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Unpublished color work: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.

2013 Literary Pin-up Calendar: Neil Gaiman

Media is the message.
We are the Media.
And she is us.

Be afraid.

A year ago, my literary pin-up calendar was published by Pat Rothfuss’s wonderful charity Worldbuilders.
I sent a print from that 2012 Calendar to Neil Gaiman with a note that read something like:

“Dear Neil,
Please consider this year’s calendar a proof of concept. But instead of dead authors who cannot defend themselves, I’d like to make the 2013 calendar all about living authors*. I thought it would be especially apt and lovely if Amanda Palmer wanted to be Miss Neil Gaiman. Please let me know your thoughts.”

He did:And when she returned from Down Under, she did.
And there was much rejoicing.

But having a model before having a concept is unusual.
Who, among Neil’s roster of splendid characters, would we cast Amanda as?
Amanda as Yvaine? As Coraline? As Door? As Delirium? As Death warmed over?
No.

There were these photos to be taken into account:No matter how much fun it would be to have her play any, or indeed all those characters, Media was simply too powerful not to get her way.
Media is the message. And of all the curious forms of media communication, the Gregorian Calendar is one** of the strangest (Why not 13 months of 28 days? Why an ever shifting number of days?? With leap years!?!). Our calendar is the QWERTY keyboard of time. Sure, it works. But there ought to be a better smarter way.

As anyone who understands the history of the Hays Code or has wrestled with the arbitrary restrictions of iambic pentameter knows – restrictions of form can lead to happy accidents.
In the case of 2013, the month of June starts very late in the week, and the money quote from Media is an exchange she has with Shadow.
And since Neil is no stranger to sequential art… why alter the text when one could simply do it in comic form?And how would we arrange to get the reference shots we needed in a timely fashion?
Happily I was invited to Readercon in Boston this year, and so was my friend, photographer extraordinaire Kyle Cassidy. Both of us were on hand to participate in a remarkable storytelling experiment with Michael Swanwick and Elizabeth Bear.
I named it ‘Dismembrance’ and somehow that’s how it stayed:

Kyle and Amanda go way back, even before he worked on the felicitous Who Killed Amanda Palmer book, and their collaboration continues apace (See: Yesterday’s Doctoral Dissertation).When we talked strategy I learned that he had already scheduled a photoshoot with Amanda in September. So if I could just get him a rough, he could shoot reference for me remotely.
Voila.Kyle and Amanda were good as gold and the reference photos came magically through the aether. Illustration reference is a different beast than “normal” photography in that I used no fewer than 5 of his 26 photos to inform the finished painting.
Some weeks later, the whole thing was done. I hope you like it.

Neil and Amanda and Kyle have kindly offered their time not just in the service of a nutty arty idea, but of a great charity. The calendar is currently available at Worldbuilders’s online store for preorder; all the profits go to Heifer International.

“Heifer International’s mission is to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth through the gift of animals. By giving families a hand-up, not just a handout, they empower them to turn hunger and poverty into hope and prosperity, but their approach is more than that. By bringing communities together and linking them with markets in their area, Heifer helps bring sustainable agriculture and commerce to areas with a long history of poverty.”

* Sadly, Ray Bradbury did not live to see the finished calendar, but we are so honored that he agreed to be part of this project.

**Tom Lehrer famously noted forms still stranger: “postcards, neckties, samplers, stained-glass windows, tattoos, anything!”