Issue 09 Cover Reveal and Process!

Art Director Riley reporting in for Wizards in Space! I'm thrilled to reveal the book cover art for our final issue and talk about the art process for a bit if thats all cool with you.

Alt text: An illustration featuring flowing clouds with a group of etheral owls flying by. In the clouds are flowing lines of colors in the rainbow. From the pockets of exposed sky is falling stars.

For this issue, we wanted to focus on the theme of chapters. How they start, how they end, and everything in between. As an artist, it’s a little intimidating to create an image with such a open ended theme. This cover has changed the most throughout the designing process than any other cover before it.

Stage One: Inspiration and Sketches

My first direction was researching in astronomy what encapsulated the theme chapters to me. So I was reading about black holes, supernovas, and most importantly nebulas. I was really interested in how dramatic beginnings and endings are in space. As you can tell by that idea in the lower half of the image, I had considered drawing a supernova. I just couldn’t figure out how I would render it in the style of WiS. It was also maybe just a tad too on the nose and dramatic for me in the end.

I pivoted to how the clouds of gases I was looking at in my research was just too beautiful in their own right. How they both looked flowy and yet still at the same time. Olivia and I had discussed before how for the final issue, it would be important to incorporate all the colors of the rainbow. Nebulas could easily fulfill that goal. I drew the top two concepts after my research. Struggling now on the composition of said clouds. I could either use them as guides for the eye to travel along the cover, reading the title in a slanted stack. Or I could make the clouds more cohesive and the title centered, creating a visual feeling of more stability.

I am sharing my progress to my trusted friends to hear their opinions. It seemed like once people got the context that this was the final issue, they leaned more to the stable centered composition. But because it was almost split down the middle, that tells me there is more work to be done to see what works for both of these ideas and how I can incorporate that. I cut up a version that kept the top clouds from the slanted composition and the bottom clouds of the stable composition. To me it was these clouds that look best and provide the most movement, they just needed to combined.

Stage Two: Experimenting and Pushing Through the Ugly Stage

Usually I would have an approved composition and go straight to final render (thanks to Olivia for trusting me that much). Yet I still had questions for this cover! It’s time to experiment with the render and see what I would find at the end. This of course takes more work and valuable time, but when you feel a disconnect from your head and your hands, you must push through the Ugly Stage in order to figure out what you want. The Ugly Stage is simply the foundational (and bulk) part of art creation that often looks nothing like what what you want. This stage is the hardest for every artist and can make your confidence wane by the minute.

In the image above, you can see a view of the process during this stage. The first cover in the line up is the original Ugly Stage render. Its messy, the textures are too much, and the lighting is not balanced. These mistakes are so crucial for me, because I often have to see what doesn’t work to find out what will. That’s the beauty of allowing yourself to experiment during the Ugly Stage, even if its not as streamlined as doing studies before going to the final render.

In the second version, I redrew the clouds entirely, making them more flat so it fit the style of the past issues. I start to draw the color wavelengths with a pencil brush so I could control how they’d look. Adding shooting stars in between the clouds to provide more visual interest and to lessen the harshness of the negative space.

In the third and fourth versions, I explore more with adding visual interest. Originally I thought the clouds would be too busy to incorporate other elements. Now I can see I needed something more. Trying first a moon (a tried and true method of issues past) but it felt too heavy on the page. I remembered the owl in Issue 02, and knew it was meant to be. As my nebula looks similar to the clouds we see at night, they fit perfectly.

Stage Three: Refining and Final Work

There is yet still some more things to correct as we get closer to the finish line. During the refining stage I was dealing with a family emergency, so I took to refining the color wavelengths and owls despite knowing there was something wrong with the composition itself. It was the easier fix to worry about while I can leave myself mental bandwidth for my family. Giving myself those days to just worry about drawing a bunch of lines over and over let me consider adding more owls to guide the eye through the image, and my biggest fix: changing the direction of the bottom clouds.

Simply flipping the bottom clouds had changed the entire image. I realized I was relying too much on the clouds as a guide for the eyes to follow through the image, when really the owls were doing a fine job of that. By making the clouds flow in the same direction instead of the zig-zag, they look way more cohesive.
All there was left to do was adding some darker colors behind any owls that overlapped the clouds (so they would pop), and format the title. The cover was done.

I learned so much through this cover, more than any of the past covers. I broke some rules, and it lead to great discoveries. Even if the cover may seem different from the earliest of issues, it truly is a testament of time. Those first couple of issues I was still in high school learning how to draw. And now I’ve graduated art school and still learning how to draw. I will miss the yearly ritual of trying to visual what world that has space wizards look like. Thanks for coming along the journey with me.

- Riley, Art Director

Down to a Tea

Tristan Marajh, Issue 07
Previously published in Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine

To my exes and estranged,
yet to budge from a grudge—
to those who are absent 
to those who resent,
to those who are distant with distaste:

I would like to invite you to tea
forty years from now
when we are old,
wrinkled and wringed out by the world
by those things that separated us—
money, lust, power,
status, ambition, trauma.

Let us sit down to tea
and put it all behind us
because forty years later,
it is all behind us.
Simply:
sit, sip, start again
from when our moments were simple and sweet,
like the people we chose to become.

~

Author’s Note:

Down to a Tea, when initially conceptualized, was expected to be a nonfiction piece, with earnest explorations of things humans compulsively chase throughout their lifetimes, unconsciously destroying relationships in the process. My aim for the piece was for the sweet, ultimate reconciliation of all individuals involved.

As I wouldn’t have chosen to closely fraternize with anyone who prioritized the vices mentioned in Down to a Tea, the poem isn’t about me. But it is about many other people and many other broken relationships. And usually, in the midst of those relationships, there were humble yet transcendent moments where the persons involved simply enjoyed each other; they laughed, shared and were nourished by the other’s compassion and empathy through pleasant company and conversations. The ending of Down to a Tea aims to recapture those moments, in purer aura: that of sweet, humble, cleansed old(er) age; an interaction almost holy, perhaps in the light of a loving sun.

Tristan Marajh is currently at work on two collections of short fiction.

when asked why I don't volunteer

Matthew E. Henry, Issue 07

because every professional development 
has become an exercise in emotional sharecropping—
unpaid labor, shackled in the red-faced sun
of small groups, whipped to explain everything 
they’ll forget when cut off in traffic, confined 
in an elevator, or too close on a sidewalk. 
or worse: auction-blocked, forced to open my mouth, 
show my teeth for all the assembled 
after speaking simple, uncomfortable truths 
in a breakout session full of buzzwords 
like “equity,” “inclusion,” and “antiracism.” 
because “diversity” means “we’ve allowed you 
to sit at our table, break our bread, become one of us—

almost,” and I’d rather pick cotton than explain, 
once again, that power is the number of times 
you can tell your story 
uninterrupted, 
only to be ignored for the next few semesters, 
centuries, or until another noose is found
in the bathroom stalls.

Celestial Bodies

Papermelon, Issue 07

Artist’s Statement:
"In these times of very uncertain feelings, the most important thing to me was to create a bridge between me. There were times of not understanding the frustrations or the why things are like this, but, in this life journey, after meeting my own body as a distant planet I was ready to discover whatever I should. This is my body and my own discoveries. And I think I'm very proud of them. - funny enough I can only remember a quote I read somewhere: ‘I'm thankful for my body, for being my home, protecting me and where I live on’, and as so it says, let us be keeping curious, brave, and gentle with ourselves as much as we are with others."

on parables

Matthew E. Henry, Issue 07
Previously published in Autofocus
Listen to the author read this piece HERE.

in sign language the difference
between hungry and horny
is only a matter of how vigorously 
an upturned hand traces a breastbone,
grasping some invisible need, signaling
a desire to never die from a lack
of food or love. so I watch your face
to hear all your still hands and lips
won’t say, your surface breaking 
the silence. the dimpled cheeks
and chin. the crescent moons
and wrinkles hedging your nose.
the tuck and folds of creased corners. 
the turned head, concealing the curve
of lids, the dilatation of desire.

Taste Collector

Amlanjyoti Goswami, Issue 06

Eat a little more, she says, it will tide over those rough days later.
Grandmother, long gone, in the village house at the harvest.
I’ve been collecting tastes all summer.
They stay in the tongue of memory.
What came first – khar, the alkali or the steamed rice?
Was it a copper or brass plate?
The aroma of my first biryani, white rice swirling from the pot.
My first burger, juicy and forbidden, at seventeen
In the big city. The first dimsums were fried not steamed.
The lush curry – my father’s tenga – sour with lemon and tomatoes
And some cumin. This is a poem not a recipe.
That akhaa jeera chach pulao. Meat filled. Untranslatable.
Grandmom’s dark gravy, smoke blown, pigeon.
Scientists will one day recover a place for all tastes in the tongue
Where is sour, where sweet, what is umami, where resides the spice
Route to the brain, to the cells where they preserve
Memories like pickles.
I will call everyone home for the perfect meal, a buffet of possibilities.
Like memory, hope and the granary, the options and servings
Will be unlimited. Baked with love. Made with attention,
That hidden ingredient lingering in my tongue
I cannot find a name for,
As I turn page after page after page
In that dictionary of memory. Call it what you like. It stays.
The one that will tide us through all the rough days.

Conversations with the Dragon and the Goblin in my Head

Avra Margariti, Issue 06

The dragon said, I know all about 
accumulated treasure: my silver and gold, 
my sapphire and emerald 
kept close to my sunless arrow-riddled body. 
But why do you hide a box of old grape-sour corks 
in the cavern of your desk drawer? 

And I said to the dragon, They’re the corks of the wine bottles
my father emptied in his belly at nine p.m. on Saturdays
just before he drove me to my piano lesson 
their bodies dyed ruby like the dull passage of time 
or the sharp edges of memory. 

And then the goblin, gutter junk clutched 
in its gleeful magpie grip, plastic six pack rings
a chokehold around its throat, said, 
Why do you keep a strand of your mother’s hair before the chemo
with a lock of her old synthetic wig 
(the one they almost buried with her but then they didn’t)? 

And I said to the goblin, 
Indeed, why do we hoard the things that hurt us, 
why is our grief so stained, yet so shiny still?