.art: Cover for fiercelydreamed's "Unidentified" and noir AU

[aesc]

A couple experimental pieces, by which I mean experimental for me. One is a cover for fiercelydreamed's really, really awesome Unidentified, and the other is a draft of a cover for the noir!AU villainny and amberlynne have been interested in.







1: At some point when I was supposed to be doing something else, I wanted to see how many layers I could handle before losing my mind (answer: 215), and producing something like Rodney's "memory wall" in "Unidentified" seemed like a good way to do it. Unlike the collages I do for textures, I wanted to try something that would have an identifiable (pun intended?) subject, and with everything--at least on the board, not so for the background elements--relating to each other. Pretty much every image on the board pertains in some way to Rodney and his interests: his friends, places he might have been or should go some day, science fiction stuff, cool physics things, a photo of Johnny Cash that John probably put there at one point for purposes of antagonism.



2: I suppose this is really only noir-inspired; I tried to adapt some of my fonts (I think this is Futural) to 40s/50s-style typefaces, and the coloring is mostly monochrome to mimick the greyscale-sort of atmosphere from the classic films. If this was really properly 1940s noir, I guess it should be hand-drawn and painted, but in the absence of mad drawing skillz, I borrowed a heavily-desaturated and erased John from a Nantucket piece for a placeholder. Like the story that might eventually go with it, it's just a battered, lousy pulp paperback, complete with coffee stain and folds in the corners.

Now that I feel a bit less like I'm falling over myself, I might actually be able to do decent stuff for paintedspires, which is a happy thing.

Comments

[fiercelydreamed.livejournal.com]

... oh my god. Just. Oh my god.

*stares for a long, long time*

You made The Wall. You are a brilliant, brilliant, insane person and you made The Wall. When I got Cate's email telling me you were posting a piece of Unidentified art, I clicked over with my mind already tuned to the station of your usual style (which I adore, or I wouldn't have a mental station for it -- you've got a way with atmosphere and texture that I love), and then this --!!111!

Jesus. Uh, anytime you feel the need to experiment with your art style, please feel free to riff on my stories. I don't mind at all. And by "don't mind," I mean, looking at this gives me honest-to-god chills.

Could I possibly trouble you for a high-res version of this? Beyond the fact that I just want to zoom all the way in and stare for hours, I've got a couple of Unidentified-related things going up soon (DVD commentary and a deleted scene, shhh), and I would love to be able to upload this to my webspace and link to it alongside them. I'm sevenspeedflight [at] gmail.

Oh, and btw, the noir cover is the kind of thing that would snag me like a siren song and seduce me to take the book home from the library.

[fiercelydreamed.livejournal.com]

ETA, because I somehow managed not to say it in with all the dumbstruck up there: thank you. It's amazing to see a piece of my story filled out suddenly into full color and life like this.

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

shall I upload this to your webspace and make it a page then? Aesc, would you authorize it? It is unbelievably cool! <3

[aesc.livejournal.com]

Oh of course! Whatever drifter would like to have done with it is perfectly fine :)

[aesc.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow, thank you so, so much; I'm absolutely thrilled beyond being thrilled that you like this. I love the story, the Wall in particular, and the image of Rodney's life laid out like that has stuck with me ever since I read it. Then "The Last Man" aired, and the way it hints at memory, oblivion, and isolation (and poor Rodney standing completely alone) made me decide to give this a shot :)

On the less thrilling side *wince* I don't have a larger version of this; what's here is the working size I started out with. I managed to resize the image to around 800px and it doesn't look too bad; I'll send it to you so you can see a little bit more of the detail, but it really isn't of post-able quality (though the one posted here is, so feel free to do whatever you'd like with it--it is yours!). Still, I can't wait for the DVD commentary and deleted scene!

(I always tell myself I need to make things larger... this is exactly why I should listen.)

Back to cheerfulness, thank you very much on the noir cover! I hope the story comes together as well as the cover seems to be doing.

And do you mind if I friend you?? I love your writing, and you know people I know, but posting the cover felt impertinent enough :)

[fiercelydreamed.livejournal.com]

Okay, well, for what it's worth, I now think you're slightly less of a crazy person than I did before. When I do photoshop work (which is rarely these days, sigh), I always find myself working at some insane size and resolution that gives the computer -- and me -- fits.

Please, feel free to friend! That's what this journal is there for, anyway, but I'm also going to go ahead and friend you from my normal journal (the_drifter), because that's the flist I read regularly. And dude, there's nothing impertinent about fanart this beautiful, ever.