Escape

Illustrator, 21.5 hours.

Back in February, Sev asked me for a commission of their weaseltaur character. They wanted two pieces suitable for printing out at A4 or bigger and hanging in their office. Possibly to work as a dyptich. Possibly not. We kicked around a few ideas and ended at “weaseltaurs in libraries, one working, one running wild with hedge clippers”. I finally finished it up earlier this week, and let it sit a couple days before doing the final render – I didn’t want to be re-uploading multiple copies of print-resolution files, each with with one little thing I realized I still needed to fix. But now it’s done.

This is where the sketch ended up after a while. I’d actually drawn most of the main figure and its setting on the left side at this point, as well as a half-done version of the right figure, I didn’t think about how to link them up until after that.

I’ve been following Michael Whelan’s mastodon account, and enjoying the regular appearance in my timeline of great sf/f art with some early sketches and notes on the process, so when I was putting these two parts together I definitely asked myself “what would Mike do here to make this composition work as both a front cover and a wraparound painting”, the big swirl of “DATA CARTS” was definitely a result of that.

There’s a lot more sketch layers in this file but they get pretty incoherent due to the fact that I originally had a lot more space between the two artboards, there’s a lot of overlapping sketches that moved around with that. Especially all the red stuff in the middle.

This is a progress shot from pretty close to done. There’s a lot of stuff going on in here. It all just kinda evolved.

And here’s an outline view from a couple days ago before I did those last few little tweaks.. 7500 paths.That’s a lot. Illustrator was running pretty slow at this point, though I probably could have eked out a lot more performance by working on the laptop screen instead of the 27″ high-dpi screen on my desk. It was at a point where I needed to be able to step back and squint at the whole thing, though.

Something like 80% of paths have really complicated appearance stacks that pile up a bunch of strokes, fills, and effects on them. expand all of that stuff from virtual paths into actual paths and you get 72k paths, plus 6k bitmap images generated by putting some of those virtual paths through effects. Mostly blurs. All those overlapping rectangles are the bitmaps.

As usual I logged my time via hashmarks outside the canvas. When I started painting this I wasn’t sure it was gonna work a one single piece so I tallied things up separately; this is a good way to make sure I don’t spend all my time on one side and half-ass the other. When I decided to make it work as one piece I added the blue marks for things in the middle, and kept on roughly tracking where I was spending my time. I haven’t spent this long on a single piece in a while, even comics pages are usually faster.

A good chunk of the time spent on the middle was the Cat Portal. Shemp is taking a nap and creating a hole between realities for transit purposes, as cats are wont to do.

This was also inspired by Whelan; a while back he posted this piece of a crazy high-tech stoplight hovering in the sky, and I said “hey I like that idea and wanna riff on it”, so I doodled some new shapes over his shapes. Which was his process for this piece too, he regularly sees things in the blobs of paint left on the scraps of board he uses as palettes, and turns them into paintings he calls “palette gremlins”. I needed something besides “more bookshelves” to fill up the middle space, and this came to mind. Maybe I’ll turn this sketch into a final piece sometime too. Dunno. Right now I get to take a break and play some video games.

…but first I have to re-export it because there was a layer on when I exported the final that should have been off, and I only noticed it when writing this post. THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING.