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SocNet Promo

19 Feb 2013:
New blog post up with notes on how to use social networking to promote your books (from my recent chat with Grace from JKSCommunications).

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Step 1 - The Vessel

Michael Sissons, artist and teacher extraoridaire who lives in Madrid, Spain, is preparing to teach a course in Concept Art to professionals working in the field. Looking for material--written descriptions from books--he emailed his old writer friend from their days in Cairo, Egypt, Ellen Larson:

"It's basically about taking the written word and putting the ideas--concepts--into something visual for film and video game producers to then base their productions on. So I thought...hey, I should ask Ellen if she has any descriptive paragraphs that could look cool and be used as a starting point for these kinds of images...so...I´m asking."

Ellen, in the throes of developing publicity for IR, responded with alarming speed, sending Mike multiple Cool Descriptions including the all-importnat Vessel--the time machine that is at the center of the book:

"In the east bay, the Vessel hovered ten centimeters above the floor, a dual polyhedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron interlaced, held in place by the uncanny might of the Artifice, twenty kilometers away. Its black polymer facets and pointed vertices looked out of place in the old-fashioned study."

Before the day was out, Mike had started work, in 3D:

vessel1

Here's Mike's accompanying email to Ellen:

"So I have a question...so the dual polyhydron...ecosihydron and dodecahydron... I´m assuming that you don´t want them set up as real dual where each vertex of one just touches the face centre of its corresponding one, virtually placing one hydron completely inside the other...or vice versa...but rather; breaking the face surfaces like in this photo...and also not a one-to-one height-to-width ratio like the polyhydra would be, but rather stretched heightwise somewhat? And would you want the dodecahydron inside the ecosihydron, breaking through its surface or vice versa. Or more simply put.. left one or right one?"

Ellen's response (an all-time record for brevity):

"The one on the right."

That settled, the following 3D series arrived:

vessel 2

And then a rough draft of a little animation, just for fun.

The next step was the first glimpse of what would become the study.