Recycled Galleon

Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara contains a total of about 150 paintings and drawings. Out of that number, about 144 are newly created for the book. But half a dozen or so are images that pre-existed the story, and were originally created for an entirely different purpose.

One example is the painting of the flying galleon. The image illustrates the vision of Captain Goldsworthy Marlinspike, who presides over Bilgewater, a village made up of sailing ships turned up on end.

I did this painting twenty-five years ago for the cover of a science fiction paperback book called Annals of Klepsis by R.A. Lafferty about some space pirates.

The painting was already sold to a collector, so retouching it was out of the question. But I had to get rid of the pirate motif on the flag and the plume of smoke (which didn’t make sense in space anyway--but then neither does the wind or gravity on the flag and sails, come to think of it).

So I did some Photoshop retouching work (the only use of Photoshop in the entire book) to make the necessary changes and to flop the image.

Speaking of recycling, thank you Dr. Fabre for the post about Dinotopian retro-tech on your fun blog Voyages of a Steampunk Physician.