Jeff Doten's Venusian Blog

A quick update that answers the crucial question of just what a Paijoma looks like under it's clothes. This also is my design that incorporates a more upright stance. The Paijoma can still crouch in the manner that I've illustrated them before, but it looks pretty ungainly for just walking around. And buying groceries is just crazy when you can't even reach past the spread of your legs....

Morning Star - the human village on Venus. Yup, a little heritage style town, and no I'm not going go say why. To the right is one of the largest buildings in Morning Star, the Hunter's Hall. Sort of a ranch house. The shield shape hanging off the balcony is the skull of a Curvim, the beastie that the Hunter's hunt. The buildings of Morning Star are built in as familiar a form as possible to create a familiar homey environment. The major exception to this being the roofing material, a shell like form that protects from fiery Draf Falls.

I freaked Super Girl out. So this last weekend I went to the Calgary Comic and Entertainment con. I'd never been, and was really impressed. There were lots of people and it was really well organized. I had a few prints to sell and lots of promo stuff on The Fire Gods of Venus. It was kind of a 'pre-pimping' the book. It was an excellent change to talk to a lot of people and give out a lot of promo cards. I did learn a couple of things. Saying that The Fire Gods of Venus was 'kinda like John Carter of Mars meets the Doors' means squat to anyone under 30. So my catch phrase of the book as 'A Psychedelic, Post Modern, Interplanetary Adventure' means about the same. Granted, I really like that phrase, and perhaps combined with an actual book description, it might work. I can't believe I didn't have one, but I wasn't really ready to write the back of the book blurb. But a lot of people asked, 'what's it about ?' So this is what I came up

Okay, I always knew that I wanted to rework this. The guy was good, but didn't stand up on image 40 " tall. And the logo needed to be reworked. This version not only has a new logo and such, but COOL iridescent colors around George and the psychedelic googlies. This is intended for trade show attention ( but did scan fine ) so it's kind of fun how the image suddenly glows from certain angles. Later on a little more work will go into updating the alien to the latest design and around the swordsman. But I've got other stuff do now, I'm kind of late. - Jeff PS - I'm sort of thinking of this project now as John Carter meets the Doors. I probably shouldn't....

Told ya I wasn't going to post regularly. But now I have something new. It was time to nail down the appearance of my Venusians, the Paijoma, and to do a sculpt of one. The painted version shows flares/fins on the lower face which did not end up on the final sculpt. That didn't surprise me much as the sculpt was intended as further refinement of the design. A couple elements of note - the back shapes are part of it's respiration apparatus and the black eyes rotate on the stalks as if magnetically attached. The somewhat artificial design of the skin is part of my choice to not use typical terrestrial textures on the Venusian creatures. The sculpting material was Super Sculpty Firm, which gives a lovely surface. The acrylic on top goes down with a rather pearlescent sheen. The really shiny parts are FW Pearlescent. Other news, I have just complete the 3rd complete rewrite, some parts have many more the 3 rewrites, and expect once my readers are finished with it to have the f