lightsail design

Reflections is part of an ongoing series of post apocalypse images I am working on.

I’m working on a series of post apocalypse pieces. The different elements are being created using a combination of images created in a 3d program and photography that gives a crisp sense of realism to the fantasy.

A work in progress. Just one in a series

This is cover artwork is for a novel that I am writing (Inside Outside) speculative fiction. Of course I have the cover finished before the book. The image was created in Bryce with a little help from Photoshop to clean it up, below is an excerpt.

There was a crisp wind and dead leaves swirled around his feet as Carl Grauer descended the long curved stairwell that had been for years the main entrance to the Greenwalk. Looking up he saw, carved in Stone above the stairway, the familiar legend, Chicago World Exhibition Erected 2020. He took off his gloves and put them in the pocket of his coat, as he stepped slowly down the stairs into the sea of human flotsam. All around him was the insectile buzz of a thousand voices; the scraping, shifting and shuffling of feet. They were to him a blur of colors and shapes, a pulsing mindless stream of movement in a canyon of fetid air. He walked among them silently observing.

Before him, displayed in meticulous detail, was a replica of S. Halted Street Circa 1920 under a huge dome of midnight blue. He stopped in front of a shoe repair shop with a faded green and white-stripped awning. Through the window he could see a small bald man bent over a workbench surrounded by old shoes who seemed to be working feverishly. Next to him was Capon’s Italian restaurant complete with the strains of Rigoletto from an ancient radio mixed with the tangy smell of red sauce and a hundred years of spilt wine; and on the corner was the Capesie Brothers Confection were two grim face men in tee-shirt argued loudly. He walked with care on the slick cobblestone street past a German bakery, a hardware store past a man selling hot dogs and roasted chestnuts from a pushcart. Most of the displays had been sold at the close of the fair and turned into the business they had been built to represent, but some like the hardware store had been saved to add texture to the street.

One of the best draws for the street was the recently upgraded holograph of a gangster style drive by shooting. Twice each evening at 7 and 9 a portion of the street and sidewalk erupted in nonstop carnage as a heavily armed 1924 Cadillac swept round the corner from nowhere; Bodies fell limp, blood gushed and guns blazed. Because it was popular to dress in period, you could always tell the holographs from the real people when the holographs ran for cover; the audience loved it.

Carl didn’t wait for the performance but walked further down the green walk. The holographs, ghostlike and translucent, had been integrated into each scene in such a way as to seem an almost natural part of the street. The woman with the tight red dress and the man in a broad brimmed hat stood locked in a endless conversation haunting the diner they stood before.

As he continued beyond the original site of the exhibition, the odd street changed in character. Gone was the continuity of city planning, in it place was wild growth. Antique shops stood next to topless bars, VR-cades and coffee shops.

Copyright © David Loew 2007

You can see more of my work at www.Chicagoprintgallery.com

You can see more of my work at www.Chicagoprintgallery.com

Flopped Chopped and Channelled

The Boneyard Café,

This piece evolved out of a series I was working on that had a post apocalyptic feel to it. I was working with large textured abstract shapes against the most ordinary of environment. In this case a diner.

One of my earliest influences was Rod Serling. He knew that our reality exists within a very narrow spectrum and that the slightest shift sets us adrift.

If we change the context of our life we slip into the surreal.

Dawn of the Vampire
by William Hill
Cover artwork by David Loew

I received the assignment for Dawn of the Vampire in the spring of 1989. This was not the first horror book cover that I’ve done but it is one of my favorites and my first Vampire book cover.

The technique was a combination of photography, darkroom maneuvers and acrylic airbrush.

I was living on a lake, in Woodbury, a bucolic town snuggled in the rolling hills of Connecticut, quintessential Americana.

The art direction was simple and straightforward. Give me a vampire rising out of the water with a full moon on the horizon and make it scarry.

My biggest Challenge was finding the right model. This was not something I could shoot in a studio in NYC. So I looked for a model among my friends and neighbors. I had been living in Connecticut for less then a year so friends where few and far between. I had gotten to know a few locals at my favorite diner, Laurel Café, named after the former owner.

The current owner and my favorite waitress was Jody. She was in her thirties with blond hair, a ruddy complexion and German good looks. It was her friends and family that made me feel at home.

One of her friends was a big handsome kid with dark hair with the coolest car I’ve ever seen. It was a hotrod that had been flopped, chopped, and channeled. Roy was a professional bull rider. In fact it seems Jody grew up on a horse ranch so she new a lot of cowboys. Her mother was even a barrel racer.

Ok back to Dawn of the Vampire. Jody was having a party at her house so I talked Roy into getting into the water and took some pretty interesting pictures.. Some how they all looked more like Return of the Living Dead, just not quite right.

My next victum was a friend of mine, a jazz musician, who was up visiting from Chicago. He had a long laconic face, big hands and slender fingers.. I prepared for the shoot by dressing him up with fake fingernails and painted his face and hands white.

He backed into the cold lake water at dusk and I followed with my camera careful to keep it dry. This time the light was perfect and the shots came out better then I expected.

Many thanks to Mark Krumich still playing Jazz in clubs around Miami.