Fourteen foot tall book covers...

I have been painting like a demon the past few days and although I’m still doing some detail work, I think it’s ready to be posted. First off, the format is a bit ridiculous...or maybe it’s ridiculously cool.  It’s certainly been a fun one to paint.  The actual size in pixels is about 2200 wide by well over 51,000 long.  (That works out to about 7.5 inches wide by over 170 inches tall)

I’m going to leave the purpose for doing this weird-sized illustration unclear, but if you want to you can think of it as a book cover that’s 9 inches wide and fourteen feet tall.  Or maybe it’s a scroll.  Or a fan-fold insert for a book...  How’s that?  Okay, I will fill things in a little more: I’m working on a publishing project that will go live this summer and involves kickstarter.com and possibly some partners.  I’ll leave it at that for now because there is still a lot of planning to do.

The concept is one continuous illustration going from seagulls skimming the surface of a stormy sea to (~51,000 pixels later) the floor of a fairly deep and dark part of the ocean.  In terms of ocean depth it’s about 6000 meters from surface to floor with some of the cool things you’ll find along the way.

Here are a few highlights (below), but it’s a big damn illo and you really should scroll through the whole thing:  http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com/switch/SeabornScroll

Finally, I want to call attention to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (www.whoi.edu) which operates the DSV Alvin, and my favorite aquarium on the planet, Monterey Bay Aquarium (www.montereybayaquarium.org) which has captivated and inspired me for decades.

I also posted this for IllustrationFriday: Heights.

Let me know what you think!

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Comments

[Ken Peterson]

Extremely cool!

[Chris Howard]

Thanks Ken! I should do a continuous illustration just for Monterey Bay! Sea otters sliding up the waves, through the open bay with a sunfish, and then into the canyon. This one started out very Monterey and then I went into mixing and matching oceans, depths, and story elements.