Catching up with more recent work, this was a quick collage for Fatality, a single by US musician OCTiV. This has been out for about a month. The main track—a kind of dubstep/metal hybrid—can be heard here. The request was for something on the cosmic horror spectrum which would also incorporate geometric elements, hence the swiping of a couple of polyhedra from Wenzel Jamnitzer’s wonderful Perspectiva Corporum Regularium (1568).
Among the other things which have yet to materialise there’s a book cover design for Tor, and the Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam anthology which features some of my fiction as well as my cover design. I’m very pleased that the latter has achieved its Kickstarter funding. More about these projects later.
A bit of Druillet in there as well John?
Great design / logo.
Perfect for tshirts, cd and vinyl covers.
How many hours does a project like this entail? are there various drafts or just one final design?
Off topic, why in your opinion does video game art , currently reside in the hinterlands of Frank Frazetta, Boris,Seventies heavy metal album art and Sven Hassel book covers?
I didn’t consciously have Druillet in mind but it is a bit like one of his things. I think this took about a day to assemble then a few hours more spent fine-tuning it with Randy from OCTiV.
Revivals have peculiar life-cycles, mostly to do with how much time has elapsed since the art in question first appeared, and whether a new generation finds it interesting. So people in the 1950s hated everything from the Victorian era but all the kids in the late 60s found that stuff fascinating because it had been buried and repudiated for so long. The burial and opprobrium made it all seem fresh again. And cheap: the shops were full of old clothes which could be repurposed, hence the fad in Swinging London for Edwardian jackets.
In the 1980s I had a strong dislike for much popular 70s design, I was more interested in either the crude computer graphics of the time or the earlier psychedelic styles which in the 70s devolved into a kind of commercial blandness. Now I find I’m bored with the 80s and find the organic quality of 70s design (and the psych hangover) has an interest it didn’t possess before.
Thank you, John! We’re just over one month away from publication on Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam!
A shout-out to Escher’s “Tetrahedral Planetoid”?
herr doktor bimler: I’m very familiar with that one, of course, but it wasn’t what I had in mind. Escher is always more careful than this kind of chaotic amalgam.