon later. It uses a lot of Astute effects so I dunno how useful that is. I gotta take a cat to the vet now though, Peebs is having trouble peebing.
edit. Back from the vet. Peebs is going on a diet for cats who have peeing problems. Whee! Also the source file is on Patreon now.
Nineteen years ago today I was sitting in a car with my mother and one of her friends driving around the Gulf South wondering if there would be a New Orleans to come back to.
I’d just gotten off a plane from the West Coast a few days ago, all my stuff was in a container in a warehouse that ended up being completely flooded and ruined (not that I knew that until a few weeks later). I was planning to stay with my mom for a while and figure out what to do with myself now that I’d given up on the animation industry.
It all worked out okay for me I guess, not too long after I was on a plane to Boston to go live with some friends, one of whom is now my husband. It was pretty traumatic for a while. And the city’s still barely recovered. I made it back here again after fourteen years of increasing seasonal depression in Boston and Seattle, but a lot of people still haven’t.
It’s raining outside. I should go get some brunch.
I feel like I should have some coherent story to tell here. I don’t want to spend the day digging through the chaos of my memories of the aftermath of Katrina and trying to find one though.
I was looking for something else and I found the figure that became this in a Horny Peggy Doodles file from 2016. I decided to throw some of my 2024 coloring methods on it; an hour later it had just sort of turned into genie/potgirl/modular weirdness.
I have a whole lot of files full of horny doodles of my fursona in these sorts of situations. Sometimes they get finished. A lot of them just stay doodles.
Tonight I went out to have some pizza with Nick. I started doodling and this came out.
Then I looked at it and started humming “Sailing, Sailing over the bounding main” in a derpy voice, and it made me giggle, and we came up with Skeleboat’s backstory:
Skeleboat comes off as an affable moron but he is actually very intelligent. He just finds that people are a lot less likely to run away screaming from the bones of a forgotten Titan, fashioned into an immense, impossible boat, with a full-sized frigate perched atop its gargantuan hat, if he affects the tones of someone whose role in life is to be comic relief.
I do not know what Skeleboat’s name is. If I do a 3×4′ painting of Skeleboat, hang it in a gallery, and get asked to pitch a show based on Skeleboat, then I will hit the books and either find the name of an obscure Titan to borrow, or come up with a terrible pun in Ancient Greek and/or Latin. Or if I have a dream in which the Muses come to me bearing a scroll upon which Skeleboat’s true name is meticulously calligraphed in letters of gold, then hey, I have a dream journal next to the bed, I’ll write it down.
He may be a character in “The Hentadekaion of Prometheus”, aka “Prome’s Eleven”, a heist story set in Greek mythology that Nick and I have kicked around forever.
Anyway. Say hi to Skeleboat.
Yesterday I drew a horny picture of my fursona being yanked on a chain. Today I decided to draw one of my spouse’s characters on the other end of the chain.
That is all.
Oh. And the Illustrator source is on Patreon.
Today I decided I wanted to recontectualize the American presidents of my lifetime in terms of intergenerational power struggle. Once I had a few data points I started to notice that there was a distinct cluster starting to emerge around the span of years that is disputed boomer/genx territory, so I decided to pull out the graph I did of that sort of thing a while back (you can see the full chart here) and plot some points on it. And then I decided to plot some failed bids – I skipped everyone who failed to turn their opponent into a one-term president, sorry guys.
This definitely confirms my initial suspicion that the Republicans generally like much older candidates than the Democrats. With the exception of Hillary and Biden, every Democrat candidate is 10-20 years younger than their Republican counterpart.
Does the clustering of presidents around the years that different demographers claim for different generations mean anything? I dunno. Does the concept of a “generation” even mean anything, or is it just a bunch of bullshit dreamt up by assholes who want to sell you useless shit? I dunno. I’m just plotting numbers on a timeline here.
Part of me wants to rework this with the years people were elected instead of their numbers in the list of presidents, and insert the rest of the losing candidates. But most of me wants to get some lunch and some cat food and work on finishing the roughs for the next part of No Pizza On Luna.