The fiction of science, the speculation of possibilities created from scientific methods, has intrigued me since I was a child. If given a chance to choose between cowboys, firetrucks, or space toys to play with, I always chose the space toys. Whether a rocket ship or a moon base, I loved the dream of it.

History was important to me, too, which reflected time travel, another aspect of science fiction that inspired my imagination. While time travel isn’t really part of Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION series, the stretch of time over human history is compelling to me.

I’ve been interested for decades in painting many classic science fiction novels, so it was easy to say ‘yes!’ to Tony Geer of Conversation Tree Press when he asked if I’d be interested in painting a limited edition of the first three volumes of the Foundation series.

I had to read the first one again, to re-familiarize myself with the five original short stories that had been compiled into one novel back in the 50’s. They take place over tens of thousands of years of future human history, involving planets across mind-blowing lightyears of distance in interstellar space.  All of it revolves around the character of Hari Seldon, who created the concept of “psychohistory” which combines human history with human psychology and social revelations.

It was not easy, but because I always encourage my students to research on paper, in other words, to think on paper…

Beguiling to say the least. But how do you express such broad visuals without repeating the same image of distant space peppered with planets over and over again, completely boring the reader? As always with an assignment like this, it’s best to limit those establishing shots to one or two, and then come in close to the human aspects of the story.

Foundation has been described as a bunch of old white guys in a room talking about events across vast time and distance, and there’s very little movement in the chapters. No action sequences, chases, or fighting. But there’s plenty of conflict. I read and reread the stories several times, searching for telling moments in the book that would allow me to express Asimov’s history and captivate the reader.

It was not easy, but because I always encourage my students to research on paper, in other words, to think on paper, I applied the same method to solve my problem of finding storytelling moments to depict. I started drawing thumbnails and out of those initial sketches came the images I needed, or at least, clear ideas to start designing from.

I came up with five moments from each tale that let me work with human figures set against background futuristic elements. To capture those, I looked at actual technology and machinery that I could modify and use as reference. This gave me lighting conditions I used to paint convincing images.




As part of the set of paintings, Tony wanted to have one cover painting stretch across three volumes, so that when you line up the covers side by side they build the whole painting together. But the trick was that he also wanted to have wrap covers for each of the books. This meant that I would have to compose one scene that could be cropped three times to work as single covers and work as each spine and back cover. Again, not easy. I had to add extra space on the far right to cover any mistakes, and also add an entire cover on the left to cover the first book’s back cover. You can see how this was laid out at the thumbnail stage, below.

The benefit here is that not only do they come together as a full painting across the front covers, but they also come together across the back covers, but with the extra part of the painting.

Here’s the full, widescreen painting.

I was also commissioned to do pen & ink drawings of characters from the story. Here’s a selection: Hari Seldon, Gaal, Hober, and Licia.

Tony’s art direction is tasteful and impeccable as you can see from the website’s video. We worked together to design the spine emblem which is based on a description from the story. All of it came together seamlessly.

You can watch the video here:

I’m very happy to be a part of this limited edition of the classic by Asimov, and already at work to compose images for the next two books in the series, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. Will keep you posted here, but you can also watch as it all develops at Conversation Tree Press.