Friday, March 4, 2016

The Warlock's Companion cover art


The cover art for "The Warlock's Companion" by Christopher Stasheff is now approved by the Stasheffs and will be available as an e-book now. These well-loved humorous fantasies have not been in print for many years and nowadays e-books are "in print." This one, "Companion," includes elements of lightheartedly risqué science fiction as well as spooky medieval ghost fantasy. 

The horse head is a portrait of "Fess," the robotic horse on whom our hero, Rod Gallowglass, depends for not only protection and transportation but counseling, as the horse (which had been a C-3PO style humanoid until Gallowglass came to the neo-medieval world of Gramarye) is a powerful artificial intelligence. The golden "halo" marks the position of Fess' supercomputer brain.

The fanciful buildings to the left of Fess are ostentatious palaces built by asteroid colonists. The asteroid colonies are the yellow constellation-like dots and lines shining on the dwarf planet's surface. And the red sports-space-car is from a story early in the book where Fess's artificial intelligence must take care of a drunken and irresponsible overrich boy driver.

Stasheff wrote lots of these fantasies and they are all fun, and I hope to continue enjoying them and pixeling the covers of more of them. So far I've done the e-book "cover" for "The Warlock is Missing" and "The Warlock Heretical. This is the third I've done and I am already  planning number 4.

Photoshop mostly on Cintiq, 12" x 16", February-March 2016. Click on the pic to get a larger view.

No comments: