THE HERE AND NOW (2)

Lines to Brushes

As I mentioned on the last page, I was still figuring out Alice's appearance and clothing when I drew this. In fact, every time I draw Alice her uniform changes. In this she's using the cheap plastic riot gun as discussed in a previous email, whereas for the later pictures I’ve used modifications of current weapons to see what they’d look like. 

This early drawing has clean line work, with block colors and hard shadows. In fact I spent more time on the background context, and in particular the graffiti on the wall, than I did on Alice and Alex. I was still finding my way into this world at the time (more about that in an upcoming email about advertising and propaganda...)

I didn’t draw Alice again until after I had finished writing The Paradise Factory, a gap of almost two years…

For this new drawing I wanted to show her how I saw her, as someone who is both emotionally and physically shut off from her surroundings. It made sense to draw a scene from the book, in particular the time after someone kidnapped Mike, but before she works her way onto the Bridge. 

This would also allow me to work with photographs of the back streets of Tribeca where the book is set as opposed to having to design and draw the Bridge, which would have been a major undertaking 😀

Once I made that decision, I took the subway to Tribeca. In The Paradise Factory Tribeca is just another ghetto, but currently it’s one of the most expensive real estate regions on earth. Every single nook and cranny is packed with high-end clothing and boutique jewelry shops. Not exactly the type of place to find a dingy backstreet to set your novel in!

I took a variety of photographs of the streets, and merged them into the background photograph later in Photoshop. I ensured no one else was in the image; Alice is alone.

The book being set in a snowstorm also helped, as I could white out a lot of the fancy Prada and Apple signage encrusting building facades. The New York winter of 2055 has lasted for months, and the buildings have endured weeks of freezing ice and snow. Therefore the snow is not clean and white, but brown and gray layers that crack under your feet as you walk. 

In any city that survives a long winter, ice and snow spreads up and across building façades, working its way into every little detail until you’re walking through spaces more akin to a crevasse than a habitable street. To show this I smeared ice across every surface, then added falling snow to further mask the background. I was working to capture the atmosphere of a frozen wasteland.

Alice is trying to move fast and silent, which is almost impossible in such a situation, hence she’s relying upon her drone for guidance here. The drone might be difficult to spot, it’s that small sphere in her eye line halfway across the picture. In some of my other illustrations I’ve drawn her remotes as larger, camera-based devices, but that is more to do with graphic styling than how I think it would be. In the books her surveillance drones are the size of a small marble—something that would fit into a pocket and be forgotten about until required.

She is wearing the full NYPD winter uniform: thick, bulletproof jacket and pants, with extra padding at shoulders and knees. As discussed in the previous email about uniforms, the idea being is it’s light and comfortable, yet tough and warm. The gun is an adaptation of an AR-10 (with a bootstrapped CWS system attached) instead of the simple plastic riot gun I had designed.

I've hinted at a graffitied sunflower next to it. I probably spent more time trying to get that sunflower right than I did on the rest the drawing! When it looked like crude graffiti, it attracted the eye too much. If I made it look too painterly, then it was out of context with the rest of the aesthetic. To fix it I blended a real photograph in Photoshop with the wall and put snow over it. It’s there, but hopefully it doesn’t distract from the image.

This is the illustration that really got me back into designing the world of the books after a couple of years out. (I had been told by other authors it was a waste of time to do this, and I listened to them like the fool I am!) I hope you like it—I think its represents the tone and reality of The Paradise Factory.

Would you’d like me to draw other scenes from the Cortex books? How about:

1. Red in his punk ensemble?

2. Mr. Bank next to his prized sunflowers?

3. Niner in his refrigeration tank?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether I should continue with these, and if so which one I should do. Send send me an email and let me know! 😀

(While you’re here - if you've read any of my books would it be possible for you to tell your friends and family? Word of mouth recommendations are the best thing for an author, and finding new readers is vital. As always, thank you so much for all your love and support.)

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