If you've poked around this site for any length of time, you'll know that I'm a writer in addition to being an artist. In April, 1998, the ClocktowerFiction site launched a new online e-zine called Deep Outside, devoted to speculative and dark fiction. They bought a story from me entitled As Bad As It Gets, and asked me to contribute an illustration for the piece. How could I refuse?

This graphic was contructed primarily in trueSpace, my favorite 3D program. The bodies were whipped together in Poser 2 and exported as 3D Studio .3DS files to trueSpace, where varying skin tones were added to indicate racial differences. (There are actually 3 separate body types, according to weight, but the differences aren't readily apparent in the illustration.) Using one body as a template, I built a suspended-animation cabinet, including a transparent headset and several electrodes spaced here and there. For variety, each cabinet has an associated control panel consisting of an EEG display (I guess that's what it is!) and a video screen showing the sleeper's "dreams." There are 4 different waveform displays and 6 different dream tableaus. These were painted on to the wire mesh, separately, using trueSpace's PAINT FACE tool. I lit the scene as darkly as I could to heighten the mood.

The foreground face is a stock shot, enlarged so that it would "pixelate," then combined with a Poser wireframe head in Photoshop, using that program's powerful layering capability. All artists, bow down before the altar of Photoshop! I liked the wireframe effect, and needed to frame the figure off from the rest of the illustration, so I went back into trueSpace and captured the wireframe version of the scene I had built, with all the sleep-modules and bodies stacked up. In Photoshop again, I composited the wireframe scene into the fully-rendered version, and messed around with the RGB curves for some subtle color effects. Viola!

Then Viola and I went out for dinner.