Archive for the ‘artwork’ tag
Artwork – An Hour To Kill
The cover for the 19 Nocturne Boulevard episode An Hour To Kill. I’d developed a creepy looking creature for this episode on an alternate version of the cover, but it didn’t fit in the composition, and for all it looked cool, just teeth in the darkness was a far better visual to sell the story and imply, rather than spoil the idea up front.
Artwork – The Fairy King
The Fairy King is the first in a series of shorter works to fill in the time-slot in between Warp’d Space releases. We did a variation on the cover design to distinguish them from the mainstream releases, incorporating a more traditional leather bound book appearance and the subtitle “Short Sharp Shocks”. I was very fortunate to find a wonderful archive of vintage photographs collected as a set on Flickr, and I was very spoiled for choice. The wings are taken from insects with glitter and sparkles added.
A lovely cover — I feel — for a very creepy play.
Artwork – Three Exes for Xmas
Three Exes for Christmas is a delayed posting. This release was paired with Gift of the Zombi for the December releases, and again features zombies. Given the care and attention I lavished on Gift, and that Sue and I were packing up house and ready to move back to WA, this cover had to be extremely basic. So it’s a largely untouched photo of a rather striking corporate building — all I did was to alter the sky and modify the colour to give it an apocalyptic feel.
Artwork – The Wrong Bob
The cover for the 19 Nocturne Boulevard episode The Wrong Bob.
Artwork – Warp'd Space Episode 3
The cover for the current episode of Warp’d Space. This cover features Beverly Poole, who plays the character/s called “Pilot”.
Artwork – Bride of the Minotaur
Leaving Tasmania to return to Western Australia, and the inevitable Christmas chaos, I had limited time to do covers. Bride of the Minotaur was done without reading the script or listening to the production … Julie gave me some keywords and some things she’d like to see, and I assembled to order! I haven’t caught up with listening to it yet either!
Artwork – Picture in the House
A supremely creepy cover for a 19 Nocturne Boulevard audio drama called The Picture in the House. The play is an adaption of a HP Lovecraft story.
I didn’t even need to take any new photographs — the ugly looking teeth are my own taken to create a set of “monster” teeth for another project, and then photoshopped to look like I need immediate dental care. The texture is a drop-sheet I took some snaps of ages ago while my dad was redecorating the family lounge room. And the artwork is public domain from the Wikipedia article on “cannibalism”.
I really like this one. It’s my favourite cover in the series so far. The tear in the picture forms such a creepy smile, and it echoes HP Lovecraft’s obsession with things hiding in the walls.
It reminds me of something. Azazel from The Sandman? Perhaps. The image of the maddened Jack Nicholson from The Shining? Maybe.
The Picture in the House is currently scheduled for release on the 20th January, 2010.
Artwork – The Deadeye Kid #2
The updated artwork for the 2nd episode of The Deadeye Kid, part of the 19 Nocturne Boulevard line up. It’s keeping with the previously established “Old West” “grunge” style. The major change here is the addition of the story subtitle.
Julie made a dedicated URL for The Deadeye Kid plays.
Artwork – Warp'd Space Episode 1
Early this year I decided to keep track of “Professional Development” properly. Not just do whatever I wanted, when I wanted, but to do some projects and keep track of completing them.
One of these projects was to do some CD covers, and I’ve been steadily doing these for 19 Nocturne Boulevard ever since. Julie who runs 19NB asked me if I’d consider doing a logo for a friend of hers — Kimberley — who was writing another audio drama: Warp’d Space which is in the tradition of thoughtful character based science-fiction/space-opera such as Star Trek.
Earlier this year I’d decided I wanted to model a spaceship in the style of Chris Foss, Peter Elson, Angus McKie etc. using Blender 3D, so I decided to combine the two goals and said “yes” when asked to do the covers.
Kimberly described the ship “The Drake” as being like a “jumping jack”, so the first cover I did had most of the right elements on, but I grabbed a jumping jack image from the internet as a placeholder to see what it would look like. Then I began re-learning how to use Blender, and we went through several iterations of the design and arrived with the above. The ship isn’t “finished” as such — there’s quite a few flaws and things I’m not happy with … but they’re the final 10% of things, and relate more to my goals and my inexperience with the software, and not to the immediate suitability of the artwork. Something that is 90% done and definitely looks okay, is ready to be used in my opinion.
There’s a precedent after all — Over the years, the Enterprise model/effects shots became progressively more detailed. I’m just following the model of stepwise refinement. 
I really like doing work for other people, especially where it aligns with my own interests. I never would have thought to do a space-ship of this shape, but it’s turned out really well.
Warped Space: Episode 1 “Milk Run” is scheduled to be released October 1st, 2009.
Artwork – Drawer 23
Another in the series of covers for 19 Nocturne Boulevard, and the story is Drawer 23. The summary is:
Tim might expect to see corpses, working graveyard in the morgue, but never expected one that can talk…
I have to say a big thank you to jim.rocco for relicencing his photograph of morgue drawers to allow me to freely use it for this composition.
Originally I was just going to add the number to the drawer, and light it in eldritch blue light, but then I got carried away and added light and smoke streaming out. I don’t know where the idea to put fridge-magnets on the drawer came from, but I suspect that I have a pretty black sense of humour sometimes. It just seemed appropriate to add a lighter note to the cover. I made my own pizza menu! Sue gave me the name of the restaurant: “The Nice Slice” (alas, it is obscured on the actual cover). It gives you an idea of some of the detail I put on these covers.
Interesting fact: the photograph of the drawers has names on — all Harry Potter characters. The drawer shown is Dumbledoor’s drawer
Julie suggested the fridge-magnet letters should say “Skidoo” after the phrase 23 Skidoo. The letters were “modelled” in the Blender 3D software package, something I’ve been getting a lot of practice in lately for another project.
Licencing and Attribution
I used a number of Creative Commons licenced photograpic elements, sourced from Flickr and here’s the attributions: