Art Archive 2 - Michael Dashow

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Michael Dashow
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Page last updated on
May 13th, 2005

This is the second of two Archives which show of my lesser digital artworks. If this is one of the first things you're seeing on the site, please go check out the Portfolio first! That's the good stuff. This is just the leftover dregs of my artistry, stuck onto the site for those obsessive-compulsives who just can't get enough of my artwork, so they want to see the bad stuff as well as the good. And if you're one of those people... Gee, I'm sorry. Umm... enjoy!

Portrait of Jennie
Another cover for Tachyon Publications, this is for a Robert Nathan fantasy story from the 40's about an artist who meets a girl who is slipping through time. Along the way, he paints a portrait of her. This is my version of it. I had to work a lot in Fractal Design Painter to really make it look like it was done in oils as opposed to pixels. As usual I did the pencils first and roughed out the color in Photoshop layers. In Painter I relied heavily on grainy oil and water brushes - the former to add color, the latter to go over the color I already had to make it look more painterly. In the larger version of the image, you can see the brushstrokes a lot better.

My friend Emily (very patiently) posed for a roll's worth of film so that I could get the pose, the dress, the light all just right. It doesn't look much like her any more... intentionally so - now it looks more like Jennie. Well, at least, that was the idea. Like so many of the characters that I paint, she's ended up looking a little like myself! Maybe not overtly, but there's an ineffable Mike-ness about her. Possibly it's the bulbous nose and the shape of the lips. But anyhow, it was an immeasurable help working from a model.

Future's Past
A fall, 1999, release from Tachyon Publications, Future's Past is a collection of short stories by the late, great A. E. van Vogt. The collection features a couple of related stories about mankind's encounters with a giant, 6-legged, blue, psychic monster called the Ezwal. (The stories are "Cooperate - Or Else!" and "The Second Solution" for those keeping score at home.) There are other tales in the book, including the fantastic "The Reflected Men" which was my favorite. Unfortunately, it didn't make the greatest cover. The editor wanted to emphasize the Ezwal featured in two stories, and those were much more representative of the book and van Vogt's writing than "The Reflected Men" was.

I probably should have given an even closer-up close-up shot, so you could marvel at all the hairy parts on the beast. I love painting fur. In Photoshop (or at least in versions 4 and lower) I draw a bunch of black dots on a white background, each dot being the size of the hair I want. I surround that with the marquee tool and select Define Brush from the menu. Now I have a new, bristly brush that I use to paint fur, hair, wood grain... It's not as sophisticated as Painter's bristle brushes, but it works pretty well!

Hitchhiker
Late June, '99: I'd just finished a very dark, serious illustration for one company and wanted to break out and do something light, airy, goofy, and sexy - in short something completely the opposite of the one I'd just finished. This is the result, mostly done in one weekend (the original sketch and line art had been done previously.)

She's wearing some sort of anti-gravity jet pack, which accounts for her being able to stand there like that without falling over backwards. But then, it looks as though most of the pack's energy goes into merely holding itself up. What in the world you'd do with the pack itself is beyond me. If it were a flight pack, she probably wouldn't need to be hitching a ride, now would she? So maybe there's some compartment in the back where you can store heavy (but relatively small) items, and the anti-grav parts help to hold it up... oh, never mind!

It only occurred to me when my girlfriend pointed it out that this hitchhiker is standing on the left side of the road, which (in the United States, which is where I am) is the wrong side of the road to be hitching a ride. So with a minor alteration (the side of the road the truck is on and the side of the truck that the driver himself is in) we change the scene to Australia. Works out fine, eh? And appropriate as a couple of months later, I was off to Australia for AussieCon 3, the 1999 WorldCon in Melbourne.

Lyskarion
While I've always considered myself more of a science fiction fan (and illustrator) than fantasy, the last couple of years have brought me a lot more work doing the latter than the former. This is the most obvious example of the trend, not just a subtle, modern-day fantasy like Peter Beagle's The Rhinoceros who Quoted Nietzsche (itself the most likely explanation for the boost in fantasy assignments) but a full-blown epic fantasy complete with wizards, magic crystals, were-tigers, shape-changing dolphins, the works! The book is Janice Cullum's Lyskarion: The Song of the Wind, published by a small Canadian house Edge.

There was an awful lot that the publishers wanted to cram into the cover: ability of Errin (the male) to turn into a dolphin (symbolized by various decorations on his outfit,) the many other lycanthropic races on the world (illustrated separately on a decorative border), the magic abilities of the wizard trainees (look, ma, they're floating!), the importance of the crystal Lyskarion (smack-dab center, compositionally), the sea warfare action (the ships and the dramatic tilt of the deck) and the romantic tension between Errin and his love Elise (it's there in their faces). The last was one of my favorite parts of the book: Cullum resisted the happy, storybook romance in favor of a darker, more realistic approach and an ambiguous future together for our lovelorn but overly willful heroes. It's the part of the book I most wanted to capture in the cover. I knew I'd succeeded when someone who hadn't read the book inquired, "Hey, what is UP between those two? Looks like something is, and she's kind of pissed off about it!" It's those kind of things - the strong interactions between the characters - that make both the books and their covers the most interesting to me.

Beauty and the Beets
The holiday season every year usually brings around another illustration done expressly for the holidays. Usually this takes the form of a holiday card of some sort. And often, accompanying the card is some sort of creative homemade gift that Talia and I have whipped up: one year it was collaged and decoupaged clocks, each made uniquely for the recipient. This year, we decided to make a cookbook. We'd been doing a lot of healthy cooking throughout the year and wanted to celebrate it with a compendium of our favorite recipes which our friends and family often asked us for. Settling on a typically bad pun as the title, I set to work on the cutesy cover illustration.

The background was modeled and rendered in 3D Studio Max and printed out. I then traced the hard-copy to get rough hand-drawn pencil lines and scanned those into Photoshop, where I combined the pencil sketches of the characters. In Painter I repainted the entire scene, using oil paint and water brushes, often cloning from the original render. I superimposed the lines back on the repainted image and ended up with something that looked very-much handmade, not like a slick 3D render at all. Which was the whole point.

You can see more detail about how the sketching process worked for this image in its Spotlight Gallery.

Vow of Honor
One of my first attempts at using Painter heavily on a painting. I wanted to combine an animation style of character design with the painterly effects available from Painter. The fur on these folks looks really great close-up: real strong oil painting brush strokes. True, it's a bit cartoony overall, but it conveys the sense of character and humor that I enjoy putting in my pieces.

One of the problems I had with Painter was how inefficient some of the tools and interface were. Once I got used to going back and forth between Painter for the natural media parts and Photoshop for the image composition and color control parts, I was a lot happier. You don't have to stick to any one application to do your work!

Beauty and the Beets 2
Another holiday season brings about yet another vegetarian cookbook. This one has the same title as last years, Beauty and the Beets. However, as last year I did a light fantasy illustration, this year I decided to go in the opposite direction and do a dark science fiction image. So what is he greedily eyeing as a tasty meal... The beauty or the beets? I can see doing these for years to come, a whole slew of healthy cookbooks with the same title, the cover image for each being different but always featuring an attractive woman, a gruesome monster, and our favorite root vegetable.

I have again used 3D Studio Max for some help with this image. It aided me in figuring out the perspective on the ceiling arches, and I also used it to get a feel for the kind of light the floaty spheres would project.

What Comes Around...
Tough guy and cyber-cycle, influenced by Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira and Masamune Shirow's Appleseed and other works. Overall the figure is very realistic (or at least as realistic as I was able to make it back in '94) and the lines are all crisp and sharp. People generally tend to really like this piece a lot, but it's not one of my favorites. It stays in the portfolio also because it's a cyberpunk piece and it's rare that I get to do one. I'd enjoy doing more.