"My God, It's Full Of Stars..."  Opaque watercolor and Prismacolor Pencil,
and warp your mind a bit for a moment: the bluish glowing rectangle in the
background has proportions of 4x9. So the walls the Discovery space pod
is falling between have to be the "1" proportional dimension ... from the outside.

"One by four by nine ... the squares of the first three integers. And how
naive to believe that it ended there." I'm sorry if I misquote, those words
brought chills to the nape of the neck of this high school sophomore in 1968,
and I never suspected that only 20 years later I would be illustrating work
by that author for ANALOG ... but as Sir Arthur is fond of pointing out,
the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we
CAN imagine.

I really tried to stretch my concept of the Monolith with this piece beyond the
simplistic "blow-yer-mind" that Kubrick showed ... I wanted that moment of
understanding that this was stranger than we *can* imagine to come to life,
and good ol' friend Robert Earl "Butch" Day had made this possible by
putting into my hands very, very rare behind-the-scenes close-ups of the
Pod. I was able to accurately recreate a solid object we are familiar with
(and believe me, MGM's display folks assigned a security guard to me,
personally, when I found the replica they had at the 1984 Worldcon prior to
the release of "2010" --- I was all over that thing and I *did* get familiar!)
and Butch's closeups gave me details I craved.

But, as is my wont, there is a significant error ... some of the dimpled structure
on the skin spells out "WARREN".

And the owner of the original, who is a serious nitpicker in such diverse
fields of expertise as antique Harleys and the Ubermech R2-D2, claims that
one of the floodlamps is off axis. To him I say ...

eh.

Too bad so sad. It was the best I could do at the time with my antique
pantograph, and I will not revisit (or will only rarely) a piece or theme,
unless I have intentionally created a series.

This was a one-of-a-kind, and it said what I wanted it to, and it was ALL
hand-painted, no computer assistance, and if you want an exercise in
frustration, I suggest you try opaque watercolor blended over a spherical
object better than a foot in diameter so it looks round with no dimples or
bumps, with light coming from about five different directions, and spots
and reflections coming from about twenty more.

I will not apologize for this piece, and it's probably in my Top-5  
favorites. There's no pleasing some people, but since the owner
has saved my life more than once, I am willing to cut him some slack.

OK, it's not perfect. But, like the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy,
at least where it's inaccurate, it's DEFINITIVELY inaccurate.

Thank you, Butch. And thank you, Redeye Knight.

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