Songbirds

Dragon Magazine cover #191, from 1993. The original is an oil painting on masonite, 17x22 inches.

Like some of the others, this one is back again, due to popular demand, as a slightly smaller, open edition print. You can look at the whole picture, or details of the Harper Elf, the Wolf, or a few of the 27 animals in the painting.

In this picture, I hid animals instead of stuff. It happened this way; I got the assignment to do a cover with a non-human on it, and happened to discuss it in front of several of my friends. My good friend Diana Harlan Stein told me that if I made the non-human her favorite non-player character, (Jandari, from the game she runs) she would buy the original. So, of course, I did. The image of an elf playing a harp with the light catching in the strings and flying away as songbirds has been with me for a very long time. So I put the two of them together. And then I put animals like budgies, starfish, and a Tasmanian devil in the woods because I could.

By the way, the harper is my good friend Tim Albee, (I changed his hair color, though.) He's a fantastic artist in his own right, and has written a couple of books about LightWave, co-created TAFA (a new system of facial animation for LightWave and Poser,) and created a short film, Kaze, Ghost Warrior, entirely on his own.

For that matter, Diana Harlan Stein is an artist, too, and was nominated for the Hugo Award as best Fan Artist 3 years running! (She also did the illustrations for my Cat Gravity book.)