For this year’s Realm Makers, a speculative fiction writing conference I attend every year, I decided to go to the costume banquet dressed as Bob Ross, the painter of television fame, as if he were a Fremen from the planet Arrakis (Dune). As part of this I drew four sandworm illustrations for use on postcards. I’ll be handing these out saying, “Hi, I’m Bob Ross of the Fremen and we’re painting happy little sandworms.” I’m hoping that this crowd will be amused. But I’m prepared to crash and burn.
Big Mouth Sandworm
These drawings are not meant to be accurate portrayals of the creatures Frank Herbert describes in his book Dune. They’re more of a parody. In this one I drew a sandworm, with a very large mouth, rising up out of the desert to swallow an ornithopter in midair.
Here’s the original sketch torn from my notebook. I liked it well enough that I scanned it, enlarged it, printed it, and traced it.
You may notice a couple of changes I made. The most obvious is probably the ornithopter. I decided it was too low and moved it up closer to the sandworm’s mouth. The other change is about halfway down the sandworm’s body where it looks like there’s an eye staring out at the ’thopter. It was supposed to be simply a blemish on the skin of the worm. It didn’t really turn out that way so I got rid of it.
The line art was drawn on smooth Bristol board with brush pens. I scanned it at 1200dpi with an Epson V600 Photo scanner as a TIFF. Color was added digitally. In another post I’ll talk about the software I use and how I use it.
Printing of the postcards was done by Specialized Printed Products and I’m very happy with the finished product. I had shopped other online quick prints and just couldn’t get what I wanted for an acceptable price.