netmouse: (writing)
netmouse ([personal profile] netmouse) wrote2008-09-23 08:52 am

SF artists grows as artists write to me

Yesterday Vincent Chong sent me a list of book covers he's done. The list includes Polish and Japanese editions - books that don't show up in English speaking book lists, generally.

This is part of the reason why the SFeditors and SFartists wikis are (unlike Wikipedia) permitting artists and editors to edit their own articles and send us material for them, without recourse to 3rd person references. I'm not going to assume and assert that 1st person references are infallible - we're all fallible - but I think it's useful to the community to allow as how an individual may have information about the work they've done, and encourage it to be shared directly.

John Picacio and Aleta Rafton also sent me CVs of their work, which served among other things to illustrate to me how many publishers (and artworks) the Locus Covers index is missing. I really appreciate the covers index, and I hope it expands in scope in years to come, but I also hope award nominators and voters realize it's only a sample of the field. John's CV also includes many nonfiction books about science fiction, which still seem like science fiction illustration to me.

[identity profile] partly-bouncy.livejournal.com 2008-09-23 02:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Wikipedia has so many issues. :/

Really awesome that you're collecting and publishing that information. Sometimes, it can be really hard to find out that information. Gathering it all in one place can be really handy.

[identity profile] encorecrazay.livejournal.com 2008-09-23 02:55 pm (UTC)(link)
John Picacio is a really cool guy, he just lives down the road in San Antonio so I see him quite often. I have the print #1 of the limited edition that won for best paper back cover in Glasgow a few years ago, and print #2 of the set for the cover that was nominated this year - actually bought it last year, well before the nominations just because I liked it (Chesley Awards). I've got his book on his cover illustrations when it came out. We've talked about drawing a bit over the years, and maybe I'll start again. Plus a bunch more of his work. Wish I could afford buying originals.

[identity profile] yarram.livejournal.com 2008-09-23 03:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Mildly OT, but the Unicode and linguistics geek in me of course wonders whether you will be listing the Japanese titles in Kanji/Hiragana, or only in romanization...
ext_13495: (Default)

[identity profile] netmouse.livejournal.com 2008-09-23 03:55 pm (UTC)(link)
So far I have not listed the Japanese titles at all. I wonder if I have to turn a character set on in wikimedia to do that, or just use unicode...

[identity profile] yarram.livejournal.com 2008-09-23 04:25 pm (UTC)(link)
In Theory™, you could use Unicode character entities. But those are a pain to finagle. Probably easier to either set your data-storage character set as Unicode, or enable Asian character support in the underlying database. Do you have a sandbox area where I can test it later tonight? I have Mandarin IME enabled on my laptop...

[identity profile] cherylmmorgan.livejournal.com 2008-09-23 08:53 pm (UTC)(link)
It is running UTF8 at the moment. The Mediawiki installation instructions specifically warned against installing unicode.