A little while ago Lynn M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas and John Klima asked if I might possibly be interested in doing some work for an anthology they were cooking up in partnership with Apex Publishing. My answer was OMG YES!! Now I’ll never get all the glitter swept out of the corners of my harddrive.
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Here’s a few work-in-progress glimpses and some of the reference imagery I was using while I created the cover art. First, here’s the preliminary sketch that we released as part of the kickstarter campaign.
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The general idea was to depict a wave of alien roller derby-ists partying wildly across the floor of a nightclub. To do this I was looking at discotheque skaters, roller boogie couples, blond bombshells on wheels, and photos of roller derby in action. (I also watched this kid with his crazy rollerblade footwork, over and over again) Once I had sketched out the figures, I needed to work out the nature of our cyboristic lead jammer’s roller gear. Regular roller skates just didn’t seem right. Two pieces of reference I leaned heavily on were these (rather incredible) futuristic looking chariot skates and these (completely mind boggling) vintage 1910 roller skates.
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The particulars of how to bring out speculative elements of the figures was fun to work out, I thumbed through images of glamerous, glowy, cyborgs and/or aliens for ideas. But always and utmost was that everyone would be dressed in their most glamorous attire. Once again, the lead jammer’s hair was something I had to play around with quite a bit to get the right feel. I tried tentacles (couldn’t help myself) and cable wires, but soon realized such elaborate coiffures distracted from the whole of the piece. A little experimenting revealed she had a taste for short red hair.
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etc etc etc. until the final painting (ta da!)
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And there you go. If you need more shiny stuff, go peruse our pinterest board.
Now to wrap it all up, here’s a little gold plated burlesque on roller skates. Just for you. (FYI, she does get down to pasties by the end. NSFW.)