Cascading oil sheets.
Holy heck this isn’t an image. It’s an painting done entirely in CSS. And there’s more.
(These are, incidentally, designed to be viewed in Chrome. Looking at them in something else, e.g. whatever Internet Explorer is called nowadays, is interesting in the sense that it shows some of the “seams”. It’s incredible work either way.)
Big Pigment.
Apparently it’s surprisingly difficult to make a bright red pigment that’s not toxic in some way. Which means, naturally, that there’s big, big money in trying…
Hello, artists!
Because of Reasons I am currently in a place where I would like to spend more money on commissioning art. That may mean art from you!
If the idea of me paying you money for your art sounds appealing, please see this for more.
Unnecessarily terrifying computer-generated photos.
Rampage speed-ink.
Speed-ink (… is that a thing?) of one of the portraits for our Con14 D7D night!
More like FAKE-up, amirite?
Mimi Choi makes intense and unsettling illusions with make-up.
Judging a book by its cover.
In recent years in the US and UK, the people with most influence over a book jacket have been those who choose stock for supermarkets and chains such as Waterstones and WH Smith. A few years ago, a publisher at one of the “big three” houses (Penguin Random House, Hachette and HarperCollins) told me that they had presented a new book at a meeting with the buyer from a well-known retailer. An order from the chain could propel the book into the Top 10, but there was a problem: they hated the jacket. The publisher returned to her art department and commissioned a second design. Again, the buyer rejected it – the cover was still wrong. In all, the publisher had the jacket redesigned five times, until, as a joke, she took the original cover back to the buyer, who asked: “Why didn’t you bring me this first? I love it.”
Danuta Kean on book covers.
I admit I’m a book cover snob although, maybe ironically given the article, I really kinda freakin loathe the US cover for What Happened. Like, I don’t think the UK cover is great… but at least it’s not freakin’ ponderous like the US version. Also, at least it has a picture of Clinton on it (one can’t help but suspect her absence on the US version is related exactly to the problems of sexism against her in particular and women in politics in general that she talks about in the goddamn book…).
Closer to home, one of the reasons I’m a huge Angry Robot fangirl is I think they do some of the most baller covers: like hiring Julie Dillon to do the covers for Foz Meadows’s novels, or Richard Anderson for Kameron Hurley’s.1 I’m also all over the more recent trend of graphical/non-figurative covers: I admit when Leife showed me the cover art for The Beast’s Heart I kind of had to suppress a little shriek, it’s so beautiful. Also see: this version of the Southern Reach books.
Covers that don’t work for me? Most things with photo-collages, particularly when they include actual people.2 Actually, I honestly don’t know anyone who “likes” that kind of book cover, which I always find really weird given how ubiquitous (and not necessarily cheap!) they are. I’ve always been under the impression it was a big-box-bookstore-buyers-like-them-so-we-make-them thing, but… yeesh. I dunno.
Go figure, I guess.
Everything is illuminated.
Exactly what goes into making a manuscript?
My grandfather used to work as a book-binder, once upon a time…