I’ve reduced the prices on the original concept artwork sheets drawn by Daniel Fu by 50%. I’ve also made each one a separate reward, so you can pick which one you get. And I will include with each one a copy of the full-color concept-art poster, which includes portraits of all eight of the main characters, digitally inked and painted by me (I’ve been posting examples of these portraits as updates as I finish them).
I’ve realized that I haven’t actually posted scans of the original artwork that Daniel Fu created for us as concpet art. This is the sheet for Georgiana Lerner. Remember: this original artwork is for sale as one of our rewards! On Flickr From this, I created the digitally inked & colored version of “Georgiana Lerner” below, which will be on the “Concept Art Poster”:
If you’re an anti-spoiler purist, you might not want to read this one, but… Implicit in some of my posts about “No Children in Space”, is a story choice some American space fans probably find a little questionable, which is my decision to have Hiromi and Georgiana go up on a Soyuz launch vehicle which is (at least superficially) very much the same as today’s Soyuz launch system and Soyuz-TMA orbiter. Why not an American spacecraft? Are we (as Americans) being unpatriotic? Is this some liberal PC “world peace” thing? Photo Credit: Isaac Mao @ Flickr / CC By
Continuing with themes in the stories for Lunatics… Here’s number four: Theme #4 People Who Don’t Want to Be There Won’t Be Close on the heels of my previous complaint comes this one: In an effort to drum up sympathy from audiences, some writers have portrayed characters who are constantly whining about their “plight” on the frontier. This is totally ridiculous.
Continuing with themes in the stories for Lunatics… Here’s number three: Theme #3 Fatalism versus Can-Do on the Frontier One of the unfortunate memes in movie science fiction — especially European SF for some reason — is the recurrence of the “nobel sacrifice of life” or of the triumph of hopelessness and fatalism. Some character inevitably concludes that it’s all pointless and takes their helmet off to die in the “cold hard vacuum of space”. I guess this is supposed to be symbolic of something or other, but I find it incredibly annoying. Real space pioneers just won’t act like that. Being on a frontier really focuses you on basic survival needs.
Dr. John Robert Lerner, founder of the International Space Foundation, will be joining the first true human settlement on a planet beyond the confines of this Earth. He and a group of pioneering colonists will be settling permanently at the International Space Foundation Colony on the northern Border of Mare Imbrium at the Laplace Promentary. This is a crowning achievement for the Mechanical Engineer who has given the last twenty-five years of his life supporting this cause which soon will come to fruition.
Themes in Lunatics Although Rosalyn Hunter is credited as the “writer” on Lunatics and I am credited as the “director”, the reality is a bit more muddled than that. We are highly collaborative in our creative process, as you might expect from a married team. I thought it might be interesting to introduce some of the themes we’re working into the series. Here’s the first: Theme #1 “Bridging from Here to There”
This is an open-source project, so anyone who wants to access the data we produce will be able to get it in time (certainly before next Summer). Anyone backing this Kickstart (at any level) will receive notification and a site to download this data as a package (probably a single large ZIP file, or possibly several smaller ones) available for download on April 12, 2012 (“Yuri’s Night”). We’ll publish this link publicly sometime after that. Of course, all of the backers will be credited in the dataset as well.
Today I finished the first of the digital ink & paint portraits based on Daniel Fu’s character concept art. This is not the final art we are creating for this Kickstart, but it is the artwork that will appear in high resolution on the “Concept Art Poster” we are offering at the $15 level, to be delivered right after the Kickstart finishes, in December. A lower resolution version (similar to this image) will appear on the “Characters” page . to replace the existing silhouette images.
