Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art

(23434) Job No:01-23425 Title:RP-Masters of Science Fiction&Fantasy Art

#175 Dtp:204 Page:6

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page 6 MASTERS of SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY ART

MASTERS of SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY ART page 7

(Text)

FOREWORD

JOE HALDEMAN

For some people this could be a very dangerous

book. If I had read it at the age of twelve, I might

have put aside my edgling writer’s typing machine

and picked up a brush—and embarked upon a life

marked with very different hazards and rewards.

The life stories here are that interesting. The worlds

to which they provide entry could be that alluring.

Karen Haber asked me to write this introduction

because we share a love of art, and she knows that I’m

a compulsive dabbler in it. My wife and I have traveled

all over the world with Karen and her husband Robert

Silverberg, and she knows that for decades I’ve kept

a travel diary of watercolor sketches.

I’ve never been a serious artist, in the sense of

knuckling down to spend the necessary years of study

and practice. But I do carry a notebook and watercolor

spitbox wherever I go, and every Saturday I bike

down to a studio to spend the morning with brush

in hand, staring at a nude woman, supposedly in the

service of art. So my interest in art may be less than

professional, but it’s more than casual.

At this writing, the book itself does not exist, of course;

I only have the draft manuscript of the interviews

and URLs I can type in to see the artists’ various

homepages and galleries. So while I was reading

the manuscript, I felt like I was listening in on

something marvelous that was transpiring in the next

room—but it will be another year before I get a peek

over the transom, to see what was really going on!

For instance, when Scott Fischer says, “I’ll often

use nothing but the polygon lasso tool, and bright-

ness and contrast to build up the planar shapes of a

painting . . . I have whole folders with nothing but

scanned traditional brush marks that I will lay on top

of a piece, playing with opacity, overlay, dodge and

burn, then erasing out areas where I don’t like the

effect,” there’s a whole nutshell lesson in how

to use a computer to make a picture. But without

actual pictures to illustrate the process, my visual

imagination can’t nish the job.

Computers and other high-tech tools do gure

strongly in all of these stories, of course. None

of these artists goes through the time-consuming

and nerve-wracking rigmarole that was the life cycle

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(23434) Job No:01-23425 Title:RP-Masters of Science Fiction&Fantasy Art

02-C60721 #175 Dtp:204 Page:6

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