peteryoung | Entries tagged with bsfa

I'm nominating five pieces of artwork for this year's BSFA 'Best Artwork' Award, all cover illustrations in great variety. And if you've left it late like me, get your nominations in quick by midnight on 13 January!

( Under the cut, listed alphabetically by cover artist... )

It's that time of year to nominate!

Under the cut are what I consider to be four excellent examples of science fiction illustration that I'm nominating for the 2010 BSFA 'Best Artwork' Award, with some commentary on each. I take this award a little more seriously than the other categories because I'm of the certain opinion that in recent years it has needed a bit of a push. I may write about my reasons for saying this after this year's Awards.

This year I'm nominating four illustrations, a mixture of professional, semi-pro and amateur artists; I am certain the two book cover images appeared for the first time in 2010 although of course I'm less sure about the histories of the other two works. Also, it was a conscious decision this year to have a 50/50 split between dynamic imagery and more static imagery. I should also mention that I don't know any of the artists personally (although I did exhibit alongside Dominic Harman at Concourse in 2004), so it's not as if I'm pimping for friends.

Please go ahead and nominate artwork of your own choice – and indeed books, short stories and non-fiction – because the more people who take part by nominating and voting, the more fun it becomes. The current list of nominees so far can be found here, and of course you can also nominate something that has already been nominated – indeed this is how nominees make it from the longlist to the shortlist. The ground rules are here, and the nomination deadline is midnight on January 14th 2011.

( Here be monsters... )

For this month's BSFA event, tomorrow tonight I will be interviewing multiple Hugo and BSFA award-winning artist Jim Burns,
at the Upstairs Room, The Antelope Tavern, 22 Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London SW1W 8EZ. Nearest tube: Sloane Square (District/Circle line).

We'll be looking back at nearly forty years as one of the world's most individualistic SF illustrators, and studiously avoiding the question "Where do you get your ideas?"

Jim is also bringing along some original artwork, plus two signed copies of his book Transluminal for the raffle.

I've mentioned before how the photo on the left came about in March, but a newer version has today appeared as the cover of Vector #256 (the journal of the British Science Fiction Association), an issue which features tributes to and discussion of Arthur C. Clarke, who was President of the BSFA.

despotliz kindly asked to use the first image on the cover but I wanted to improve upon it. A photo of my iPhone – the iPhone is far more obelisk-like, y'see – was taken at a similar angle to the previous image and dropped onto the same star-like background (actually a café table in Hong Kong). I had to heavily retouch the iPhone for smoothness and make it blend in properly, then I used a famous image of Clarke on the display, tilted it back and added some lens flare (I tried uploading the photo onto my iPhone first and taking a photo of that, but it lost too much clarity). There's also a detail only really visible on the magazine cover: reflected at the bottom left corner of the iPhone you can see Conway Hall in London, where the BSFA holds its AGM.