The Bone King at HFQ

There's a Far Side cartoon with a crowd of art patrons admiring a painting in a gallery. In the back, one old lady is whispering to another, "My boy made the frame." In that spirit, I announce the appearance of my illustration to "The Enemy's True Name" by Mark Silcox at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. That's right: I made the picture.

The Bone King: drawn in ink, digitally colored. Go check it out! And read the story, too!

As I've said, I've been toying with Photoshop workflow used by people in the comics industry. I've recently become interested in comics and in digital illustration in general. For me, it seems to work best when I begin with a hand-drawn picture with cross-hatched shading and build up a layer of flats, with highlights and shadows in separate layers. Not quite the same as painting, but it's exhilarating to actually be able to change things that need to be changed.

In other artsy news, I'm having an exhibition at a certain university out in Alpine, Texas, this August and September. More details to come. Stop by if you're in the area! I'm also still working on my Enoch and Carvajal stories – I've written several of the latter – but I've been too busy with school to blog regularly. Hopefully that will change once the semester is over.

Right now I'm wrapping up a graduate course on regular polytopes. My school recently purchased a large 3D printer which, for lack of a better place (and because of my shameless begging), is set up in my office, and I'm working on producing some of the interesting solids and compounds we explored this spring. I've also been composing a post on higher-dimensional geometry and genre fiction that I'll have to wrap up some time soon...