fantasy

Step Six of new image: Lighting
Digital art articles and tutorials

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Slap me in the face with a herring and call me Stinky! My last post I said that it was time for post-production. Totally wrong. That’s what happens when you spend six straight hours positioning and posing models – the brain goes gaga. I also forgot to tell you what models and gear I used. Well, I will leave that up to my concluding post on the topic. So lighting

Thanks plus goals for this blog in 2015
Website Design

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Thanks Firstly a big thanks to everyone who follows or reads this blog. An even bigger thanks to those special few who have chosen to leave comments! To be honest, I really did not expect much interest. So imagine the surprise that I feel knowing that since

To map or not to map - Part 3
Digital art articles and tutorials

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I now have a “photo” map of what Shade looks like. The combination of Bryce and Photoshop was great. I also spent a lot of time referencing Google Maps to get a sense of colours and geography. Notice that since my previous pictures of the map I have flipped it to its true east-west direction. I also decided to crop off any bits of geography not used in the story,

To map or not to map - Part 1
Digital art articles and tutorials

As a child in the 1970s I used to take great joy in the maps of books that I loved. I remember patiently tracing the Narnian maps, then transferring them to drawing paper and carefully colouring them in. I went on to do this with maps of Middle-earth and Earthsea and then started creating maps for any book I really loved that was without a map. Now that my upcoming

A documentary that influenced my fantasy writing - Slumming it
Writing Shade (Contains spoilers)

‘Slumming It’ is a documentary by Kevin McCloud whereby McCloud visits the slum of Dharavi in Mumbai, India. Here he finds a world that is so different to that which Westerners (like myself) experience. The children play among filth near toxic drains, Pollution is everywhere. Poverty is everywhere. Surely this must be soul crushing for the inhabitants. And yet there is a richness of spirit that is fascinating to watch.

Creating the cover of my novel - Part 1
Digital art articles and tutorials

Whoever said that you should not judge a book by its cover was obviously swimming against the tide. Judging a book by its cover is precisely what most people do. You only need to stand in a book shop (you remember book shops don’t you?) and watch people browse. The books with the great covers are constantly being examined. Anyway, I wanted a great cover. And I wanted it as

Writing my own gestalt-sentient beings
Magic, science and the arcane

In the mid-1990s I read a book with an idea that captured my imagination. In Verner Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep” I read of a canine gestalt-sentient species called the Tine. A gestalt-sentient species, as portrayed in that novel, was one that had a sort of group mind or group consciousness. So an “individual” might be made up of five or six beings who shared a consciousness. What really