Strange Worlds is now available !

It’s been a long haul and lots of artwork but the Strange Worlds Anthology is now available. Nine stories and one comic book ! Each story is illustrated in color and black and white. Working with a great group of writers we created the first NEW collection of NEW Sword and Planet stories to be produced in a very long time. Check out the gallery page for a closer look and and get ready to order your collection of illustrated adventure now !  - Jeff

Strange Worlds Process.

Once I had it stuck in my head that I was really going do this thing, I sat down and created several colour concept images that writers could base a story on. Each image was intended to look like a book cover, and in the final product, a beat up and abused one at that. I sketched ideas that I felt implied some kind of  narrative and conflict. The process of my collecting writers started with my emailing them with a description of the project and a link to the the host website. If interested they would send me a short story so I could get a better handle on what they did. They would then peruse my studies and choose one not already assigned. Then they’d throw an idea at me for the story. It never matched what was in my head, not one. I find that kind of interesting in what it says about human creativity. – Jeff

Strange Worlds review !

I have a wonderful review of my Strange Worlds Anthology at Black Gate magazine ! –  Jeff

http://www.blackgate.com/2011/12/01/new-treasures-strange-worlds/

Strange Worlds Writers – Charles Gramlich on Sword and Planet stories

Strange World author Charles Gramlich has a Sword and Planet trilogy (  Swords of Talera ) under his belt and a few posts on the topic at his blog . I”ve grabbed a snippet  from one - ”Also, the S and P hero is generally not a barbarian, but, in fact, is most often quite chivalrous. The setting for S and P is not earth but an exotic alien world, often with multiple suns or multiple moons, and is populated by a variety of strange plants, animals, and intelligent beings. The intelligent aliens are usually humanoid (the better to sword fight with), but they will have some exotic elements such as extra limbs, beaks, feathers, etc. (Not unlike Star Trek come to think of it.)”  You can read the whole thing here and check out Charle’s Amazon page here.  – Jeff

Strange Worlds sketchbook images.

As you can imagine, a project like this produces a lot of art. A quick look in my iPhoto folder shows a number of 330. There are a lot of duplicates and things like scans of a sketch followed by a color study then another , then the painting…. So it creates a lot for just one image sometimes. And the comic, that’s a lot of stuff. So I’m guessing maybe somewhere around 100 pieces. It’s still a lot.– Jeff