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Since Arizona Kenopsia will be released soon, with so much art filling its pages, I feel it’s a good time to let readers know how the sausage is made! The illustrations begin their lives as Daz Studio renders like this one, with many adjustments made to the lighting following wisdom I’ve acquired from FZD School tutorials and others. After that, I use either a Wacom or Huion tablet to draw on top of the renders. The end result shows some of the digital skeleton, revealing the digital nature of the work, but has plenty of organic flourishes to better express my vision of the scene.  An early work-in-progress shot of this illustration where the Daz Studio render is more visible along with the photobashed pictures from my personal library and some hand drawn elements just getting started.  The final work of art showcasing all my hand-drawn details and some filtering to create a little extra magic. The most controversial thing I have done is use filters to soften the polygon edges and conceal some of the 3D components of the art. I did this mostly in works made between 2019 and 2022 using a technique called deep style transfer. It leaves a digital imprint on the art—a sort of tell-tale sign that this was made with a computer rather than physical paint. Unfortunately, prompt based generative art emerged from the AI world later on, something I don’t use to make these digital illustrations, and people often mistake any trace of digital magic for “AI art.” I’ve received a lot of hate when people assume I'm using prompts to generate my art. Most people just don’t know any better, and couldn’t tell you the difference between prompt-based generation and deep style transfer filters. The prompt-based generation is where the whole world suddenly made a 180 degree turn against computer intelligence in art, for understandable reasons, and where I drew a personal line for myself. I insist on making my own art, not having others make it for me. Using prompt-generated art to create art from a database of other people’s art requires relinquishing control to a degree that a control freak like me isn’t okay with, since the art is no longer really an expression of myself if I do that. It’s other people’s art Franksteined together. Many of the AI models are trained on artworks that are made by artists who have received lessons in lighting identical to those I did. The concept art industry has shaped many illustrators like me thanks to FZD School tutorials. Now the AI is absorbing that knowledge and using it, and many of us who still do things the old way are accused inappropriately of using AI prompts to generate the art for us. The unfortunate truth is that it's very hard to make digital art without being accused of using AI because any tell-tale signs of the digital process are often mistaken for proof the art was made with AI. Even I can only guess with about %60 accuracy if something has been made with generative prompts. The websites and apps used to figure it out are also equally bad at it, and man, am I ever sick of being mistaken for an AI artist, because my art is a representation of me and what is in my heart. Not other people. I can guarantee my works are organic Daz Studio renders with photobashing, my digital painting, and occasional filters applied. That’s it. I have the work-in-progress images to prove this, showcasing the 3D models used and more, but realistically…there’s a limit to how much I want to spend time arguing with a lynch mob composed of people who are less educated on the subject. Hate’s a powerful thing, and I can only be arsed to care so much about the opinions of strangers. August 25th marks the release of Arizona Kenopsia, a project that took me years to make. If you want to possess the largest and most ambitious of my works, this is the one!
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If you play through Chrono Trigger as an adult and revisit the story and its graphical presentation, you’ll notice a few oddities that seems either miraculous or absurd. The developers were working with a visual shorthand that communicated to us intuitively rather than literally, and this extends even into the literary devices in the storytelling. The end result is a game that leaves an astonishing amount out of the storytelling, things which we might only notice with repeated playthroughs, with cooler, more mature heads. The first and most striking to me is the complete lack of horses or chocobos or any kind of beast of burden that could carry a mounted knight or pull a heavy load. Without any such animals, no castles can be built, or any form of larger architecture. Long distance journeys are unreasonably ambitious on foot. Combat is relegated to whatever can be accomplished on foot. And yet we see the castle is built, and the people are traveling from one town to another—on foot across Zenan bridge—to reach the Millennial Fair as truly sad music plays. The world is built without load bearing animals, and its people travel long distances on foot. Its knights defend Zenan Bridge on foot. Even Cyrus battles the Frog King on foot. No horses or any equivalent are shown to exist in this world, a presumably medieval world that should depend on them or something equivalent like a chocobo. It isn’t until the future that a race car is shown to help people travel across land. I have received pushback on this point in the form of, what about the boat in 1000 AD, the Dragon Tank, and the Black Omen? The boat is not a load bearing animal that aids construction of castles or carries knights into combat or helps people walk on land--so what about it? The dragon tank is unmanned, propelling itself forward without passengers and casting its own magic. The Black Omen is a flying object from another time period that was built--again--without load bearing animals required to create such a thing. Really magical and having no impact at all on the relative technological advancement of the people below it. None of these are the horses or donkeys or chocobos that 600 AD or 1000 AD would need. The game explicitly shows the knights fighting on foot and people walking to the Millennial Fair from another town on foot, rendering the implied existence of these animals dubious upon serious inspection. Chrono Trigger shows us a radically different world if we take it at face value, but when we played it as kids, we assumed what made sense to us and carried on. And of course, you can continue reading your own impression into the game if you choose; it doesn't impact the dramatic beats of the plot.  Crono and his team deliver food to the starving army at Zenan Bridge, presumably enough to save the army from starvation. His team has three people, and they feed an army. While Crono is compared to Jesus often enough, this isn’t strictly possible. What had to happen was Crono and his team escorted a “baggage train” that would be used to feed the army, a lengthy chain of wagons with potentially a hundred people cooking, cleaning, and carrying supplies for the soldiers. This is how real medieval armies were fed. No three people could ever transport food of any meaningful amount to an army.  Further back in time, the technologically superior reptites attack humans—with their bare hands. They carry no weapons. Their attack animations show them doing something silly with their hands. Strange. But we’re meant to assume that these reptites have the capacity to innovate and to build incredible buildings that tower overhead. Their doors open at the press of a button, among other things. They couldn’t innovate weapons or—again—ride a load bearing animal. None of this could play out as it does on screen. We assumed what made sense to us in our heads, and followed the story beats as the music and drama guided our thoughts. This extends into the literature, the writing of the story itself. Magus defeats his mother at the end of the Black Omen, and following her defeat, she dies in a blast of light, presumably from either Lavos or as part of her own death animation. But she is dead, and Magus is responsible, and yet he says nothing at this turn of events. It’s an icy cold way of letting us know that he’s not a warm, expressive person. But no person in any context would go through this without commentary, without development of thoughts through dialogue. This is the shorthand at work again, Magus’s icy demeanor manifest through the developers’ magic trick of showing less and letting us fill in the blanks. We understand these things intuitively while playing the game, and so we accept and appreciate the game’s shorthand communication style. Only with sober retrospection is this magic trick obvious. Should the game ever be remade, these things would be obvious to a fault. Plenty of SNES games had horses and chocobos and characters who expressed their feelings at the deaths of loved ones; there’s no technical reason Chrono Trigger couldn’t have done it. But there’s some magic in how the art and drama of the game caused us to overlook these gaps when we first played the game decades ago.   Without a doubt, Byzantine is my most ambitious work I've published so far. It's just over 200 pages of art and storytelling set in a fantastic world of afterlife adventures and treats. With over twenty illustrations, this is the largest collection of my artwork in print anywhere! You can read about it on Amazon.
This book explores the absurdity of people existing in Heaven as they do on Earth. The protagonist seeks what’s most important to her. A bureaucratic system of deeply imperfect people hold her back. It’s romantic, it’s a bit comical, and it’s honest about the absurd hopes that we have of recognizing each other if we meet on the other side. It’s a dream, but byzantine. That's all I'll say about it for now. I have one more trick up my sleave after this... Most of the creative projects on the internet, from video games to comics, novels, and everything in between, never get finished. They're products of people giving their second-best energy, their sloppy-seconds afterthoughts to the arts. The whirlwind of ideas and pretty pictures is fun when you're young, but it breaks you when you're middle-aged: the internet is a wasteland of dead projects and deader artists. Social media is an ocean of OCs, excerpts, prototype images, and mockups that go nowhere. All this creative energy dissipates, leaving so many artists empty-handed and bitter.
In 2023 I got a short story published through Grendel Press, in 2024 I self-published a novella, and in 2025 I've self-published a novel and am preparing to self-publish a second novel. The works are finished, but they're worthless if no one gets to experience them! I'm making sure they're available to those who have an interest in what I make. All these hours of work culminate in products that can move people whose hearts are open. Between AI witch hunts and overt politicization of spaces intruded upon by interlopers who value politics more than art, the internet's creative spaces are poisoned wells. A person can only become a resentful and bitter product of hate by lingering here. After Arizona Kenopsia is published--either late this year or early next year--I'm going to take an adventure somewhere strange and beautiful, where art is king and no one knows what's happening on X or Bluesky. Where the children with messianic complexes and half-written stories are nowhere to be found, but the hours are spent revering process, completing works, and valuing merit and craft. On Easter, Byzantine will be published through Amazon's KDP program. I'll make sure to share the link here! A full-length novel, this work is much larger than The Celtic Quest of Casey Byrne. It tells overlapping and interweaving stories about Sarah Lambert's adventures in the afterlife, where she seeks her missing boyfriend and confronts the abusive power structure she finds along the way. It's about 200 pages of magical adventure with wild characters and mystical locations.
I didn't feel like the publication companies I was reading about could appreciate it. The work is too unique, and the illustrations will cause it to be too costly for these companies to invest in since I'm not well-known enough. Since I don't want this to sit on my hard drive any longer, I'm doing this my way and self-publishing it. Stay tuned for more info. I've seen impressive advances in AI recently, and I understand it will only be a matter of time before the machines can create masterpieces of art and writing much faster than any of us can. I've been forced to reevaluate what makes art valuable.
The AI cannot generate the context that creates the art; that's a life that you must live. That part primes us to interpret art a specific way, and even to create it a certain way. That part has to be lived and can't be generated any other way. When I wrote Arizona Kenopsia, it was in response to a historic time and place that can't be replicated. I saw Arizona with the eyes of a newly arrived stranger, and it inspired in me an alien, hostile future of science fiction as bizarre as Mars. I encountered the pandemic in this context. I saw the world shut down and busy places become ghost towns. I became chronically ill, and understood the shift in ethics and ruminations that causes. Arizona Kenopsia, with its many distinct qualities, is anchored in a time and place real to all of us, but especially to me. Everything we took for granted was closing, shrinking, hiding away. Strip malls became barren. The media, professors, and jurors became dubious instruments of the regime. Life receded into illness. Every day we asked ourselves what in the world it was for, but doggedly persisted in the courageous and selfless act of living. That will never lose its value. I'll write more on what makes each thing I write valuable. The context I give the writing is just as important as the art and writing. The context is the life I lived and shared with some of you. My sci-fi novel, Arizona Kenopsia, is in beta reading right now. That means that it's receiving comments from a very kind reader who is helping me sculpt it into the best possible shape. One day it will be published, either traditionally or not. It's packed with illustrations and the beta reading process is helping me transform it.
The Casey Byrne series of short stories is a fantasy adventure about an unlikely hero facing daunting monsters. It's about developing and maintaining character in a world gone wrong. It ends well! It will be released first here on Royal Road starting December 13th. Please support me there by posting a review of it. In the distant future, it may be self-published on Amazon so you can own a physical copy. I have other plates spinning, but if I say too much too soon, I can mess them up. Enjoy your Christmas and New Year's Eve! I'm looking for my place in the world of storytelling and illustration. I'm thrilled by the success of Death in the Highlands; it's now published in an anthology called The Devil Who Loves Me and available on Amazon. After tasting success, I only want more. Plenty more.
I'm considering other things I can do to share my creative work with people. The next year will be a time of experimentation. I have nearly a dozen polished short stories and about three rough novels tragically sitting on my hard drives. They're wasted there. I'll keep you posted on where they're published or accessible to the public when the time comes. This blog should also humanize me. I am indeed a person, and hopefully not too much of a stranger. I grew up obsessing over the 16 bit world. I like to read speculative fiction books, but I especially enjoy beta-reading. I don't have cable television service and I never will. I'm fighting chronic illness that forces me to treat each day as a blessed opportunity to do the things I was meant to do. Not a single day is superfluous. Every moment matters. With art and writing we can go somewhere else and bring knowledge and wisdom back with us when we return. Let's leave planet Earth together for a while. |
Melrose DowdyAuthor of Death in the Highlands, illustrator of many more things. I woke up today. I'll create something. Archives
May 2025
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