I started working on this illustration a year ago. (See: Not from around here, May 2010 below) For several reasons, it went into hibernation for a while. The drawing was initially created as one of several pencil, spot illustrations in a book of short science fiction stories. The author, Daniel Russ, and I discussed the project often over the last year and eventually he decided to publish the stories as individual short stories on Amazon for 99c each. So my pencil drawing, had to grow up and become a cover instead. Hooray.

I inked the drawing (aprox. 11x17) with a Faber-Castell brush pen, then scanned it, placed it in Adobe Illustrator. I then wen to work on it with the tracing tool to clean up the line quality and create a sharp, clean black and white line drawing. Once I had the black and white lines, I opened the illustration in Adobe Photoshop and added background effects, color, shading and light effects. And here it is. The published piece is 600x800 pix, but the finished art is 300 dpi and 12x17, so I have a lot of flexibility if we print it one day. Might make a fun poster. I’ll post a link when it’s up on Amazon.