Technically I read this last year. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon is a much, much different book than King Lear, so a different kind of illustration presented itself. This one’s a bit more like a book cover, too. I dunno. It was hard to think of something appropriate for this book. On a side note, hands are too hard to draw.
Media: Pigment liners with digital color
For purposes of practice and portfolio-expanding (and my interest in projects like Picture Book Report), I have challenged myself to create an illustration for every book I read this year. The first book I finished was my re-read of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Thus:
Ink and watercolor with minor digital modification.
The concept of being an outsider is an important one in science fiction. The idea of being the only human in a group of aliens is possibly the most dramatic example of isolation imaginable. For writers of SF it presents a vast array of possibilities to explore not just the possibilities of alien cultures but also what it means to be human.
In Outsider, Jim Francis enters into this longstanding tradition with an epic of war and politics, depicted through attractive anime-style artwork. Francis obviously spends a considerable amount of time on both art and writing, and the world-building is extensive–but does the story hold up?
Well, it’s a new year, and hopefully the blog will be better than ever. Along those lines, I’m reintroducing a feature I attempted a while ago on a different blog: Circuit Reader, a series of overly-lengthy reviews of webcomics in the style of The Webcomic Overlook. These take a while to write, so I can’t promise them very often, but I will put one up when the mood strikes me.
See above for the first Circuit Reader post, in which you will find out my feelings on Outsider by Jim Francis.
