Technotherium

As seen in Nuthin' But Mech: the book, the movie, the webseries, the 5-part television docu-drama, the collector's cup, the holographic bicycle decal.

 - Or -

A Young Lady's Illustrated Mech Primer: the steam/diesel/cyber/bio/retro/goth/erotica-Punk iOS social gaming sensation of the Historian Age.

40+ people with such varied job titles as Concept Artist, Concept Designer, Conceptual Art Doer, Paintist, Drawer Man, and Assistant Painteer were ordered to try as hard as they possibly can. While distracted, their fees were donated to Charity Water (http://www.charitywater.org/). Mechs. Nothing but. If you're in to that sort of thing, BUY IT.

Gethen Rising : ImagineFX, Issue 86

This piece was loosely inspired by Ursula LeGuin's masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness. It appears as a workshop feature in the recent Pulp Art issue of ImagineFX magazine, dressed up as a 'sword and planet' genre piece in keeping with the issue's theme. It's the usual ImagineFX workshop bit, including 4 pages of step-by-step construction along with a couple of brushes and videos of the creation process on the disk.

The Bronze Road

Erreth Unfor

Erreth is an oblique reference to the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula LeGuin. Although this isn't a location from the books, I like to think it has something in common tonally with the world she created. Read everything you can get your hands on by LeGuin. The quality of her fiction cannot be overstated.

The Keys to December

Inspired by Roger Zelazny's short story The Keys to December, a terraforming tale with a mythic twist. There is a wealth of short fiction out there containing worlds that are just busting at the seams to get their very own 'cover' treatment. I'm doing my part...

Trip the Light Fantastic

Three parts retro-future nostalgia and one part hard scifi speculation, shaken, not stirred. iO9 and Space.com are writing about the Playboy Club in Space that ran as a 6-page feature in the March 2012 issue of Playboy. Playboy reached out to Virgin Galactic's lead designer to envision an orbiting entertainment venue of out-of-this-world design. This was an experiment in balancing carte blanche with a detailed design brief on a very tight deadline. A big thanks to Cody Tilson for excellent art direction and graphic design.

 

BLAST !

I recently contributed to BLAST: Spaceship Sketches and Renderings, the latest Design Studio Press opus featuring the work of Scott Robertson, Annis Naeem and Danny Gardner. It was great fun to jam on a project with few design limitations and a solid crew. I seized the opportunity to do some sci-fantasy genre mashups, one of which was selected for Spectrum 19.  It's in ye olde scifi bookshop now: BUY IT.

Shiva

Detail of a larger piece created for the book BLAST. Pre-order the book at Design Studio Press.

Severian

Detail of a larger piece created for the book BLAST. Pre-order the book at Design Studio Press.

Silver Linings

An illustration from '09 for Tim Pratt's 'Silver Linings'. Hi-res wallpapers available from Tor.com. This was a swashbuckling tale with a twist. The comps process was particularly fun and one of those rare occasions where any one of the sketches could have been developed for the final.

Stations of the Tide

A cover for Tor's 2011 reprint of Michael Swanwick's Nebula award winning Stations of the Tide. If you haven't yet read it, I envy you the experience of encountering it for the first time.

way of the seeded earth

The Return

A cover for Ben Bova's The Return, book IV of the Voyagers series.

The manuscript wasn't available so I was sketching with a rough description of a constantly transforming green 'energy' craft of ostensibly alien design. We decided that the abstraction of it would need to be grounded somewhat and that erring on the side of something more bio-mechanical would be preferable as a cover to a (more accurate) surrealistic abstract smear.

Alien Race

Alien Race is now available! Three years in the making, it's a hefty volume at 212 pages. The print quality is outstanding and hopefully others will find it as much fun to look at as we had making it.

antikyra

towr dun

turonian drift

bathymetry

patience. i'm working my way around the color wheel.

'31

the lime brigade

LMS 3, round 3.

nocturne vostok

buildering redux

A revisited version of work appearing in In The Future. This exploration was part of a larger project that centered around a form study of the urban sport of buildering.

ort virus

LMS 3, round 2

uiaro

qzeik ex machina