(urth) Speaking of Art...

[Son of Witz]

Yes, lane, that is mostly in line with my mental image.
But then, consider two details. At one point Sev tells us the rockets have '"swelling sides" and that no one could climb down their smooth surface to escape.  This sounds so much like the gleaming rockets of 50's SF. But try drawing that. It looks pretty hokey, unless perhaps you nail the exact type of rendering to contextualize it as a pulp cover.

At a point, an artist needs to divert from the text.  I have been unable to draw a torturers mask with a chin that I like one bit.  Somehow, for me, the whole mouth and jaw need to be shown for aesthetic reasons.

Oh my god, I could FILL this list up with these concerns, they've been so much on my mind.

~witz



On Jan 4, 2011, at 9:52 AM, Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com> wrote:

> I always envisioned the Citadel as a real 1980s-ish version of "rockets," e.g., not the sleek futurist curves of the 50s and 60s, but rather blocky, industrial, girder-laced monstrosities like you'd see in Cameron's "Aliens."  Severian's Citadel would be a like a hollowed-out inner city, fractured skyscrapers clawing at the blood-red sky, with a lot of rust and decay around a sluggish-moving green river choked with weeds and trash.  The "new" parts of the citadel, e.g., those buildings built after Typhon's time, would all be stone and more akin to what we would see in a late medieval city or town.
>  
> But that's the impression I had, and I can't say it's textually supported or anything.  Just the vision I get in my head.
>  
> LH
> 
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Son of Witz <Sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org> wrote:
> Don't get me started.
> I think the artist was gave it an honest, earnest attempt.  Economics likely affected the renderings. A lot is very sketchy. Naifeh's style has evolved into something very different now.
> The attrocious coloring job more or less hammers any subtlety out of Naifeh's lines though.
> 
> Such a huge job for someone to take on, there are so many diferent aspects to consider, like heights, as you point out.
> 
> Take a simple idea like Illustrating the citadel. What should the towers look like? How many towers? Sometimes the spaceport/citadel seems like most of the towers are launched and a small portion of towers remain. Yet at other points Severian mentions the "thousand towers" of the citadel. Then, are these rockets like ours, which are mostly fuel with a compartment tip, or do they contain the antigravity stuff the landers have, which would make most of the towers height cargo and quarters, not fuel? So how much renovation? Are the first several levels a tank with floors and rooms and stairwells added, or were there already usuable live/work structures within that we repurposed? Then, was the citadel an organized effort where there are a limited number of possible designs, or was it an ad-hoc collection of whatever rockets someone could afford? Are there baroque exultant family rockets with ostentatious flourishes, or was everything built by Halliburton?
> 
> This is why, though I have two years of sketches and designs trying to flesh out concept art for Urth, most of it still needs so much work.  These questions start coming up in the middle of drawing.
> 
> ~Witz
> 
> 
> On Jan 4, 2011, at 1:05 AM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:
> 
> > ...Santa brought me back issues of the SHADOW comic book, as discussed recently. Indeed, Gene Wolfe is credited with Script Supervision and the script is true to the book modulo the adaptaion to comics, and it's fun to see the artists' different takes on the characters, the architecture, and especially the animals, but I don't think it can be taken as anything revelatory of the original work, due to the very poor quality of most of the anatomy and similar lack of attention to detail.
> >
> >    Perhaps most egregious is that Severian (who is drawn to greatly resemble Gaiman's Dream) is drawn to be *taller* than Ultan!
> >
> > --
> > Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
> > Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
> > < http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >
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