|
THE COVER ART FOR NOCTURNE
(Click to see the cover much larger)
The painting for NOCTURNE is a digital composition from
no less than eight elements! Some of those elements are
the profile of a young man (from a yonks-old b/w litho),
a photo of a marble statue by Annibale Carracci which
stands in the Farnese Gallery (Florence or Milano??),
detail from a tiny portion of Tintoretto's 'The Capture
of Parma,' painted in 1580, and 'detail' from a fire
in the grill in the backyard (!). Finding the individual
elements was a chore, but it was only step one. Next,
the color toning of each image was profoundly altered,
masks were introduced, and the digital painting began,
to turn a rag-tag mess of a jigsaw puzzle image into
a coherent whole. Digital paintings like this are actually
much more difficult to achieve than, say, the cover
of THE DECEIVERS or DEEP SKY! This one was a right
royal twerp, and the sheer amount of painting done to
get it all to flow together and look right was far beyond
the artist's original plan! (The idea had seemed simple
when it was originally dreamed up.)
Once again, this cover was done in close
consultation with Mel. We wanted to produce a cover
that was 'different' from the usual, and reflected
the centuries-spanning nature of the book. Previous
covers have had a generic background (nebula, the sea...)
and two faces. But NOCTURNE is vastly different from
anything Mel has done before, and we wanted to hint at
this quality in the cover.
The last element to be added in was the 3D logo, using
fonts which were shaped and molded to our needs, and then
'skinned' in platinum and white-gold. The final effect is
quite something, and we're all tremendously pleased with
this cover.
If this story about the process of digital art and
the making of this cover was of interest, you might
like to read others. See Jade's
Corner of this website for a brief feature on
the artist and a menu of other "Cover Stories" for
the Mel Keegan novel covers.
|
|
RESEARCH TALES:
The British Empire, the French Camague,
The Vet from Peking, The Vamp from Ireland, the Surgeon from Wales,
The Singer from Milan, the Immortal from Iberia and the Doctor from
Zambia...!
You're probably thinking that the research for this novel was close
to a full-time job — and you'd be right! The good thing is, it
was all done for the first version (which wasn't even a gay draft;
see above, in the potted-history of this piece of work), so the
subsequent drafts (first gay version, c.1991; vastly reworked in
'99 for Millivres; and tightened into the DreamCraft final draft at
New Year, 03/04) were easy (or easy by comparison.)
I have vivid memories of researching NOCTURNE ... I spent a lot of
time pouring over books: the history of art, music, Ireland, Europe,
the British Empire, and Queen Victoria's armies in India and China.
In one early set of notes, Vince Bantry was coming home from India,
not China. I changed this detail on a whim, because I have a greater
affinity for China, and I know a heck of a lot more about Taoist
magic than about any form of occultism from the Subcontinent (is there
a form of occultism from India that isn't bound up with, or based on, one
of the religious forms??)
A couple of the characters mentioned in NOCTURNE are actually real
human beings of the era: Helena Blavatsky (who features in one scene
with a speaking part); Eliphas Levi, and obviously the writer and
social reformist, George Bernard Shaw, (no relation to either Robert
or Martin), and Oscar Wilde were real individuals. But they form only small
facets of the background of the era.
The 1890s was a very fascinating time, where the surface morality of
England was a kind of scab over a festering wound of cruelty, neglect and
downright immorality. On the surface, adultery was condemned and if you
happened to be gay, you were headed for a prison cell ... two inches under the
surface, brothels prospered, and some of them were full of *very* young
kids who should never have been within a mile of these places. In NOCTURNE,
I've tried not to gloss over anything, but I also haven't glamorized the
dark side of London and Paris. I tried to depict every 'face' the city could
put on, faithfully.
To get a feel for the era, you could do a lot worse than run some movies
set in the 1890s. Filmmakers have been depicting the era accurately for as
long as movies have existed. The very best depictions I know of are
MURDER BY DECREE (Sherlock Holmes solves the riddle of Jack the Ripper),
and the JACK THE RIPPER miniseries done about 15 years ago, where Michael
Caine solves the riddle, and isn't even Sherlock Holmes. There's also
the late-1980s HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (Ian Richardson), which was
very well done; and if you're curious about the British presence in the
Far East, run FIFTY-FIVE DAYS AT PEKING (crudely synopsized as Charlton
Heston, bless him, wins the Boxer Rebellion).
My favorite part of NOCTURNE is the biographical chapter in the middle:
a man's life in 10,000 words, spanning four centuries of adventure,
misadventure, love, loss, drama, desperation, the works. This is the
bit where I, as a writer, get to jump in with both feet and let the
fantasy roll ... this was also the part where the research consumed my
spare time for about five weeks, back in 1986. All of the names I'm
dropping (Caravaggio, Titian, David, Palestrina, Handel, Mozart), are
obviously historical figures. If you don't recognize them, pick up an
Encyclopaedia. It was massive fun to whisk my vampyre through the
Europe of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth Centuries.
But 95% of the action takes place in the world of 1892-1893, and I
strove to get it right. I was nipping and tucking the research all along
the way. For example: the country in East Africa which is now called
Zimbabwe used to be called Rhodesia. But not in 1892! What in the world
was it called prior to inheriting its middle-period name from a Brit
explorer? Turns out, it was called Zambia. Another example: if you hailed
a taxi-cab on the street in Vince Bantry's day, it would he horse-drawn,
and what was it called? If it had four wheels and you called it a
hansom cab, you'd be wrong, because a hansom had *two* wheels only! (And
the spelling of 'hansom' is correct ... there's no 'd' in that word).
Research questions to be answered: when did telephones become common,
when were houses plumbed for gaslight ... what the (bleep) is a
gasmantle, what fiction was contemporary in '92 ...? Suffice to say,
it was quite a job to get it all right and movies won't help much! But
if you enjoy reconstructing a past age, it can be very gratifying.
The geography of NOCTURNE was a major challenge, and I admit, a large
part of it was done from maps. But I was lucky enough to be able to draw
on the real-life reminiscences of an old friend who, looooong ago, visited
the Camargue and was able to describe it as it would have been a good
half-century ago. I'm playing a hunch that little changed beteen the 1890s
and the 1950s, and the Camargue as reconstructed by me for this novel is
based on those real-life reminiscences.
The book's Languages were another challenge! Most characters in the
novel are English, but some are French, Italian, one is nominally a
Spaniard. I tried to stay away from putting too much into French and
Italian, because nothing annoys me, personally, more than being
confronted by a ream of dialog I don't understand, because I just plain,
flat-out, don't speak a third or fourth language. There are snippets
of French, Italian and Latin in the book, but not enough to be annoying,
I guarantee. However, I had vast fun in designing the way the opera
singer from Milan speaks English. Luigi Scozza turned out to be one of
the best characters in NOCTURNE, and his speech patterns were both a
challenge, and a load of fun.
|
See the SF list
The Vampyre series continues with TWILIGHT
(Click to see the cover much larger)