Barry Rosenberg’s science fiction epic Pillar of Frozen Light is due to be unveiled this weekend at Novecon (the UK’s longest-established science fiction convention), by publisher Guardbridge Books.
The story has been described as character-driven journey from self-indulgence to enlightenment, and follows Jonan, a man driven by his desire for a remarkable woman, pursued by a shadowy menace, and intrigued by mysterious pillars found on distant worlds that hint at a knowledge way beyond human understanding…
The brief for this project was to convey that traversal of space and alien vistas alongside the story of desire, and the strange, ominous pillars of light that form the core of the story.
My cover art for Pillar of Frozen Light will also feature in the Novacon art show.
I have just completed the cover art for No Space for Justice, by William N. Gilmore – and here it is.
The story sees Earth’s best homicide detective shipped off to a strange alien world with no police, courts or crime, to solve an 800-year-old murder, and it was crucial to get a feel for this in the cover art.
Stay tuned for more details about the book’s release this coming December, plus a look at the back cover illustration…
It is getting to that time of year where we start to notice subtle signs of the change of seasons ahead, and a reminder of how quickly time passes. The passage of time, and indeed the concept of time travel is a regular theme in my music.
I’m pleased to offer 25% off each of the following albums using the discount codes shown:
There is something life-affirming about the music of Jean-Michel Jarre – the French artist who took electronic music to another level and to a worldwide audience. Jarre injected emotion into his music which touches on the nuances of daily life and the environment around us. Rather than something cold and soulless, there is a warmth and richness to Jarre’s music which has transcended language barriers and reached fans of all nationalities around the globe.
Jean-Michel Jarre has created some of the most iconic and influential music of his generation. This week, Jarre turned 70, (a milestone also celebrated by upcoming box set release, Planet Jarre: 50 Years of Music), which got me thinking about my own journey with his music and its impact and influence on me and my work; both art and music.
We all remember the first time we heard certain songs or pieces of music, and those musical memories from our childhood often remain the most profound, usually defining our tastes for years to come.
I first heard Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1976 breakthrough album Oxygene, as a child in the early 1980s. I was perhaps four or five years old, and I had never heard music like it before. It was the record that my father was playing. To my young ears, I couldn’t quite comprehend what I was hearing – this wasn’t the sound of normal instruments; it was something altogether different and other-worldly. I remember being utterly entranced by the strange, almost organic sounding music… it was as if some kind of captured environment was emitting from the stereo.
With this sensory feast, my young artistic imagination was fired up – the soundscapes and atmospheres of Oxygene transported me into the sky, floating among the clouds; it sent me to a vast snowy expanse with a glaring winter sun, and most significantly, it propelled me out into space, beyond the stars.
At the time, I was surrounded with books of space imagery and science fiction art of the 1970s, and even a young age, I was addicted to Doctor Who. Jarre’s music was the perfect accompaniment to these fascinating futuristic visions, and with that, my lifelong obsession with science fiction and electronic music was born.
I rediscovered my love of science fiction art in 2007, and that led to creating my own artwork (as you can see on this website). And more often than not, I listen to Jarre’s music while I’m working.
However, the biggest impact Jean-Michel’s music had on me, was in making my own electronic music. The decades of enjoying Jarre’s music culminated in me trying my own hand at creating my own instrumental soundscapes – an ongoing journey that I’m still exploring.
I have always been fascinated with the notion of letting music create images in the mind and allowing the imagination to explore new environments through music. With no lyrics to distract or send the listener down a specific path, instrumental music works as a blank canvas for the imagination – and I think we all need that escape. This remains one of the main appealing aspects of Jean-Michel Jarre’s work as well as the objective of my own.
Over the course of the last couple of years with the release of the two Electronica albums and Oxygene 3, Jarre has proven his staying power and influence on artists and fans of all generations. Not one to rest on his laurels, Jarre’s passion for creating, composing and collaborating is as strong as ever, and I certainly can’t wait to hear what the next chapter of his musical journey will bring.
Happy Birthday, Jean-Michel!
Jean-Michel Jarre photographed at Manchester Arena, 9th October, 2010
I’m pleased to reveal my most recent cover illustration, for the latest book in Alice Sabo’s Asher Blaine mystery series, Blood Relations.
The cover art follows the same visual and typographical style to the previous two Asher Blaine titles. For this new book, Alice came to me with a fairly clear idea of what she wanted to see on the cover – Blaine, standing in a cornfield, with vultures circling overhead. My immediate reaction was to set the scene at sundown, with a golden haze enveloping our subtly blood-stained protagonist.
Below is the full front, back and spine design for the paperback version.
To find out more about Blood Relations and Alice’s other books, visit her blog.
I got my first Amiga computer – an A500 – in 1990, initially to pursue my interest in computer graphics. However at 12 years old, it wasn’t long before I also became absorbed in computer games, arguably one of the things that the Amiga did best.
I was always a big fan of the shoot ‘em up genre – in particular sideways scrolling shooters like Menace, Blood Money, R-Type, Apidya and Disposable Hero to name just a few. Being a science fiction fan, the notion of piloting your own space craft through alien worlds and fending off the enemy was always appealing (Apidya aside, where you flew a wasp through a more Earthly environment). There were fewer vertical scrolling shooters, but titles like Battle Squadron and Xenon II were excellent.
My best mate Tony had told me about the existence of a shoot ‘em up construction kit – a piece of software which allowed you to actually create your own vertical scrolling or static screen games, without the need for any programming! I was sold!!I remember the Shoot ‘em Up Construction Kit (or S.E.U.C.K) arriving, in its shiny blue box. It was published by Outlaw and Palace Software, the studio responsible for games such as Barbarian.
The S.E.U.C.K interface was simple and easy to use. It was limited to either static screen vertical scrolling levels, which essentially meant any game you made would have to be top down in view, and 16 colours; 8 colours for sprites and another 8 for backgrounds. It also came with a large sound library for all your in-game sound effects. Everything had to be drawn pixel by pixel, and you decided all the attack waves and enemy movements, mapped out by movements with the joystick.
The world was suddenly my oyster, and in no time at all, I was exploring what I could do. I remember making a Doctor Who game where you battled Daleks (simply due to the inclusion of a Dalek shouting “Exterminate!” in the sound library), and a game called Iron Butt, an Untouchables-inspired gangster romp, which was really an excuse to draw lots of bloody deaths! However, it was thosepace-based shooters that I really wanted to make and gradually became addicted to creating.
Me and Tony made several games together, calling ourselves STAB Software (the name was derived from our combined initials!). Our first project was called Paranoid, which we ambitiously spread across two disks in order to vary the colour palette, by effectively making four separate games for each ‘world’.
At the time, I had set my sights on becoming an Amiga games designer or artist. Being able to put together my own games, felt like an exciting first step. I even used to draw my own cover art for the games and make boxes for them.
Dozens of S.E.U.C.K games were started, though my main fixation was to make the best classic shoot ‘em up that I could. Granted, there wasn’t much variety in what I was making – the games were a variation on a theme and each one was an attempt to better the previous as my ideas and pixel art skills improved. Above all, it was tremendous fun!
I was frustrated that you couldn’t make a horizontal scrolling game – I remember even writing to Palace Software to see if there was any possibility of a Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit 2, where this would be possible! There wasn’t going to be one.
As the next couple of years went by, it became obvious that the end of the Amiga – and my dreams of making games for it – was in sight. However, my career ambitions had already shifted by that point, and I was content to simply enjoy the process of creating my own S.E.U.C.K games. I made them for my own enjoyment during the school holidays, their only audience being Tony, who would receive a copy of each finished game, fresh from the disk drive! Of course, had I had the Internet back then, they would have gone straight online for other people to download and play.
Dusting off my A1200 recently and finding my (fortunately preserved) disk box of S.E.U.C.K games, it was great to relive and rediscover my own creations.
These games were made between 1992–1995 and the ages of 14 to 17, so do bear that in mind – along with the fact I’ve had to take photographs of the games, via an LCD television screen connected to the Amiga by SCART, so not the sharpest images I could achieve (especially with no pause option…!), but certainly better than nothing. The main thing was to get a snapshot of the games, so here goes…
Zyrax (1991)
After dabbling with the construction kit for a year or so, this was the first game that felt like it was really going somewhere to my 14-year-old self. Tony came on board to draw some of the backgrounds, as he had a way with pixel art that I didn’t at the time. Obviously any space-themed game needed an alien sounding title, with Xs or Zs in the name!
Hell (1992)
All of my S.E.U.C.K games took influence from the many games I loved playing on the Amiga. By this point, I we were starting to work out ways of cheating the software to make the games better.
On Hell, I faked parallax scrolling by having invisible sprites firing out a steady flow of vertical background graphics down the screen! Here’s a short clip:
Terrania (1993)
I took everything I had learned in making Hell and ramped it all up a level for my next game. One major advancement in my designs was rather than joining enemy sprites together (which rarely worked that well) in order to make a big end of level guardian, I actually drew the guardians out of background blocks in order to make them huge, then covered them in invisible sprites for the collision and firing. This meant they were static (then again look at R-Type or Menace…), but much more exciting.
Megawing (1993)
A great game with a terrible title! Highlights included an aquatic level where you could pop bubbles by ramming into them to score bonus points. The aim of the game was to rescue your Megawing fleet, and at the end of each level (usually just next to or behind the boss), there was a fleet ship to ‘collect’.
At the end of the game, you are rewarded with a screen displaying all the end of level baddies… and their silly names.
Intruder (1993)
Taking it’s title from the opening track on Peter Gabriel’s third album, which I was obsessed with at the time, Intruder was a much shorter game but I increased the difficulty level, probably just to put Tony to the test. During this game, I drew a hexagonal background pattern that would become a recurring theme.
Scorpiox ‘95 (1995)
This was one game I actually made twice. One of S.E.U.C.K’s major flaws was that it was very easy to accidentally overwrite your game with the title screen graphic. The game file and title screen had to have the same name, but saved in different directories, so it was an easy mistake to make. This fate befell the original Scorpiox, which I remember being very happy with – and in one click it was gone! So I started over.
I deliberately went for a more organic look to many of the levels on Scorpiox, whether it was aquatic, vegetation or anything generally slimy and tentacular. Again, all the boss characters were built out of background graphics with animated sprites overlaid for power sources, guns or big features like mouths or eyeballs. This also meant that when you blasted the sprites away, you could reveal wounds or damage underneath.
I’d also learned to play with the timing function for the end of level boss sections, so after you’ve been fighting the thing for a while, it was possible to suddenly change things, so the boss could unexpectedly come back to life, get angrier or increase its attack.
The first boss in Scorpiox was a big brown monstrosity screwed into position with gigantic bolts. After you think you’ve defeated it, the thing suddenly frowns and fiercely does its best to obliterate your ship in a second wave of attack! Other bosses included a green mass of pulsating eyeballs, a huge gun and the end-of-game guardian which starts off encased in an armoured shell that you gradually blast away, revealing the enemy within.
Armouroid (1995)
By 1995 I was on a roll, and making my best games. Despite its title sounding more like a medical condition, I was particularly pleased with the ship design in Armouroid. Once again, we had crystalline landscapes, subterranean caves and industrial strongholds to penetrate.
Cronium (1995)
Even looking at Cronium today, there was suddenly an improvement in my graphics and combining the various tricks to make things more exciting.
On the first level of Cronium, I had indestructible sprites fire out a constant wave of lasers – a security force of the level you were entering. So you had to be quick in navigating the laser fire, otherwise you’d completely had it.
Tin Machine (1995)
Yes, the name did come from David Bowie’s much-maligned late 80s rock band! I had discovered the first Tin Machine album in the run-up to the release of 1.Outside, which would become my personal favourite Bowie album. Meanwhile, I concluded that Tin Machine would also make a great game title.
It was also the best game I’d made up to that point, putting everything that worked well in the previous ones into play. Huge end of level guardians… timed screens, so that they would explode once you’d blasted them to bits, and I even worked out how to use the static level option to create basic end-of game sequences.
In Tin Machine, you faced a huge robotic golem, a giant sphere (with obligatory centre eyeball) and a screen-filling end-of-game boss. You flew over the compulsory hexagonal background, space age pyramids and a Giger-esque world of mangled pipes and wires.
Tin Machine II
Finally, we have Tin Machine II, with a stylised colour palette of just reds and blues. This gave the game a really different look to what I’d done previously, even if I was (still) revisiting old ideas (like the hexagon level…).
By this point I was drawing more organic looking backgrounds. One of the levels was made up of a red bubbly landscape – this was actually a recreation of the first level of a game I had made (and lost/overwritten) a few years earlier, called Space. Tin Machine II culminated in a grotesque final level where, at the end, you encountered a repulsive giant heart, studded with pulsating, blinking eyeballs! Once shot, the valves deflate and the heart hangs in tatters before leading into the end of game sequence.
I even dabbled in some rudimentary end of level boss music, having loaded various audio samples I’d found, into the construction kit. Again thanks to an invisible sprite firing bullets off-screen, the fire sound effect was a music sample, timed to fire so that the sample played on loop. It didn’t always work, but it was fun when it did. Years later, I realised that the sample I’d used was actually a bit of “Maniac” from Flashdance. That ruined it a bit.
But that aside, I’m still enormously proud of the two Tin Machine games, probably more than any other. They’re playable (as well as any S.E.U.C.K game was) and brimming with creative ideas. They are arguably the best games I had made in my efforts to push the construction kit to its limits.
Making these games were a large part of my personal computing history and indeed teenage years in the early 90s. I’m grateful to the Amiga for so many things (I owe my entire career to it, in many ways), but in particular the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit.
I’m really glad I still have these games. Perhaps the next step is to work out how to port them to my Mac, and then they can at last go out into the big wide world…
This week, my latest cover art was unveiled – a full cover wrap for The Sleeping Dragon, a fantasy comedy by Jonny Nexus.
This is probably among a minority of fantasy books with “dragon” in the title, but no dragon in sight on the cover, and there is a good reason for this – but you’ll just have to investigate the book when it comes out, to discover why!
Jonny was keen to show two times within the cover; a lush, Tolkeinesque landscape of the past, intersected with a glimpse of the future metropolis that would be built on the same land. Showing the future vision via a crystal ball conveyed the magical, fantastical element that we wanted.
I also created a short animated visual for the cover, which Jonny has used in his own cover reveal video…
You can find out more about the book and Jonny’s other work, by following him on Twitter.
The Light Dreams 