The Clouds Will Soon Roll By (30x20") Poster

Here's a new large image from my world of Retropolis: it's called "The Clouds Will Soon Roll By", after a song from 1932 (Woods, Dixon/Lawrence). Because that's just the sort of future it is. I spent about six weeks on the picture. It started as a rough little animatic that used my pre-existing monorail and city models. I did this as part of a pitch I was hired to work on, for a series of station IDs meant for a renamed and relaunched satellite channel. Unlike 99% of the pitches I've ever worked on (or heard of) this one was greenlit. Amazing! A week later, the network decided they didn't want to rebrand the channel after all. Typical! This scene never even appeared in the final pitch, but I'd gotten sort of interested in it and I kept working away, thinking it'd turn into a print at about 18 x 24". It started working so well that I decided to make it even bigger, which meant that I had to up the resolution on almost all its elements, and so like I said I ended up working on it for about six weeks. There are 21 characters in this final version. We see a group debarking from the monorail - and at least one passenger about to board - while up above, a construction crew is overseeing a couple of "Big Lug" robots, and in the foreground, we've got a pleasant evening party getting started on an art deco balcony. Retropolis itself fades off into the distance and we see that what we always suspected about this sort of City of the Future is true - it's a terrific playground for the birds. This picture's proved to be a sort of watershed for me. First off, it's the first picture I've done on my newly built latest computer and I was happy to have so much more memory, and faster processing, than I had before. But also it's a sort of break from a lot of the work that I've been doing on a very large project. No matter how hard I work on that one I never seem to be any closer to a finished piece of work, and when I go for a very long time without making a finished piece I like I start to get grumpy. So having finished this, I am a considerably less grumpy artist.