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Out of Tune: Book 2

Respawn, Reboot by Allison Pang.

Out of Tune: Book 2 is an anthology of original fiction edited by Jonathan Maberry that’s just been published by JournalStone. Last year I contributed six illustrations to JournalStone’s The Gods of HP Lovecraft, and would have done more if I hadn’t been busy with other work. For this new collection I’ve illustrated all the stories in a slightly sketchier style than usual (see larger views here), the brief being to provide something similar to the illustrations that appeared in the first volume.

The Knoxville Girl by Cherie M. Priest.

Both books in the Out of Tune series feature short stories based on folk songs or murder ballads, some of which are very familiar if you listen to folk, blues or country music. Almost all the songs are from an American perspective even though a number of them use songs that are derived from old English and Scottish folk songs. Each story ends with a commentary by Nancy Keim-Comley that reveals the song that the story was based on (some are more obvious than others), and also gives a brief history of the song. Not all the stories take an obvious route: Nik Vincent-Abnett’s piece based on The Two Corbies concerns people trying to survive in a near-future dystopia.

The Beams of the Sun by Dan Abnett.

As to the drawing style, all these illustrations are digital works produced with a collection of Photoshop brushes I’ve had lying around for a while. It’s taken me some time to get used to using brushes that do more than draw straight lines or imitate an airbrush but this book acted as a kind of crash course in their application. Once I’d finished the work I felt quite at home using them so I’m looking forward to doing more in this looser style.

The Ghost Rider by David Mack.

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More Things to Come

The organisers of the Things to Come exhibition at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel, sent me their photos of the show earlier this week. As with the other recent exhibitions that I haven’t managed to attend it’s good to see how everything looks in situ, and also see some of the other exhibits.

The art pieces are all related to science fiction old and new, with my airship illustration (as seen in The Steampunk Bible) and a couple of other works representing the old (or new-as-old) side of things. I’m not used to seeing my work enlarged to such a huge size so this was a treat. The only larger reproductions have been a window display for one of the Cradle of Filth album covers which filled a whole window of Tower Records, London, in 2001, and stage backdrops for Cradle of Filth and Melechesh. I can’t identify any of the other exhibits until the catalogue arrives but I really like the iridescent metal construction that’s lying on the gallery floor. All the photos are by Elad Sarig, and are shown courtesy of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art. My thanks again to Doreet LeVitte Harten for selecting my work, and to Avshalom Suliman for dealing with the printing and other details.

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Leather Cthulhu unleashed

The beautiful leatherbound Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales is officially published this Friday but the books are in Barnes & Noble stores already, and my complimentary copies arrived this week. Photos don’t do justice to the volumes in this series of classic reprints, you really need to hold one to see how well made they are. The leather is smooth and flawlessly printed—I was worried that I might have pushed the limits with some of the details in my cover design but every line and edge is where it should be. The pages of this particular volume are edged with gold, an effect applied to some of the books I’ve designed for Savoy but an uncommon thing in today’s book world.

As I mentioned earlier, this edition also features endpapers showing details of my R’lyeh spread from The Call of Cthulhu, plus a poster of my Cthulhu Rising piece from 2004. Which leads to an important note for purchasers: the temporary glue that fixes the poster to the back endpapers, and the ad sheet (see below) to the back cover was stronger than intended so care needs to be taken when detaching these items from the book. I’ve been told that a warning about this will be added to the next batch of books, and the glue (which is that clear stuff used to fix things to magazine covers) will also be changed.

A couple more photos and a list of contents follow below. I’ve worked on a lot of books over the years but this one is up there with the very best; Lovecraft’s finest fiction in a single gorgeous volume, and all for $20.

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Things to Come

Things to Come is a science fiction-themed art exhibition opening this week at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel. Among the works on display there will be a large print of the fish-shaped dirigible that I created for Jeff VanderMeer and SJ Chambers, editors of The Steampunk Bible, back in 2010. After publication I reworked the picture slightly, adding a frame and trying out various tints, the idea being to produce a large version for print sales. I still haven’t got round to making prints available but I did let the museum have a copy of the framed version so its appearance at Petach Tikva is a first.

My thanks to Doreet LeVitte Harten for selecting this piece, and to Avshalom Suliman for dealing with the printing and other details. The exhibition runs to 20th August, 2016.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk in the Tank

Leather Cthulhu

A couple of the projects I’ve been working on for the past few months have yet to be made public but this one from last September has finally shambled into the light of day. The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales is a collection of 23 weird tales by HP Lovecraft (some of which are his collaborations with other writers) published by Barnes & Noble in their leatherbound Collectible Editions series. Anyone who’s held one of these volumes will know that they deserve to be called tomes rather than mere books; they’re heavy and lavishly produced, with detailed designs embossed on the front and back boards in a variety of metallic inks.

One of my drawings was used a few years ago inside the big B&N edition of Lovecraft’s collected fiction; more recently I also designed a cover for a B&N paperback edition of the Cthulhu Mythos tales but the brief on that occasion was for something quick using pre-existing artwork. Given that the Mythos stories are my favourites in Lovecraft’s oeuvre I would have preferred to have done something more elaborate so I was very pleased when asked last year to create a new design for this hardback edition. The design on the front panel presented some challenges as I didn’t want to have an isolated head with wings but I also didn’t want to reduce the Cthulhu figure to such an extent that detail would be compromised. (This type of embossed printing imposes a limit on the amount of detail you can put into the design.) The compromise was a frontal view of what I consider to be another Cthulhu Sphinx, after the more elaborate sculpted design in my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu. I find myself wondering now how this creature might look from the side.

The photos of the boards are courtesy of Betsy Beier at Barnes & Noble, and they show how much more effective the printed design is when you have the light reflecting on it. I’m now eagerly awaiting the arrival of a physical copy. The book will be out at the end of the month, and among the extra features there’s an introduction by Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi, my drawing of R’lyeh on the endpapers, and (if that wasn’t enough) a poster reproduction of my Cthulhu Rising picture.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive