All Things Great and Good
Thanks to Ginosion, I have another review for Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog, woo hoo! Ginosion’s a good friend and I appreciate him taking the time to write a review immediately upon reading my blog post yesterday. So, I think I’m going to dedicate this post to Ginosion and other good and great things on the Internet that have come my way recently 🙂
I am a subscriber to WOSSNAME which is a great e-mail newsletter for fans of Terry Pratchett and his Discworld series. Yes, they are all good and great things but that’s not the thrust of this article here 🙂 In the latest issue of WOSSNAME, they featured Discworld art by an artist named Ruben de Vela. Now I like good art. I can’t draw well enough to beat a man with palsy in a gun battle, but I certainly enjoy good art when I see it. And I was blown away by the examples of Ruben’s artwork that WOSSNAME featured. (Oh yeah, if you’re curious, the newsletter linked to Squeak, A Hat Full of Sky, and Angua by Ruben.)
While I enjoyed all of the images, I was especially struck by the one of Angua. There were so many tiny little details to the piece which brought the spirit of Discworld to life; from the tower of art in the background to the posters on the wall which, instead of gibberish, had actual Discworld (and Ankh Morpork) related stuff. Additionally, the kind of 3D perspective the painting had and the quaint old-world feel that the buildings conveyed was just fabulous.
Of cousre, this was before I discovered Ruben’s deviantART gallery and discovered his own comments on the image. Apparently there were things I’d missed about the image in my first few looks, like Gaspode the wonder dog and CMOT Dibbler! That just confirmed, in my own mind at least, how intricate and detailed that particular image was 🙂
As I think I’ve mentioned before here on this blog, I enjoy the detailed, crammed-to-the-brim-with-references covers that Josh Kirby used to do, especially for the Discworld series. I absolutely love that kind of artwork over your normal, humdrum one-idea, one-image kind of cover. Ruben looks as if he might be the kind of person who can pull off the Josh Kirby-esque artwork that I love so much. I wish him the best and hope that someday, he will indeed be doing work equivalent to that of Kirby because we need another Kirby, darn it! 😀
[pg-image src=”http://rubendevela.com/out/Angua.jpg” caption=”Angua © Ruben de Vela”] [pg-image src=”http://rubendevela.com/out/A_Hat_Full_of_Sky.jpg” caption=”A Hat Full of Sky © Ruben de Vela”] [pg-image src=”http://rubendevela.com/out/SQUEAK.jpg” caption=”The Death of Rats © Ruben de Vela”]
I actually remember seeing his Ender’s Game fan art when it first hit the net a while ago. Its actually one of my favorite pieces of art ever.
[…] my previous post about Ruben de Vela and his artwork, I began thinking (and yes, I know that’s not good for me […]
He did Ender’s Game artwork? I’ll have to check it out. 🙂
My favourite of his thus far is A Hatful of Sky. It’s absolutely beautiful.
[…] course, there’s another issue. When I wrote the plugin, I was testing things with the entry I did on Ruben de Vela. Now all of Ruben’s images were direct links to a specific image file. […]
Ha! Very Ghibli. I like it!