Living in the past… present, and future

Despite being generally forward thinking and a fan of works that depict futures, I do find I spent a lot of time looking back, in the comfort of nostalgia. 

There’s often a weird mentality out there which seems to dictate that you should be enjoying the very latest bands and albums, films, TV shows or books. Yet all of these things were made to last through the ages. Take films or music as leading examples; some innovated and made their mark; became timeless and still as relevant and exciting today as they were at their time of release. Some may be slightly more dated, but in a good way that evokes the feeling of the particular time it was released, yet manage to stand the test of time and still work today. In other words, age shouldn’t matter. And that applies to creative people too. If you’re inspired or still in awe of something from yesterday, that’s absolutely fine – whatever works for you. 

It’s important to not to forget the places or people that over time, all helped shape what you’re doing today. I was lucky enough to have some great art tutors at college, many of whom helped push me in directions I may not have normally taken. But more often than not, I think about Mr Crooke – my art teacher from school. During those formative years, his art lessons were the thing I looked forward to the most, every week. As a typical 15 year-old, I was bursting with ideas and enthusiasm which needed his expert eye to refine and critique. I learned a lot from him. Over twenty years later, I still think of so those classes with a certain fondness. And he’s still at my old school, teaching a new generation of budding artists. I did try and contact him by email recently, just to say a belatedly acknowledge my appreciation of what I gained from his tuition.

Creative people – artists, writers, musicians etc – are the ultimate recyclers. We spend years absorbing all these influences and inspirations from all times and places, and we repurpose it in the guise of our own contemporary works. Our creations are made up of the past and present, and will go on into tomorrow.

In short, looking back is just as healthy as looking forward.

Novacon is coming / listen to your feedback

As an artist, it’s always difficult to choose pieces of your own work.

I have recently produced a limited-run publication, Escape. Copies of which have been popping through letterboxes around the country, but it will also be available from me in person at next month’s Novacon.

When producing a small booklet of your own material, it really is a hard task to select what works to include. I decided to focus on my science fiction artwork for Escape, as it is primarily what I do, and also what I have done most of my best work in. But it also requires some variety, so I had to choose some non-SF pieces to go in too. Eventually with the help of my wife and feedback from friends, the shortlist was made.

One particular piece of art – and I’m not going to tell you which – was one that I had never felt was particularly good; mainly because it was essentially a quick sketch; more of a rough concept for a piece rather than a finished thing. Yet this rough affair has become the final piece of art, simply because of the comments I regularly receive on it, which never cease to pleasantly surprise me. 

Which basically reminds me that we are not always the judges of our own work. Feedback is invaluable. Your audience are your best critics.

From having little confidence in this particular piece, I’ve now featured it in Escape, and it will be on show at Novacon.

This year’s Novacon art display will feature mostly new and recent artwork, as well as a some older works which haven’t been displayed anywhere before.

In addition to artwork, I’m hoping that the art room will also have some of my music floating through the airwaves, and copies of Traces and possibly Future Worlds Redux will also be on sale. 

Once again, I really look forward to talking all things SF with fellow fans, artists, writers etc. Come and say hello!

Cover art insight: Lethal Seasons

Alice Sabo's brief for Lethal Seasons was clear from the outset – a tornado set against the Blue Ridge Mountains and a landscape devastated by storms and an overgrown, neglected infrastructure.

This was Alice's first foray into science fiction, but in a post apocalyptic setting, so it was important to get the right atmosphere and feel – you should be able to look at a cover and know what you're in for.

Having looked at the landscape, I thought of a perspective scene, following a road covered in fallen trees, with the tornado looming in the distance. Here are my preliminary sketches:

To inject an additional element of horror into the cover, I vignetted the image with splattered blood and virus cells. With the cover art worked up, the next stage was looking at the typography and how to really integrate the title into the cover. While I tried out various conventional approaches as well as graphical treatments of the text containing virus elements.

And the end result:

...available now in print and ebook from Amazon, iTunes, Kindle, Kobo, Barnes & Noble etc.

Back... to the Future (a science fiction symphony)

Orchestral soundtracks have long since dominated the film industry, particularly in science fiction, with classic scores such as Star Wars, Alien, Terminator or Total Recall. And you can enjoy a good film soundtrack as an album in its own right. 

I wanted to make an album that captures the essence of this kind of soundtrack, with an emphasis on drama and atmosphere. And I think I’ve achieved that with my new release, Future Worlds Redux.

Until now, I’d never been one to re-visit music previously deemed completed. When my favourite artists have released a new album of reworks of older songs, I often saw it as a disappointment or sign that they’re out of ideas. I was wrong.  With distance and hindsight, you can really see where your best bits are, and where you can expand your work to realise its full potential – stuff that perhaps wasn’t evident first time round. I guess we can call it artistic satisfaction. Sometimes you just need to put a bit of distance in to see what you need to do.

The problem many an artist faces, whether we’re talking music or artwork, is never quite knowing when something is finished. In truth, nothing is ever complete, not really. There just comes a moment when it feels right, and you stop. Otherwise you’d be niggling away at it for months or years and never get the thing finished!

I was really proud of my original Future Worlds album, which I started working on in Autumn 2012, and released in February 2013. It was made during a personally difficult time, and was a great cathartic experience as well as realising my ambition to make an album inspired by classic science fiction books and scenarios. 

But at the same time, something at the back of my mind was left unfulfilled – an annoying "unfinished" feeling, perhaps because I had originally intended to make an orchestral style album, following on from the Road to the Stars soundtrack I produced for David A. Hardy. But thanks to my love of synth sounds, Future Worlds ended up a fusion of the two styles, with the electronics taking centre stage.

Almost two years later, I felt enough time had passed to finally revisit the album and rework the tracks into symphonic versions as I had originally intended. I always wanted Future Worlds to play out like one of those great  science fiction film soundtracks. 

Not only was this a relatively quick process, but it was great fun, getting back in to the vibe of those songs and realising I still very much enjoyed them, and that there was still a lot of life in them. This was an opportunity to move things around and expand and change the arrangements to suit the orchestral approach, as I didn’t want to make the same album with different sounds.

In addition to changing the order and arrangements, I also went through my unfinished demo files from when I made the original album, and found one that I felt had some potential to work up as a new addition. The original album came with two bonus tracks which I liked a lot – in hindsight they should have been more than just bonus tracks, so this was the opportunity to give them a new home.

And that “unfinished” feeling has now been upgraded to “Complete”.

Future Worlds Redux is out now as a digital download on Bandcamp.

Graham Joyce

Last night I learnt of the sad passing of Graham Joyce. 

59 is far too young to go. Such a creative mind and truly brilliant writer. He had so much more to give.

I’d only just discovered Graham’s work in the last year. Even though I have only read two of his works – Dreamside and The Silent Land – both books had a profound effect on me. Such imagination and poetry; the kind of stories which really penetrate the emotions, make you think and ask questions. In those two books alone, it was evident what a master story teller Joyce was. Haunting, intriguing, beautiful and fascinating – those are books that really make their mark and stay with you.

I had no idea Joyce was battling cancer.  Looking online now, I can see that it was well documented in his blog, but in the interest of finding out more about his books, that had passed me by. That’s another example of how overloaded with futile stuff the Internet is, and that it’s so easy to miss, or not even see any genuinely important bits of information.

I had a few very friendly exchanges with Graham via Twitter, during my search for Dreamside (long out of print in the UK). And I had tried to contact him a couple of times by email, but never heard back. Silly, naïve me. Now I know why. 

Graham's final blog entry is such a moving piece of writing. And as it turns out, his final work. I dare you to read it and not shed a tear.

Although I never got to meet him, by all accounts, he was a great man as well as a great author; clearly a devastating loss to his family, friends and fans. And the literary world has lost a rare, great mind.

It's odd how we can so often strongly connect to writers, artists or musicians. Yet they're usually people we don't know or will ever get to even meet in some cases. Yet books or albums become intensely personal things; you take possession of a good book and treat it like your copy is the only one in the world. They take on certain meanings.

Dreamside really tapped into my interest in the world of dreams. The sort of book I’d always wanted to read. That book inspired some of the music on my latest album, Traces. I’m glad now that I credited Graham in the notes.

Graham, this one’s for you.

"Autumn Colours" by The Light Dreams

A short blog about art

I never got along with paint. Always liked the idea of it, but during my school and college days in fine art, my otherwise good pencil pieces would be ruined as soon as I started to paint over them or add colour. So I always used to, where ever possible, draw in ink, pencil or charcoal. Life in monochrome.

That’s why the humble pencil became my weapon of choice for a long time, and probably why many of my digital paintings started out as pencil sketches.

What I love about working digitally is I'm finally able to enjoy working with colour, in a non-messy way! I feel I've struck a happy medium here, especially for my science fiction artwork – which makes up the majority of my output!

Having spent the last 18 months working mostly on music projects, it’s been great getting back into the flow of illustration. I guess I always feel a little guilty of referring to a digital piece as a “painting”. OK, it’s a digital painting; a common term in the industry. I’m just applying pixels, rather than oils or acrylics. More recently I’ve been referring to my work as illustrations. But in truth, they’re both. 

Time for a quick flashback (pretend there's an echo there).

After completing courses in fine art and computer graphics at college back in the mid 1990s, my plans to go on to a course in illustration fell by the wayside when I was offered my first job in advertising back in 1997, and out of that my career as a graphic designer was born. Work and life took over art. I guess that’s why it took me over a decade to get back to creating my own artwork, which coincided with the rediscovery of my love of the science fiction art of the 1970s and 80s. 

By 2010 I was in my early thirties, and well aware there was a whole generation of genius young CG artists working away out there, alongside the ageist disclaimer on almost any given opportunity or competition that "entrants must be between 18–25". Cue confidence crisis.

While I’d previously had work published in books and magazines, it wasn’t until 2011 when my piece “Awakening” was chosen for inclusion in “Brave New Worlds”, an exhibition of utopian and dystopian art down in Richmond-Upon-Thames, that I found my confidence in this new age of digital art.

It's so easy to get hung up over whether your work looks realistic or is accurate, etc. It's not important! I would say most artists suffer a lack of confidence at most times. Creating a piece of art regardless of medium is such a personal experience (and often a turbulent journey!). Then you unleash it to the world. And thanks to the Internet, its easy to feel surrounded by other artists who are better than you. They're not – they're just different. Quirks or imperfections add to the personality and individuality of a piece, and the evident touch of an artist's hand still triggers an emotional response. If you feel interested, intrigued or moved by a piece of artwork, digital or not, then its done its job no matter.

The motto I've always stood by is, that if you're really fired up and into what you're doing, there will be hundreds of other people out there who love it too. Keep at it! 

Post-virtual Loncon

So Loncon 3 is over – and by all accounts it has been the highest-attended Worldcon event to date, with over 10,000 members at the last count. Recently described in a news article as an “art form”, it seems that science fiction has never been healthier. A lot of people enjoy SF for escapism, and you only need tune into the news for a daily plethora of distressing and misguided events in this world to realise why people crave for temporary escape.

While I did not attend Loncon 3 personally, I had a display of SF-themed art in the main art show and a couple of large prints on display as part of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) stand. I also designed several flyers, t-shirts and art postcard packs for I4IS recently, so it was great to have that presence too. By all accounts, the I4IS stand received the attention it deserved – perhaps helped along by their giant 2001-esque monolith with moving images projected on to it, and special guest speaker, renowned SF author Alastair Reynolds.

So it’s interesting to have been a part of this enormous event, even though I wasn’t actually there. Personally, I’m not a fan of large events, so aside from missing the chance of meeting several of my favourite artists and authors, I was quite happy to have been a non-attending member.

So what’s next? I’m currently working on new artwork, and my next project will be another music album for the I4IS. I’ve got a lot of ideas I’m quite excited about and keen to develop further. Event-wise, the next big thing will be Novacon 44, where I plan to have a display of brand new and recent artwork, totally different to what was on show at Loncon.

What I do love about Novacon is its more literary and scientific slant – no costumes in sight! However it does have its share of film and television SF, and it’s a great place to chat about Doctor Who or any other cult SF show for that matter. But Novacon does feel like a family – many familiar faces each year alongside new faces. Novacon is just the right size for me - big enough to be busy but small enough to be able to talk to people more than once. And I’m really hoping that many folk who attended Loncon will also attend Novacon this year. Hopefully there’s enough time between the two events for it not to seem like SF con–overload!

See my website for a photo of my Loncon 3 art display as well as general news round-up.