Fantasy & Science Fiction: Concept Art/3

Here are two other sketches I dropped down the pipeline for Gordon Van Gelder during the realization of the original illustration for Five Thrillers, a novelet by Robert Reed. At this point I'm seeing a raised hand in the second row: "Please, tell me..."

Q.) How many sketches have you realized for this particular work?

A.) For this commission I realized six different sketches, each of them with different degrees of impact, all of them strictly connected to the story I had read in advance. Gordon forwarded the manuscript via email once I had confirmed my acceptance of the assignment.

Among the six sketches, there are two/three main versions, followed by secondary concepts with variations/mixing of same elements, color proofs and other tweaking.

Q.) How long did you take to complete this artwork?


A.) Being a fan of Robert Reed, it took:

• an evening for reading avidly the story and elaborate a few notes
  
• a further week for the sketches
  
• a small waiting while Gordon showed around my creations and decided the path. This is the hardest moment, you can hear the crunch of parallel Universes splitting...
  
• another week for completing and shipping the illustration.
  

I think about three weeks from the beginning to the end! ...It's just the organic rhythm of the editorial life. During the pauses - in the middle there were the usual exchanges of ideas, comments and feedback -, I kept working to other assignments...

Fantasy & Science Fiction: Concept Art/2

Someone asked me what looked like the concept art for Five Thrillers so I'm back with my bag of visual material. I wished the publisher could feel the same emotions of his reader, so I dropped in front of his eyes the usual advanced color sketch. Here it is:

concept art

When this solution was chosen, I kept working each part of the illustration, as you can easily see looking at the detail of my burning starship...

before

after

Fantasy & Science Fiction: Concept Art/1

When I sat at my drawing table, full of visions and ideas about the illustration I was going to realize for the novelet Five Thrillers by Robert Reed , I produced more than just a proposal... this is one of the alternative concepts...

Alternative Concept Art for Five Thrillers by Robert Reed

(click to enlarge)

Someone will say now... "What? What is this? A 'proposal'? Another illustration?" . The reply is...

This is not the real thing, it's part of a bundle of alternative concepts I offered to the publisher together with the winner selected for the front page. Apart the character faces and some fingers in the foreground, everything in this concept is a rough color sketch, a ghost canvas. The only purpose is to tell a story with great effect, to create an atmosphere and provide a general idea about spaces and color palette.

I'm sure that in the Multiverse there's a Manzieri Maurizio who has delivered this version of Five Thrillers and an issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction where the above proposal has been published. Maybe these are just rants, maybe only my quantistic mind finding connections with these other realities while painting and fishing ideas for GVG...

Hey, what about that incredible city in the background I was carving on the surface of that asteroid?!? At the end sometimes I complete one of these alternative visions for fun, mostly I go ahead towards new horizons. Multiverse is BIG! :-)

A Glimpse behind the Curtains

Here's a photo album including a visual walkthrough of my illustration Underneath It All . Click on the picture - or upon the link just below -, switch off the lights, put on some good music of your choice... and let me guide you along one of my artistic paths...

The Making-of-Underneath-It-All