MY LATEST WORK

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	THE BOOK has now been released by Australia. Delightfully written by Sally Odgers and lavishly illustrated by “yours truly,” it’s designed for kids 5 and up. Look for it in your local bookstore and if they haven’t got one ask them to order one for you from Koala Books.
	Fantastic creatures come from the imagination and fly, swim or slink through our stories. In this book you can meet some of the ugliest, most beautiful, funniest and scariest creatures ever. They’re just FANTASTIC! $13.99 pb picture bk • 287x248mm • 32pp• Ages 5+ 978-0-86461-729-3

Click image to enlarge	Click below for cropped hi-res image
	(414kb)	CENTAUR
	(769kb)	DRAGON
	(515kb)	GRYPHON
	(360kb)	MERMAID
	(641kb)	OGRE
	(367kb)	PEGASUS
	(573kb)	PHOENIX
	(607kb)	TROLL
	(340kb)	UNICORN
	(371kb)	VAMPIRE
	(473kb)	WEREWOLF
	(377kb)	YETI

A very BIG note of thanks: To all who were so supportive to me during my recent prolonged period of ill health. In particular to Debbie Brown, who did such a superb job of the layout and design in spite of having to constantly rework her ideas to accommodate my failings. And to Sally Odgers who rewrote much of her original text to make it easier for me to understand! But especially to Cathie Tasker, the commissioning editor, who encouraged me, excused my laxity and rearranged deadlines to suit.

Coming up with the cover of The Doomsday Genie

I've worked with Frank Ryan many times before, doing covers for his crime/forensic thrillers Tiger Tiger, Goodbye Baby Blue and Sweet Summer. I also painted the cover of his sword 'n' sorcery fantasy The Sundered World . but that was all many years ago. So I was surprised when late last year I got a call from him in the UK asking if I'd like to do the cover of his latest. Naturally I said I'd love to and so he emailed me the manuscript.

The next bit is always the hardest; coming up with ideas. Frank had a vague notion about the sort of thing he wanted and sent me one of his dabblings and, to be honest, it wasn't the kind of image that I thought would sell the book. With his preferrences in mind I had to come up with somethng that I thought would. This one wasn't easy as Frank was particular about his baby the "entity", as the culprit is known in the book, and making sure it was depicted in the right way. He's a writer, a scientist and an intellectual, no offence Frank, and to him the shape of life at a sub-microscopic level is as easily read as the TV Times, but unfortunately the rest of us can't tell a protein chain from set of centipede's dumbells. Consequently, I had to think of a way of making it obvious to the mass-market audience what the book was about. I'm still not sure if I've done that.

However, the cover was created mainly on the computer. The dark cloudy sky and cityscape background were adjusted photographs, the biohazard symbol was created in Adobe Illustrator and rendered in the application's new 3D render filter. I repainted Blake's painting in airbrush and coloured pencil and played around with its proportions and colours. The rest, the Petri dish, god's dividers, the entity and all the molecules and digital assemblers were created and rendered in 3D Studio Max 6. The lot was assembled in Corel Photopaint. To give you dear reader an idea of the way the cover evolved, below are some of the roughs I supplied to Frank with a brief comment about each of them.

Click to enlarge
	"Digital Mitochondrion" This was one of the first and of course I got it wrong. It was too "biological". In the story the "entity" is a construct of nano-technology and lives within or replaces an organism's mitochondria by using it's own biological nano-computer (hence the digital sequence I drew on the rear end) to simulate an RNA code consistant with or acceptable to its host's.
	"A Clockwork Miotchondrion" Same sort of idea only with clockwork signifying the "entity's" man-made nature.
	"A ZAPPED GANGLION" Here a ganglion is "attacked" or infected by an entity carrying mitochondrion.
	"A HURT HAEMOGLOBIN" Same as above only a red blood cell.
	"A MERRY BAUBLE" When Frank was unhappy with the themes I was coming up with he suggested that I look at ways of depicting the "entity" itself. This was an early experiment.
	"THE FRANKENSTEIN CHIP" Frank also suggested that I should try playing up the book's modern day Frankenstein aspect. The alternative title to the book is "Prometheus Revisited" so I thought of how I might give a hint at the way the nano-biological entity was created. The surround is simulates an electron-micrograph of a nano-circuit.
	"FRANKENSTEIN UNCHAINED" Same as above only I tried here to indicate the way the "entity" broke free from its laboratory prison to go on to invade or infect all life on the planet. The myriad of life forms in background hints at the scope of the contagion. Here I also tried another way of rendering the entity and adding the Petri dish puts it into the realm of the biological laboratory.. This one was my favourite.
	"THE OMNIPOTENT" I was trying to think of a way of suggesting "man playing God" in the cover and came up with William Blake's "The Omnipotent", also known as "The Ancient Of Days". It is a well known image that everyone recognises as God the creator, so with a wrist watch on his arm and having him looking down on his creation through a microscope it made him distinctly human. Frank liked this but was unhappy with the way the entity was rendered.
	"THE OMNIPOTENT 2" Here I rearranged the elements taking out the Blake background and re-introducing the life-forms background. With yet another version of the entity. Frank said I had the shape roughly right at this stage but didn't like the way it was rendered.
	"ENTITY LATTICE" This was just a trial to see if Frank would like to see the entity rendered as a lattice, such as is used to represent the chemical or atomic structure of molecules in the sciences.
	"METALLIC ENTITY" This was another speculative attempt to get the entity right. Frank didn't like it but we didn't realise then that we weren't communicating well enough. You see, Frank had an idea about the entity being more "ghostly" as it is created out of a digitally sequenced primal broth. I misconstrued what he meant and went on to produce images with the entity within a ghostly membrane.
	"THE ENTITY WITHIN A MEMBRANE" This my first attempt at creating a believable biological membrane that could be seen as the membrane that encloses a living cell.
	"MEMBRANE ONLY" It wasn't what Frank wanted but I kinda like this membrane. It's got an "alien" feel to it that you'll only be able to see if you view the larger image..
	"CELL MEMBRANE WITH NUCLEUS AND ENTITY INSIDE" Likewise, it wasn't what Frank wanted at all. I didn't like this metallic version of the entity either.
	"ENTITY -NEW DESIGN" This was when I began to get the idea of what Frank wanted. It's an early rendering of a more ghostly version of the entity. I like the luminosity and detail of the surface.
	"THE ENTITY -FINAL VERSION" Apparently, something like this was what Frank wanted all along.

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