ILLUSTRATION

A woman with short dark hair reaches out to a mantis-like alien. The fingers of her hand match the long slender digits of the alien as they touch. There is an embossed gold star on the alien’s shoulder, and it wears a furry covering overs its lower legs. Traces of snow can be seen on that fur as well as on the cuff of her green puffer jacket and branches of vegetation barely seen in the lower right foreground. The background of the painting, however, is loosely painted in greens and yellows, populated with silhouettes of branches and tree trunks. A barely visible structure resembling an alien city can be seen on the distant horizon as framed by the alien’s cautiously extended appendage and the woman’s arm.
  • Acrylic - 30" x 19”
    1981

NOR CRYSTAL TEARS

A favorite theme of mine is the depiction of human-alien interactions. This book deals with the subject so wonderfully that I wanted to make it the focus of attention for the cover painting. Several of my other concepts for the cover involve relationships between human children and the Thranx, the intelligent, insect-like species of Foster's imagination. Hopefully, I'll get the opportunity to develop at least one of the alternate concepts as a finished painting. At any rate, months after delivering the final painting to Don Munson, I was chagrined to note a similar approach for the E.T. movie poster. A coincidence I'm certain, but frustrating!
  • Nor Crystal Tears
    Alan Dean Foster (Del Rey)

  • Before Man and insectlike Thranx had become allies, when the reptilian AAnn were just occasional raiders of Thranx colony worlds, one young Thranx agricultural expert lived a life of quiet desperation.
    A dreamer in a world of sensible, stable beings, Ryo buried himself in his work — reclaiming marshland from a tenacious jungle — until he came across a letter describing a relative’s encounter with horrid, two-legged, soft-skinned space-going beasts . . .

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