lightsail design

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