Blood Relations

Book cover: Blood Relations

A particularly complex image. The three figures represent characters from my novel Blood Relations. Clockwise from the top, Captain-father Neil B, Arrizida Yokoi, and Usona Vabbidge. All three were built by "tracing" over photos of models.

My biggest challenge was to find a blonde Asiatic female model suitable for Zida. I finally found some images of one on a web site devoted to the display of ladies of -- uh -- questionable morality. *sigh* Be that as it may, I'm pretty happy with the way her hair came out. Usona, the black female on the left, raised her own set of problems. Her hair isn't quite right -- it ougfht to be glossier, with thicker curls, but I was fed up with the piece by the time I got to her so I gave her a bad-hair-day sort of look and left it at that. The planet in the background is actually a color-manipulated NASA photo of Jupiter's moon Io. The spaceship was built in trueSpace and is actually a very complex 3D mesh. But it is so small here that the details are lost.

Oh -- and what is that little critter sitting on Usona's sholuder? It's her pet, a "genie," an artificial lifeform modeled on the Golden Lion Tamarind. His name is Pyewacket and he plays a pivitol role in the book.

I've seen how good this piece looks in print, having ordered a POD (print on demand) copy of BR from Amazon dot com. Very nice. All the effort paid off.