#wayne barlowe

I have been following you for a while now and I really like your art ( especially biollante)

If you don't mind me asking, is your art inspired by Subnautica by any chance? For some reason when I saw your art I was reminded of the Ghost Leviathan ( which is very cool)

Subnautica has some incredible design work but a las it's not a big influence.

If I had to shout out a massive inspiration to my art tho it's definitely Wayne Barlowe

Wayne Barlowe cover art for Anasazi by Dean Ing.

I saw this displayed prominently at my library's continuous book sale and once I realized it was a Barlowe piece I'd never seen before I knew I had to snatch it for ¢25. The psychedelic biology of the organism in the foreground is classic Barlowe but the translucent spaceship(?) in the back is interesting in how it highlights Barlowe a little bit out of his element. The rendering of it with the extremely soft highlights reminds me more of Angus McKie. I love the title design as well but unfortunately no designer is credited.

I couldn't believe this was a 38 year old book. Not a crease on it- I don't think it had ever been opened. No idea how it ended up at my library. When I looked it up there were no scans of the cover online that I could find- only a couple photos from ebay- so I knew I had to scan mine.

I don't no know if anyone would else would get this excited for what is probably (based on the back cover summary) a pretty middling and possibly racist ancient aliens novel.

In the back of Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy (1996), I believe, there are sketches for a book called Pilgrimage to Hell, which appeared two years later under the title Barlowe’s Inferno. Three years later, a follow-up emerged called Brushfire. All three of these things have had a strange hold on me. The sketches are nightmarish, a big shift from the fairly safe and reasonable creatures in the Fantasy and Extraterrestrial books and an even vaster gulf between them and The Pop-up Book of Star Wars, Barlowe’s first published work. I’ve never come across the actual Hell books, though, only seen their covers and a piece here or there, once in person at the Enchanted show. Until I learned about Psychopomp (2021), that is.

A massive book, it collects just about every piece of Barlowe’s Hell that existed at the time — the contents of Inferno, Brushfire, the art from Barlowe’s two novels about Hell and a gigantic section of character design work (though not the sketches for Pilgrimages, oddly). This vision is both strange and unsettling. I don’t find it horrible, but rather more melancholy than anything. So many of Hell’s inhabitants are petrified to varying degrees, a state I find sadder than upsetting. I also find it so outside my preconceptions of Hell as a medieval torture chamber that it winds up verging on science fiction.

Barlowe is a real master of details, too. The cover alone, a self-portrait, gives you enough amulets and talismans to stare at for an afternoon before you even start trying to parse the background. The city behind is vast, the statues massive, the souls tiny, but is Barlowe a giant or is it a matter of perspective? Psychopomp is rife with these conundrums of scale.