Love and Reclamation: Love Bites
Story Art and Notes
Valhalla Point
I used the Love Bites artwork in Pulp Kings 7 as a chance to experiment for the upcoming Love and Reclamation standalone release, and was pretty jazzed with how the story art turned out. Colour was the first thing I thought about, picking a contrasting palette of purples, blues, and pinks to match the space-adventure and romances themes in James’ novel. To capture the imaginative and dreamy qualities of the novel, I blew out and blended the colors and threw heavy lines on top.
Before anything else, I made a space background, knowing I’d need it for the story art.
There’s a great description of a junky space station in the novel that James made a sketch of. I redrew his sketch in layers, using the sketch for shadows and then adding layers of colour to it. After that, I blended the colours and then stuck close to James’ sketch for the final lines. All the Love Bites story art had a similar process, but only Valhalla Point had an initial sketch to work with.
Escape Hatch
The novel references films throughout, and I wanted to do something similar with the artwork. Emulating specific framing and posing, I referenced different films in the pieces and then stuck with the Love Bites colour palette and style. For Escape Hatch, I used the character’s pose and the escape hatch’s framing to call back to 2001.
Grinning Cheshires
One of my favourite descriptions in the novel is of a seedy alley with weird cat/dog things waiting in the shadows. Right away I knew I wanted to do an art piece of the scene, but strayed from the text with all the Galicor logos.
Starship Crabs
Killing giant crabs is a big part of Love Bites, and how could I not draw that? Funny enough, I didn’t reference Starship Troopers in the art — just the title. I did look to Apocalypse Now for inspiration, modeling the soldiers off of a scene.
<<Back