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

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.

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