Taking Stock of the Stock Art

I’ve been trawling through stock art sites in hopes of finding something suitable for the ebook release of Aristoi, and I’m finding that there are certain images that appear over and over again.

Bald heads, for one.  If there’s a person without a helmet or something covering his or her hair, ten to one that person’s bald.

I don’t think this is because science fiction artists have a strange fetish for bald heads.  I think it’s because hair is difficult to paint using Photoshop or other electronic tools, so it’s easier to leave them bald.  (Maybe an artist out there can enlighten me on this matter.)

The endless progression of expressionless bald heads begins to get really eerie after a while.  (Oh, I didn’t mention that most of the baldies were expressionless?  Trying to get an expression right probably takes too much time.)

The characters who actually have expressions tend to have strange expressions, as if they had just been jabbed in the buttocks by a cattle prod.  (I’m thinking that expressionless is better.)  I’m also thinking, again, that getting an expression right takes too much time.  But I keep looking at the pictures and thinking, “I might buy this one if the character didn’t look as if he had just stuck his finger in the light socket.  What was the artist thinking?”

There are an awful lot of androids and cyborgs.  I suspect they’re easier to do than people— you pose your maquette and then you just give it a machinelike gloss. You don’t have to worry about clothing or musculature or, again, expression.

There are a great many penis substitutes to be found in the stock art pages.  This is, of course, not uncommon.  Surely we’ve all seen many suggestively-posed swords and strangely bulbous weaponry on the covers of science fiction books.    But I keep looking at the art and thinking, “I might buy this one if it weren’t for the BIG FREAKING PENIS.  I don’t want my readers to look at the cover, and the first thing they see is the BIG FREAKING PENIS!   If I do that, they might think I am a big freaking penis!”

Space suits with boobs.  Oh yeah, there are a lot of those.  It’s the way you know the astronaut is female, especially if she’s bald and has no expression.

Planetary mashup.  There are lot of astronomical scenes with way too many planets in the picture.  Often one of them is ringed like Saturn.  Another favorite is the Death Star, aka a moon with lots of windows.  There are also lots of pyramids on the planets being loomed over by Saturn or the Death Star.

The Greys.  Nothing says science fiction like a bald, expressionless alien descending from a flying saucer.  You don’t have to get the proportions right, and if the expression looks weird, hey, it’s an alien expression.

Cute humanoid robots.  Big threatening transformerlike robots.  Cute animals that happen to be robots.  Lots and lots of scientifictional cityscapes with Saturn or the Death Star looming down on them.

Weird, uncomfortable poses.  A lot of the artists who are very good at spaceships or future cities or astronomy tend to be less comfortable doing figure drawing.  So the figures end up looking as if they’re posing for a statue in some deeply uncomfortable way.  The result doesn’t say, “I am a titanic, adventurous figure in a landscape of the future.”  It says, “I just got frozen in Carbonite and now I’ve got a cramp in my leg.”

I think I’ve been doing this far too long.  And I’m not really complaining: all illustrators have to start somewhere, and all are better at some things than others.  Besides, illustration thrives on cliché, at least on some levels.  I’m sure they sell a lot of grey aliens and cute robots and pyramids standing tall beneath the rings of Saturn.

And there’s a lot of good art to be found.  It’s just not art that’s right for this book.

Fact is, Aristoi is a very difficult book to illustrate.  I doubt very much if I’m going to find a striking image that resembles anything in the book, so I’ll probably end up taking a striking image that suggests something in the book, and using that.

But I wish the stock art pages were a little easier to search.  I wish I could look for science fiction art but somehow exclude the bald people, the dachshund-shaped robots, and the flying saucers.

But I want you, the reader, to have the best experience possible when viewing this book.  So I shall soldier on through the Forest of the Stock Art; and tonight, when I wake up screaming from a nightmare of being surrounded by a horde of bald, expressionless cyborgs, I shall comfort myself with the knowledge that I endure this only to make you a happy consumer.