.cover art: cesperanza's "Te of John"; fiercelydreamed's "Rebuilding Babel"

[aesc]

There are few pleasures in life so sublime as making art for kick-ass stories.

For cesperanza's very awesome Te of John and fiercelydreamed's also very awesome Rebuilding Babel. If you haven't read either of these yet, you really really should. I will leave it at that.






The vertical text is a selection from the Tao Te Ching, and the Chinese characters (God, I hope) are te (in red) and tao (in blue).



I've had this in my mind for ages, and it's gone through about three different drafts. I got the idea for it back during artword's Typographic Illustration challenge, and "Rebuilding Babel" seems to lend itself really well to anything having to do with broken, jumbled-up letters and words.

.extra notes: The very minimal texture work in the background comes down to two very awesome and handy stock textures by elli ♥ ♥

Comments

MAXIMUM FLAIL.

[fiercelydreamed.livejournal.com]

If there had been anyone in my kitchen at around 5:30 tonight, they could've testified to the fact that I opened up your email and blurted, "Holy shit!" God, the RB cover just takes my breath away every time I look at it. The absolutely dead-perfect likeness, the fantastically spare design, the jumble of letters that I took to be random until I looked closer, the beautifully subtle use of color -- and this image feels how the story feels in my head, in a way I can't articulate properly. I have some very limited, now very outdated experience in graphic design, just enough that I understand the amount of talent and skill it takes to do something like that. Lady, you've got both in spades. I'd recently recalled the post where you asked for stories to do art for, where I'd offered up RB, and had been imagining somewhat wistfully what you might do for this story (as I fangirl your art madly). This is so much more gorgeous than anything my head had been able to concoct, and I'm so honored to have had anything to do with its genesis.

And the Te of John cover -- wow, it's just beautiful. The luminescent watercolor wash of both figures, the sense of space you create between John and Rodney, the dead-perfect incorporation of the text (god, I love how the title, the te, and the vertical text combine to create the feel of a ribbon, crisply tied and bowed, and the way the tao disguises itself as a shirt graphic).

Both images also demonstrate one of the things I love about your art, which is your use of texture to make these wholly digital creations feel like corporeal objects, with tooth and body to them.

I'm just going to page back to these every half-hour and gape for the rest of the night. That okay by you?

Re: MAXIMUM FLAIL.

[aesc.livejournal.com]

*flails stupidly* I never quite know what to say, except "thank you," which sounds incredibly, incredibly lame. But it's true, very deeply true, because I love and respect your writing a lot, and it's kind of amazingly awesome that you see something of the story in the art, which is always something I try for but can only hope I get right.