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.

The print is a print-on-demand reproduction of my digital painting. Its resolution is 300 DPI at a full size of 30 by 20 inches. There's a narrow border on the sides all around the image area. You can frame the print as is or matte it, if you like, to a different shape.
 

These prints are made to order by deviantPrints, using an archival quality photographic process on Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper. They're rated to last over 100 years without fading - though no prints should be left where they'll be baked by direct sunlight. The color fidelity, clarity and paper weight of these prints is far superior to the poster-quality reproductions I also sell here. They're pretty much the bee's knees.

You can order a print in either glossy or matte finish. This is mainly a matter of personal taste, but I do think that the glossy prints give you a sharper representation of the original digital image.

When you add one of these archival prints to your prints shopping cart it will pop up in a new window. You can keep browsing through these pages and add new items as you go. The shopping cart window will update as you add more items. When you're ready to check out, do so in the cart window and you'll be taken through the ordering process.

These archival quality prints are supplied by a different vendor than my other merchandise, and use a separate shopping cart. You cannot place a single order for both archival prints and, for example, coffee mugs.

Archival prints will ship separately from other items.