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Part of the creative process for me
involves visualizing the characters and places to which I refer.
I find drawing very hard. My longsuffering sweetheart tells me
that I'm "almost good" when it comes to rendering a picture with
paper. Computer modeling relieves me of the tedious work
undertaken to capture the essence of a mental image, but I've never
been fully satisfied with visual representations. I think I do a
far more effective job with words. Nonetheless, here are some
original art concepts that I created in support of the novel and
its milieu.

Garrick and Brenna
The image is badly faded, but this is my
original drawing of the couple from 1982! There were many things
I found difficult about drawing this, but the part I spent the most
time completing involved the foreshortening of Garrick's left
shoulder. I didn't draw this using models, so there are some
anatomical flaws glaringly evident, particularly with placement of
eyes. My sweetheart thinks that Brenna has too much of a tummy,
but given the two dimensional curvature of her spine (she's leaning
back and turning toward the viewer) I think she's fine. I
have a lot of difficulty drawing expressions, so my art tends to depict
people looking rather serious. This is not intentional.
Original Edge of Justice Cover Concept
This is my feeble attempt to create a
"younger" Garrick, who is only 15 in the story. I think this
makes him look more like he's 12, and Brenna, who is supposed to appear
very similar in age, looks like she's in her mid '20s. I wanted
to clothe the characters like they were dressed for cold weather, which
is a lot easier to do with pencil than with Poser. I've always
liked Brenna's sweater in this picture. She's wearing a collared
shirt underneath, with a high collared flannel shirt under that.
It didn't scan very well, so that detail makes her under shirt look
more like a necklace or choker. This image comes from 1988.
Actual Cover Image
I developed the background for this image
in "Terragen", then imported it as a background image into
Poser, carefully placed Garrick and Brenna into it, rendered the
picture, then did a lot of
post production work in Photosuite III to clean it up. I hate
Garrick's hair, so later on I painted over it by hand.
Brenna's fingers around the dagger took forever to pose. The
reason her right arm looks funny has to do with the way Poser renders
characters. The clothing "layers" are placed on top of
the figures, but don't always conform very well. When
I posed Brenna initially, her right shoulder kept poking
through the sweater, so I made her shoulder "invisible". The
image looks a little strange (though most people don't notice), and the
AuthorHouse art staff thought the image was simply wonderful. (It
doesn't look nearly as terrible when it's small like this!) One
of my sisters, however, has an eye for art and asked why the shoulder
foreshortening looked so odd. I sent her a copy of the image with
the characters unclothed to illustrate the problem. She replied
that I might increase book sales if Brenna appeared naked on the
cover!
Cover Image Redux
Much of what makes this image an
improvement over the previous version has to do with using high
resolution characters, the use of dynamic clothing, more skillful
application of texture maps, an
improved rendering engine and a better understanding of how light works
in Poser. I re-worked this image in November of 2006 because I've
never really liked the cover for The
Edge of Justice. The only post rendering work for this
image involved adding the glow to Brenna's blade and a lens flare in
Adobe Photoshop. It shows how far I've come as an artist
in that time.
Queen
Tamar

This drawing dates from 1981. It's
sketched on the back of a letter from a place where I worked at the
time and I had to crop
the left-hand side because it's so badly faded that the scanner
essentially obliterated the whole thing. The scan makes it look
blotchy, but it's actually quite a pretty drawing. I've never
developed a
Poser figure for Queen Tamar because she plays such a minor role in the
story it didn't seem worth the effort.
Brenna
and Pony

I
found this image so frustrating to draw that I never finished it.
This is a 1987 drawing. Although her face and upper
body are pretty complete, I was never happy
with the shape of Brenna's face, I hated her hands, and abandoned the
image before I finished the horse.
The Glacier Gull
One of the
early permutations of my story involved fantastically large birds who
lived on the cliffs overlooking Broken Wing Lake. These creatures
were large enough to be ridden by a petite human, so their riders were
often small boned females. (Of which there are very few in
Tamaria!) I wrote an exciting encounter between a Tamarian scout
riding one of these creatures who battles an Azgaril dragon in midair
during the early story sequences, but later cut that entire
section out.

In this sketch I've drawn
a saddle directly in front of the wings. That will give the
viewer an idea of how big this carnivorous bird is supposed to be!
Devera

This is the original map of
my created world, drawn in March of 1982. Like much of my artwork
from that era, it's badly faded. This is a freehand drawing
showing the outline of the continent, the computerized, colored version
of which appears on the "World of Devera" page. I drew every single
mountain as a tiny triangle. Many hours of work went into this
image. For you Rush fans, the archipelago on the top of the image
is named "Pegasus", and a tiny island at the very top, left hand side
of the map is named "Lyra". That should tell you what I was
listening to at the time!
Original
Garrick Drawing

I don't have a date for this drawing, but
it's probably from 1982 or 1983. Prior to this era, I'd been
working on a science fiction story that I dropped in favor of
developing fantasy ideas. Garrick, Brenna and Algernon all
started out in a milieu without guns, and because I'd practiced with
swords to learn how to write about them, the size of the blade Garrick
is wielding in this picture inspired me to develop an "underhand"
technique. (I learned later that European swordsmen also did this
with very large weapons.)
Every link in his mail shirt is an oval, drawn by hand. Most of
these drawings were done while working graveyard shift, and since I had
to stay awake, I had a lot of time to draw.
Original
Algernon Drawing

This
is one of the first drawings of the Ravenwood siblings I created.
It shows Algernon holding a unique weapon I called a Dakkah, which I'd intended would be
a traditional weapon of the Temple Elsbireth. The blades are
supposed to be facing opposite directions, but the foreshortening of
the top blade was more difficult than my artistic talent could
handle. The rectangular box on the bottom of the page shows the
logo of the answering service where I worked in 1981.
Blade Girl

After completing this drawing, I felt so
proud of it that I included the date. This drawing was done on 10
October 1982, and though it's a little hard to see in the scan, this is
probably the most anatomically perfect female figure I've ever
done. The blade seems ridiculously big now, but I drew this in
the era of the Conan films, and large swords were in vogue back
then. This girl has no name, she was just a study in anatomy and
sword design.
Speaking
of Swords

It's really too bad that this image
doesn't scan very well. It's a 1986 drawing of three blade
designs I intended for the story. I went back to college a couple
of years later, where I had little time to work on the novel, and
discarded the idea of using edged weapons when I returned to writing
after graduation.
Abelscinnian
Robe

I
wanted the Abelscinnians to have colorful garments that reflect the
optimism of their culture. In the spring of 2006, I picked up a
program called Virtual Fashion Basic, which enables me to design
clothing for characters in Poser. Although clothing has never
really interested me that much, I've done a fair amount of designing
with this program, and it's forced me to develop some fashion
sense. (My longsuffering sweetheart thinks this is a good
thing!) Initially, I designed this robe for Jawara, but it
looked too feminine. This woman is his older half-sister,
Lungile.
Working With Light

Learning how to use light in Poser 6 has
been a gradual, and often frustrating, process. This is one of my
first attempts at Image Based Lighting and ambient occlusion, where I
use the program to replicate the natural light of the background
image. Although there is too
much light in this image (as evidenced by the extreme
highlighting of Garrick's hair), there's a realism in it that I'd never
been able to do in Poser 4, and certainly had no hope of replicating by
hand.
The Truth
Hurts

One
of the things I'd intended to do with my Poser images involved using
them to illustrate excerpts from chapters in the novels. This is very difficult to do because every
image that appears on this website reflects many hours (often 20 or
more) of work, and not all of the results are pleasing. This is a
render of Kira (on the left) and Astrid (on the right) having a
difficult discussion about their relationship. Though it's
compressed and a little jagged (something that doesn't appear in the
original image), this render is pretty faithful to my
original concept of the scene. By the time I posed the two
figures, worked on their expressions, simulated their clothing and
worked on the lights, I'd invested about 30
hours into its completion.
Legacy

This
is my favorite image. Originally, I'd thought to create a cover
for The Long Journey using
this render. Brenna's wearing the military parade uniform I
designed in VF Basic, and personally, I think she looks stunning in it.
Family
Lithian women tend to be petite.
Brenna is so small that when she's standing, Garrick can rest his chin
on her head. Poser allows me to scale figures according to their
heights (based on the "standard" Jessica, who is over 6 feet tall!),
and as this image indicates, Brenna is much bigger than her mother,
Alexina (in the center) and her sister,
Acacia (on the right). Had I included Cynthia, who is
proportioned like a young adult human, she would not have fit within
the frame of this render.
Posette Brenna

This is my Poser 4 Brenna. There's
something very special about her, even though she's been displaced by
the more versatile, higher-resolution P6 Jessica. I've always
liked the proportions of Posette, as she's affectionately known in the
Poser community, as the P6 Jessica (on whom most of the other female
figures on this website are based) has upper shoulders that only a
weightlifter would love! Working with Posette is a little bit
like remembering an old girlfriend. I might think of her with
wistful remonstrance until I remember what a pain it was to get her to
do what I wanted . . .
Garrick,
the Dork

This
is my P4 Garrick, who is based on the male figure those in the Poser
community call "The Dork." His hair is hand painted because P4
hair, especially male hair,
is so awful that it should be a crime to display figures wearing
it! However, the facial structure and features of this figure are
remarkably similar to what I'd been drawing for several years. I
tried to duplicate this face with P6 James in the Poser Face Room, but
didn't have the skill and patience to effectively pull it off.
I hope you've enjoyed this historical
foray into the art behind the World of Devera.
Order Your Copy of "The Edge of
Justice" and "The Long Journey"
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