2012: Art Year in Review

2013 took off like a rocket with work and adventures (and a flu that allows me a moment to look back on the wide variety of work I did in 2012). As Rod Serling might have intoned, “Submitted for your approval, the work of one Lee Moyer hanging here, in the Twilight Zone.”

The largest grouping of pieces is of course my calendar. It’s my favorite project ever! Not just because of the work, but because of the amazing writers I got to work with and the fact that it raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity (it’s also eligible for the Best Related Work Hugo award. Just sayin’.

2013 ‘Check These Out’ Fantasy Literary Pin-up Calendar

Covers:

A Red Sun Also Rises and The Warlock’s Curse

Also check out my journal entry on the making-of A Red Sun Also Rises and my essay on Mary Hobson’s previous covers, wherein I try to understand why the first worked and the second failed.

A Stark and Wormy Knight and Confessions of a Five Chambered Heart

Axe Cop

Honey West: Murder on Mars!

Shadowrun: Jet Set

Unpublished color work:

I spent a lot of time last year working on 13th Age. The game is still in it’s final stages of pre-print and will be published late spring:

The pieces below are from Aaron with my art direction and occasional emendations:

The book is the work of noted game designers Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet with me and illustrator Aaron McConnell. Even as this first book goes to press, work on the art for the expansion, 13 True Ways is already underway. It will include maps like the one below:

Misc. Fun Projects:

2012 marked the end of Dan Garrison and Zephy McKanna’s remarkable Exalted game. This set of Exalted trumps were a collaboration with Felicity Shoulders and Sarah Barker, and served as a tribute to Dan and Zephy’s work:

This year also marked yet another successful Ambercon NW ( portraying that young chowderhead Bertie Wooster is always a delight) and another Ambercon t-shirt design (this, the first to work on a tie-dyed shirt):

Working for Wizards of the Coast is always interesting. One never knows quite where work done for a book will appear. In this case, on large exhibit-screening banners at PAX.

My yearly posters for Lakewood and NorthWest Children’s Theater 2012-2013 seasons:

This is the design for a spinnaker, recently seen intimidating the other racers around the San Francisco bay:

This surprise book cover from Readercon 2012 is a collaboration with authors Michael Swanwick, and Elizabeth Bear, and photographer Kyle Cassidy (and audience members like Bracken, Tom and Venetia):

A just-for-fun Christmas Dalek to wish all my friends happy holidays. Rumor has it that a couple crew members of BBC America put it to good use. And this Circus Shoggoth hails from last year’s Pickman’s Apprentice competition. The masterminds at Sigh Co. are already Kickstarting the HP Lovecraft Film Festival.

Sometimes I get surprisingly interesting commissions quite out of the blue. This time I was asked to draw a series of rare antique telephones:

This year I was asked to do my first piece of art for the McMenamin brothers for the new wing of their splendid Kennedy School. At any other time I’d have been happy to paint from The Two Towers, The Wizard of Earthsea, or 100 Years of Solitude. But the opportunity to honor my father who died last summer in a painting from Sometimes a Great Notion was too much to resist. Elmer Moyer is the man in the middle:

Another Kickstarter I worked on was for the logo for Broken Continent:

And finally, some random memes for 2012:

There are of course still more projects I worked on in 2012 that have yet to be revealed by my clients. I hope to share them as they are revealed in 2013.

Putting the Zed in NZ

Day 10: Queenstown to King’s Level 3

We rose early enough to say goodbye to Stacy as she left for work, spent a leisurely hour packing up the car, and headed to the airport. Without the Security Kabuki we’ve grown so used to in America, the time from parking to waiting for our flight was something like 10 minutes. How very much like my memories of Grand Junction, Colorado’s wee airport when I was a lad – of how things used to be before the Fear Industry took over in the US. A couple hours’ flight south, we were excited to watch the acres of farmland give way to the “Southern Alps”.

Queenstown is a big mountain resort town – part Switzerland, part Montana, part Aspen. We ate lovely local ice cream in the airport and took a coach to our hotel with the lakeside view (just like most every building outside the very heart of town). A short walk to Thai food and a brief shopping expedition followed. We came back to long baths and more reading. Ah, vacation.

Day 11: Huge on the Luge

After cereal and yoghurt in our room, we headed to the Vudu Cafe to meet up with NZ photographer Trey Ratcliff, who had kindly helped publicize the charity calendar last year. A brilliant photographer and lovely person, Trey showed us a few splendid photos and kindly offered tips of things to see and places to go.

First among these places was the top of the nearby mountain. A large gondola takes people up, and then a small chair lift takes them further up to use the luge. This may be just a glorified go-cart track, but it’s got the best views imaginable. Top o’the world Ma, top o’ the world!

After my first 3 runs, Venetia and I headed in for lunch – only to encounter Trey and his lovely wife and kids! They were celebrating the kids’ last day of freedom before the onset of school and shared both their table and foodstuffs. Venetia and Trey exchanged book recommendations, and before we leave town we hope to pass along the copy of Mark Hodder’s ‘A Red Sun Also Rises’. Serendipitous indeed!

I took 5 more runs after lunch as tandem paragliders wafted overhead and Venetia took in the view. I could have ridden all day if the passes so allowed…. But ice cream and a walk around the garden awaited, before a trip to the jacuzzi and a proper appreciation of sunset. We’re certain this would be a fine town for star-gazing, but we find ourselves thoroughly unconscious by the time any stars would think to show themselves….
Day 12: Sometimes the treasured things are not the things that last….

We arose early to meet one other small drop of rain in the lobby. From there we joined a small rivulet in the tour bus. Eventually the bus picked up enough others to stream away from Queenstown on a 4 hour ride to the Milford Sound (a mislabeled fiord). In the Sound we joined with other streaming tourists and put out to sea – sailing into the Tasman Sea before turning back around.

To say that Venetia got carsick through the winding slopes and tilting hardscrabble tunnel en route would be an understatement, but then I suppose some things are better left understated. By happenstance Brownie, our driver, a Maori from Rotorua – a good communicator in English and Maori, and an excellent salesman – told a tale of native medicine that Venetia immediately put successfully to the test (though it seems to have turned her tongue bright orange). Here’s to native medicine!

En route we passed by the Mirror Lakes:

Mountains everywhere as we climbed (and eventually descended) the Southern Alps.

The bus driver wanted to make sure his passengers signed on to hate a high-speed rail from Queenstown that the local Maori groups were lobbying for, but his reasoning was purely corporate – the rail in question would clearly be better for the environment. But it would make the long drive he was taking us on obsolete. And the tourist town stopping point (“Want a toilet? That’ll be a dollar, thank you,”) would suffer far more than bus passengers without that crucial dollar….

We both found the cruise astonishing – the animal life consisted only of a couple gulls, some suggestions of lobster by the intermittent traps, some very relaxed seals and a delightfully playful dolphin – but the sheer topography of the place!

We happily braved the 10k summer wind coming off the water, but at the end of the day, there was no way we could sensibly take 4 more hours of bus trip back. So we didn’t. Instead, we flew in a tiny plane over New Zealand’s breathtaking fiords.

Our scenic 4 hour trip condensed, through a desire to stay outside our comfort zone and the miracle of cash, to a mere 40 minutes – barely reaching an altitude high enough to cross “the Wall” of the Darran and Humboldt Mountains (with their amazingly beautiful, but otherwise unattainable tarns) in time to come right back down.

What an incredible day. Our hearts are still in our throats, and amid the bumps of the cruise and return flight I’m sure that many of our pictures are blurred messes, but today is our last in New Zealand and we went out with a bang!

A Red Sun Also Rises

I met Lou Anders, multiple award-winning art director and editorial director at Pyr, many moons ago at the San Diego Comic Con, and I’d wanted to work for him ever since.

There had been odd rumblings and hints of possible projects over the years, but this was finally the year.

How cunning of Lou to wait for me to win a Chesley. ;)
And how lucky for me that author Mark Hodder‘s story was so… mad:

When Reverend Aiden Fleischer, vicar of the sleepy town of Theaston Vale, finds a hunchbacked, light-sensitive and crippled vagabond named Clarissa Stark begging at his door, little does he suspect it’s the start of an adventure that’s literally out of this world!

Bribed by an unscrupulous family, Fleischer and his companion flee to London’s missionary college, but in wicked Whitechapel, the faithless priest stumbles upon one of Jack the Ripper’s victims and becomes convinced that he himself is the notorious killer. With her friend’s mind shattered, Miss Stark is relieved when they are both posted to the far away Melanesian island of Koluwai, but here they encounter an even darker evil, one that transports them to another planet.

Beneath the twin suns of the planet Ptallaya, Fleischer and Stark encounter an alien species, the Yatsill, master mimics who, after gaining access to Miss Stark’s mind, create their own bizarre version of Victorian London.

But Fleischer and Stark’s new home from home is not safe, for the Blood Gods will soon invade, and if he is to defeat them and rescue the woman he’s come to love, Fleischer must first face his own inner demons!

Here are the three roughs I sent Lou:

Design 1

Design 1: I loved the notion of idea of a proper Venetian Carnival with four shiny dark eyes. An alien Jack the Ripper literally popping out of the complex steampunk/nouveau frame.
In your face, but with enough grace notes to keep it interesting.

Design 2

Design 2: The full cast action shot ~ Marvel at Steampunk Zeppelins hovering noiselessly about Victorian factories! Covet Clarissa’s cool goggles! Be impressed by weapons and their implied uses!

I loved the column of Victorian type and the “A Novel of Wonder”, and while I suspected that it would be the approved rough, I firmly expected to have my old school type treatment vetoed.

But that discussion never came. Because of…

Design 3

Design 3: Positively subdued in some ways. A tricky background but a relatively straightforward presentation of a proper Ptallayan.

I was a docent at the Smithsonian Institution’s Naturalist Center for a decade, and while I love this sort of art, I didn’t really expect Lou to go for it.

But I’m glad he did. In part because I’d already solved many of the piece’s difficulties in the rough, and that meant I could concentrate on the things that really mattered, like spats for Aliens!

The Final Cover

The finished printed book has arrived at my house, and I’m just delighted.

I may take it with me to New Zealand.

I can’t imagine a more entertaining book for a 13 hour plane flight!