Art Archive 1 - Michael Dashow

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Michael Dashow
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Page last updated on
May 13th, 2005

The Art Archive is a place for me to show pictures that no longer quite make the cut to be in the portfolio but are still (somewhat) worthy of perusal. This is the early digital artwork, the origins of my craft, the seminal pieces... Boy, does that sound high-falutin'! Seriously, though, these are some of my earliest works using Adobe Photoshop as a paint tool. I'm still happy with these (all the ones that I wasn't happy with I excised from the site.) They still show off a little bit of the craft and technique. These piece were all produced somewhere between 1992 and 1995. Because these are "less important" pieces, I haven't bothered to put details or close-ups of any of these works. Sorry!

The Black Room
This was my first book cover, for a science fiction / horror anthology called Fusion. It was never published, the ill-fated Spectre Publications sinking before putting out their first book. The illustration is from one of the stories, a gothic horror a la H. P. Lovecraft in which a Miskatonic University student tampers with the "dark meditations" and winds up corporeally taken over by some elder evil thingie.

The model is my friend John Gardner, who graciously posed in underwear for this shot. The blobby parts came from a charcoal drawing digitally added in and colorized. The shadow on the wall was his actual shadow: There was a halogen torchier lying on the floor in the bottom of the picture that I edited out.

Y.T.
Based on one of the main characters from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. This was, at the time, one of my largest pieces, being full tabloid size at 300+ pixels per inch. I got all of the pencils down on paper before bringing it into Photoshop to paint it.

Snow Crash, if you haven't read it, is a spectacular, satirical, cyberpunk romp through a world of the future where the only thing that America still excels at is "music, movies, microcode (software,) [and] high-speed pizza delivery" (which is run by the Mafia.) Hiro Protagonist, the main character (if there was any doubt from the name) is a master at all of the above. He meets Y.T., a skate-board courier and they end up getting into a lot of trouble together. It's a lot of fun, too.

The Black Flame
This was my very first color cover for Tachyon Publications, a reprint of Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1934 story The Black Flame. The story is about a 1930's man who sleeps his way into the distant future and becomes embroiled in a rebellion and love triangle between the beautiful leader of the rebels and Margaret, the Black Flame, Princess of Urbs (the big city in the background.)

The city was based on the drawings of New York architect Hugh Ferriss, a contemporary of Weinbaum's. Ferriss' 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow is a stunning depiction of architectural trends and what he thought the cities of the future would look like.

While the illustration was okay, man did I botch the book design for the title! Everything was crammed together, the title squeezing in just over the skyscraper, the author's name obscuring the cat.... What a mess! I've since improved some. :-)

GiftHead
My 1994 Holiday Card: A piece of vellum with holiday greetings went over the illustration.

Working very loosely, I produced a sketch on paper and did most of the reworking in Photoshop. I use the airbrush a lot and get very soft edges and lines.

The backgrounds was one of the KPT Texture Explorer presets recolored and overpainted.

At the time I did this, I was really into dark outlines and soft edges around everything. You can see a similar approach on the next couple of images, It Was a Good Dream and Angels.

It Was a Good Dream
I threw this together one night combining the painting of the face with a strange pattern (created with the help of KPT Texture Explorer) and some scanned text from a letter from my friend Elizabeth Baldwin in Japan added in over the art. Elizabeth, incidentally, was the inspiration for the currant incarnation of the sire redesign: She's been the one pushing me to make it easier to navigate and update, and I'm thankful for her input and inspiration!

Anyhow, back to the art... Later a black and white variation on this work was used as the cover illustration to the June 1995 issue of The Thirteenth Moon, a San Francisco science fiction and jazz fanzine.

Angels
The background for this painting was designed in 3D and then I brought it into Photoshop to add more textures, tweak colors, and make it work with the foreground characters.

I originally created this piece for fun, a post-modern version of Raphael's Angels. Later on, Tachyon needed a last-minute cover for a collection of essays by Michael Swanwick on the science fiction writers' community. We agreed that this illustration would work and so it ended up on the cover of Swanwick's The Postmodern Archipelago.

To answer I question I'm often asked, YES, I read the books and stories before I do covers for them. But every once in a awhile comes an exception, where someone essentially wants to buy a piece out of my personal portfolio because if fits something that they want to do and there's no time for a custom approach. This was one of those times. Fortunately, I was later able to go back and read some Michael Swanwick stories for the next two covers I did for him, Gravity's Angels and Tales of Old Earth.

Beauty of the Beasts
Okay, I have a sort of dark secret from my dubious past... I was once known to do anthropomorphic animal illustrations for comic books. There! I've said it! Now don't bring it up again. I am NOT going to show off other examples from this genre. Please don't e-mail me about it! That being said and done, I still had to include this one. I just like it too much!

This was a cover for one of Edd Vick's anthologies for MU Press, a cinematically-themed anthropomorphic pin-up book. The assignment was to create a sexy pin-up "fuzzy" which fit the book's theme of movies. I used as a source all of the 50's robot monster movie posters like Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and of course, Robot Monster. I didn't even have to try to make it silly as those period posters were goofy enough without any help from me. Note the cheesy buildings and flames, the fleeing crowd, the generic spaceships and flying saucers, and even little ringed planets in the sky... The result still makes me giggle whenever I see it.

Giganotosaur
The cover to a collection of stories by Michael Swanwick entitled Tales of Old Earth, published by Tachyon and Frog, Ltd. This image specifically illustrates the story "Riding the Giganotosaur." The collection is utterly fantastic. In 1999 and 2000, five of the collection's nineteen stories were nominated for the Hugo Award, given out by science fiction fandom annually for the year's best writing. Two of the stories won the award. That's just how good the book is. I could have easily picked any story in the collection and done a great cover image from it. I like this one because it sets up an interesting relationship between Dr. Maria Alvarez and George the Giganotosaur. After all, usually when you see a woman and a dinosaur in a painting, the latter is invariably chasing the former. So what's going on here? Why isn't she scared? What is she doing to him? Is she about to be a therapod snack? These sorts of questions raised by the cover image make the viewer curious and want to look at the book to find out the answers... which is, of course, the entire purpose of the book cover!

For this image, I talked with Swanwick to get a better idea of what he'd had in mind for the Giganotosaur. He gave me the references for the specific sources and images he had used when working on the story. I consulted those and in doing so did as much as I could to insure that the image I was working on matched, as closely as possible, the image in the author's head. Doesn't always happen that way, but it's nice when it does and it works.