If Name Of The Wind Took Place In 1950s America, This Is What Kvothe’s Inscription Would Look Like

Redesigning some packaging. Spray paint and pen.

Raw Power.

A bit darker in tone, a bit more minimalist, and not using any marker for text over top. Utilizing only two colors, other than the white of the paper, this one is called "Seep," sort of a play on the melting of one's character, worn down by the world, the darkness latching on and making one's true colors bleed.

It's not all bad though. If you're observant, you'll find a simple, more lighthearted message embedded within.

Thanks for looking!

Mountains on a Lake

TONIC (n.) - Badass, cybernetically-enhanced, industro-punk star of the dark future.

A WIP of my previous line-drawing post, this is my newest artwork for Color of a Mirror, featuring my main character!

Really trying to stick to my love of minimal, restricted color palettes (plus leaving it mostly black-and-white fits the noir feel of the book). A lot of work for me to figure out the lighting and materials--and then leaving her cybernetic arm disconnected was a late decision; I really like the asymmetry it provides, but I also love how it fits with her character arc.

This armor she's wearing is part of her concert attire, a reclaimed outer-space exosuit painted in a red-glow-in-the-dark finish. It's a piece of her character that I've always had an idea in my head of what it would look like, and to be able to finally visualize it like this is so much fun.

More progress to come on this.

(Painted entirely in Photoshop, with some 3D lighting reference work in Daz3D.)

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If you want to see Tonic's vibe from a music perspective, I have an ever-evolving playlist on Spotify. Periodically, if I hear something new that feels like her, I'll add it in, but overall I try to keep the flow nice.

And if you haven't had chance to read the book, there are still physical copies of the first printing or e-book, both available through my website.

Beginning of a Totally Unrelated-to-Anything Scene

The place was called “Executive Hotel”—it took a conscious effort to keep from thinking what sort of low-life executive would choose to stay in such a pisspot.  It looked more like a prison compound than the “Most Comfortable Stay,” as the sign out front bragged.  Sleeping beneath an overpass might have been better.

White paint peeled from the exterior walls, streaking the dingy surface with scars of brown.  Either it was the paint peeling to reveal half-rotted wood beneath, or it was mildew caused by some awful roof runoff.  I was certain to stay far enough away so the distinction couldn’t be made.  And the cars parked in the lot were in much the same condition, nearly every one of them a beater joint fit to throw a piston and clatter to a stop at any moment.  Paint jobs all dull tans, beiges, and sickly olive greens—or at least they had been, before the rust had begun to corrode the old steel frames—did nothing to improve my already low opinion of this fine establishment.

It was enough to make a man rethink the choices he had made in his life.  And as the shoddy suspension of my loaner car—only earlier that day, I had saved it from the scrapper with a quick exchange of five, crisp one hundred dollar bills—bounced over the broken cracks of the uneven lot, rolling like a drunken mule into the space outlined by two non-existent yellow stripes, I found myself doing exactly that...

So, I actually finished this one about a month ago, and just forgot to put it up here. Everything you see here is just paint and paper (finally got to make use of a special glow-in-the-dark spray that I bought a while back). The maze was drawn and then hand cut by me.

Top Image: Lights On

Bottom Image: Lights Off

(It looks even better in person... Hard to capture since I don't have a badass camera.)

Jovian Sunrises

The lightning played freeze tag throughout the looming thunderheads, flitting first here, then there, capturing an image in the blaze of an instant.  Forked fingers reached like hands to touch each other, missing by what seemed to be, from the shoreline at least, only the narrowest of margins.  But the clouds weren't all that threatening, despite their distant, insistent rumbling; their color was a salty white against the charcoal sky of night, making them seem more like clumps of cotton than angry bruises.

Plus, they were receding, chased by the starlit heralds of day.

I had undertaken to race the sun, to beat it at its own game, spinning around the Earth as it does.  And I had succeeded in my challenge, arriving at those dunes nearly an hour before its initial hues began painting the backdrop of the world in pastel color once more.

But this dawn was unlike any other.

It wasn't the ire of Jupiter that broke the night.  No, it was the faces of the other Jovian gods--Uranus and Neptune--that melted the black in pools of cool sapphire and jade. They caught the sky in marbled perfection and turned it, ever so carefully, to day.

Delineate.

Razor blade.