(urth) Speaking of Art...

[Son of Witz]

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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