MILESHIPS - A Narrative Art Book by Ian McQue.

MILESHIPS - September Update
26 days ago – Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 12:37:45 PM

Hello, everyone!

For the time being these updates are currently mostly going to say similar things: that we’re getting on with the book and pages are being created. There’s a little more to it than that, of course, because this is a major creative project and we keep having real lives! McQue, as previously mentioned, had a bit of a mishap with his arm, and is now undergoing some physio (all thanks to the NHS) to get it to a condition to help him return to painting full time. The painting has not exactly stopped, however...

Also as mentioned, the timeline remains the same. The broken arm hasn’t slowed him down all that much in terms of what we’re making for the book and Ian’s been working in Photoshop and InDesign (often simultaneously) to create the text and image pages that are going to be making sure this book really comes alive. It’s easy for me to say this, as someone on the inside of the process, but this is easily the best part of it. Ian has spent years making these paintings, and I’ve now spent years carving out the narratives and world-building that explains and ties it all together, and now we get to see the book becoming an actual physical object that people are going to hold in their hands. But more than that: a thing that says something, that depicts and reports on a place, and has its own vibes and feelings attached. Seeing the combination of words and pictures do their magic is so rewarding.

And if anything, the creation of the pages reveals just how much work we have already done. Ian began the project worrying that we’d have to fill all that space, and, well, the problem is rapidly becoming one of deciding what are the very best and most suitable page candidates, and what gets left on the bench! A rather good problem to have, to be sure. The quality is already very high, and we’re still tweaking both images and text.

With regards to that finessing work, the effort of the past few weeks has also been about doing more to define the voices you will find in the book. There’s an authorial voice overseeing it all, which is the sort of neutral story-teller of the world, an abstracted narrator, but we also hear from specific characters within the archipelago, and Ian has been defining how they will appear in the book and in what ways we end up hearing their voice from the page. We get to learn about the MIleship Magnate Aldous Kemplen in both his grand historical works and his own intimate hand, and we get to hear from Huna Lintaig, the captain of The Remora, as she plots a course for her vessel in this tricky world. We also, of course, learn about Finisterre, the traveller, the cartographer, the lad from the Siltmarshes who is seeing this all with the eyes of an artist.

Now, we’ve had these folk in mind for a while, and mentioned them before in talking about the book, but the trick, truly, is to make them real, and to work out how they present themselves in the pages we’re designing. How does each of them have a voice which comes across not simply in the words we write, but the very design of the book? 

We’ll show you soon.

One last bit of house-keeping: We’ve kept the pre-order page up, so if there are folks you know want a copy and they didn’t get one, please point them our way.

Thanks for your support, then, now and ongoing!

-jim

Mileships: An August Update!
2 months ago – Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 07:32:57 AM

Hello, Mileships folks! We thought we’d best get in touch once again to let you know how things have been going for Ian and Jim over the past few weeks. We’re busy! Those of you who checked in with the last update will recall that Mr McQue picked up an injury which led to him having to have a cyborg upgrade holding his hand/arm-bones together. Pretty cool! Fortunately for Ian this now seems to be largely on the mend, and fortunately for our schedule it didn’t derail things. We’ve been calmly bobbing onwards with the production of the book, a process which includes a bunch of new artworks taking shape, as well as old artworks being finessed, and the structure of the book defined with an overall direction, broad themes, and lovely charts of rocks floating in clouds. And who doesn’t want to run their finger over those particular inks?

As we mentioned during the Kickstarter, the book is a narrative, based on the paintings Ian has been producing for years, and now combined and fleshed out with text written by Jim Rossignol. This process began a few years ago when we wrote a bible or worldbook of the ships, characters, and locations, but it’s the process of making this concrete which has been unfolding for us over the past few weeks. We’ve been working out which threads of text should run through the book, how they support various images. We’ve been going over where images are required to bolster a few of the things we want to explore in the book, too, particularly the structure of the world, the factions who operate within it, and the nature of the peculiar, gravity-bending technologies that the people of the Mileships world are using to live in the sky.

McQue has long been excited about the broad sweep of this project, from how people might build weightless cities, through to how they might colonise pastoralist outposts of mossy rocks, and distant crags, in a stone-filled cloudscape. Exploring that in depth has been possible over the past couple of months, since the success of the Kickstater was - thanks to all of you - quite considerable. Ian getting to spend extra time examining things like character outfits and everyday objects in the world is going to add some real depth to the world this book strives to depict.

Far more practical things like the final specification of the book, the page count, the templates for laying out the final version, and all that good stuff, have also been cohering over the past few weeks. But we won’t bore you with that too much, we just wanted to say that things are going well, we’re enjoying the process tremendously, and that’s absolutely going to be a golden thread of joy and enthusiasm that runs through this entire labour of love. Doubtless you’ll feel some of that too, when the book lands in your hands next year!

More soon,

Ian & Jim

No 'Arm Done!
3 months ago – Sat, Jun 29, 2024 at 05:44:10 AM

Hey gang, it's Jim here with this latest update, typing in the stead of Mr McQue because, well, he's not doing much typing this week.

Those of you following along his exploits on Instagram will have noticed that he's been fitted with a new bionic arm (tripped and broke his wrist) and it's going to take some time to heal.

Oh no! How will this influence the MILESHIPS schedule? Well, we're pleased to be able to say that it won't particularly. Ian has a few weeks healing ahead, but we built in a fair bit of contingency to the book's schedule and there's planning and non-painting tasks to do in the meantime. Regardless, I am certain you will all be keen to wish our visionary artist the swiftest of recoveries, so that he can get back to being a big old paint-wizard!

More soon! x

-jim

MILESHIPS June 2024 Update
4 months ago – Wed, Jun 12, 2024 at 10:26:42 AM

Hello, everyone!

Welcome to our June update. We said we’re not going to bombard you with updates, and we won’t, but we wanted to include everyone in the process so far and to explain what we’ve been up to in the weeks since the Kickstarter concluded.

As we mentioned during the crowd-funding campaign itself, this Kickstarter has, for the first time since I left Rockstar North in 2015, allowed me to focus purely on my own work. As a freelance artist I have always been dependent on client work, and I have been hugely privileged to work on some really fantastic projects (the last of which you will doubtless want to go and see when it appears in the cinema). However, for an artist like myself to be able to work on an original project is really what it’s all about, and you have enabled me to do that. Again, thank you. I cannot stress how vital this sort of direct support is for artists. Crowd-funding, Patreon and other avenues have changed what it means to work as an artist, and it’s hugely important for the creation of original works like this one. 

Speaking of which we can say that the production of Mileships is now well under way. I have been working through my back catalogue of Mileships and Mileships-adjacent paintings as we create a flatplan (which is what publishing-types call the page-by-page plan of a book) as well as working out where Jim’s writings are going to fit across the 190-pages we’re creating. It’s actually quite challenging to fit in everything that we’ve got planned, as well as to find a place for everything I’ve created over the years. We’ve reached a point where new materials are being created for the book to address ideas that have come up as we’ve filled out our world, as well as old paintings finalised to the quality that I want to see them delivered in the final tome! 

Our narrative bible being is redrafted for the final book by Jim, based on the work that we did together over the past decade, and that in itself as been sparking so many ideas, at an artistic and design level as well as a narrative one, that it’s been important for me to identify and depict the characters who live in the Mileships world, as well as finishing our tour of the ships themselves.

We do want to just remind everyone that the book won’t ship until June 2025, as we’ve had a few questions about that. We’ve still got plenty to do before then!

Obviously Kickstarter has charged you for the book, but shipping will be happening via Backerkit at a later date. We’ll be sending out the survey from there when we are ready to start thinking about shipping. If for some reason your pledge failed and you still want to secure yourself a copy of the book, we have left the Backerkit late pledges page open for now.

As ever, thanks so much for your support, it makes all this possible.

Regards,

Ian McQue (and Jim Rossignol)

The MILESHIPS Book Takes Flight! And What Happens Next
5 months ago – Fri, May 03, 2024 at 07:53:26 AM

We did it. Thank you all, so much, for supporting this project. 

 MILESHIPS is an idea that has grown and cohered over many years and this Kickstarter has been the culmination of that time and focus. Now we have to finish the paintings, dot every lowercase j in the text, and get the book laid out and printed for you. That will take until 2025, but we are certain it will be worth the wait (as well as the effort we’re about to put into making it as good as it can possibly be!)

 We’re going to be sending out the survey emails closer to fulfilment, so please watch for emails from Backerkit. We are using that platform for pledge management, and your shipping costs and details will be handled there.

 Backerkit has also provided us with a pre-order page! So if you (or a friend!) missed the Kickstarter you can still reserve a copy for the next few months, right up until we lock things for printing.

 Meanwhile, we will keep all of you up to date here with regular posts about the book’s progress. Don’t worry, we won’t bombard you with trivia, but we will let you know as we hit each significant milestone and keep you informed of the progress of the project as the MILESHIPS books heads towards completion.

 Finally, I want to say how life-changing moments like this are for creatives like myself and Jim. Your support is how that happens. We’ve both been privileged to work on some fantastic projects over the years, but to be able to fund and focus full time on a project that we’ve conceived independently is the dream. And for it to be a book, a beautiful thing of paper and ink that will sit proudly on shelves for decades if not centuries to come, is really quite humbling. This is my first “proper” hardback art book, and for it to reach so many people is both a deep hope fulfilled, and also faith in people confirmed. Crowd-funding like this has freed artists and writers to do things that would have been impossible within the constraints of the bigger publishing business. I cannot overstate how important that is for both unlocking creativity and validating our work.

 Thanks, again, for helping us reach this enormous goal. It’s been thrilling. 

 If you want more from me in the meantime, there’s also my Patreon where I will be doing more sketching and posting other materials from my work. It certainly helps keep the wolf from the door.

Thankfully and cheerfully,

Ian McQue and Jim Rossignol