flash fiction

Introducing new Lore Cards for the Salt Mystic setting is just awesome for me! Nothing brings the setting to life like a fusion of art and flash fiction, and this new one tied together a lot of things that have been stewing in my head for a while.

It’s called “Companions”.

Download it here, or access all the Salt Mystic Lore Cards for free by smashing the button below:

What is the background?

While writing the original novel that kicked off Grailrunner’s Salt Mystic setting, Tearing Down The Statues, I thought it would be a nice twist to have shaggy white silverback gorillas that gunslinging adventurers rode like horses. When it came time to actually introduce the concept though, on a whim, I wound up explaining that these wonderful beasts at one time, centuries ago, could speak. It always seemed a sad thought and something I’d maybe return to explore one day. I haven’t really dug that well yet, but maybe today’s scene scratches at that dirt.

So what’s happening in the story here then?

Why not read it? Just takes a couple of minutes. But just to give the flavor, the beast and rider are in the frozen wilds looking for an abandoned oriel gate to a lost pocket of artificial space where surely treasures and marvels lay forgotten. That isn’t the story though, as the title suggests.

How did the art come about?

I generated the base piece with AI, using variations of prompts relating to “shaggy white silverback” and “gunfighter explorer”. It was a low res square image but had the general layout I wanted. I corrected the snowy rock they’re standing on and removed some weird noise on the image, as well as another person standing there in a completely different scale.

The rider’s head was terrible, so I replaced it (after five tries) with another one, also generated in AI. That was tricky and had to be color graded and tweaked to fit.

Then I added the snow with an overlay in Screen blending mode. I just grabbed it off the internet (googling “snow overlay”). It was my first time making a snowy scene though, and I definitely learned the importance of scale for the snowflakes. My first few attempts looked like a blizzardy mess, but I laid a bunch of copies of the overlay down, tiling them across the image so the flakes would be smaller (and lowered their opacity, which was the real trick with this!).

Then, magic happened.

When I went into Illustrator to build the Lore Card itself, dropping the square image in didn’t look very impressive. With the previous Lore Card, I’d tried dropping the text directly onto the image for a magazine-look and thought I’d give it a go again with this one.

I needed a longer vertical image, with a dark, snowy rock in shadow at the bottom for white text.

Look at what Photoshop’s new “generative expand” feature did!

Sheesh, guys! What a time to be alive. Photoshop is incredible.

Anyway, I hope you take a look at the new card and that you enjoy it. Thanks for your time today. Have a great week.

It’s always exciting when we can bring you another lore card: those new bits of the expanding Salt Mystic setting delivered in a unique fusion of flash fiction and original artwork! And they’re free!

You can download any or all of the Lore Cards at the Story Arcade by smashing the button below:

One thing we’re hammering home with the Salt Mystic line, and which will always remain core to it, is this:

In the Salt Mystic universe, cowboy-clad adventurers with ball lightning carbines slung to their arms bravely delve terrifying and thrilling pocket dimensions. The backstory of the Infinite Republic and its collapse, and the unlimited range of possibilities lying in wait out there behind sparkling dimensional gates is the (intentional) engine behind the adventures we’re trying to create.

Read all about the setting here.

So this lore card, called “Newb”, began with the image. I was touring an art museum in Kansas City. And I came across Claude-Joseph Vernet’s “Coastal Harbor with a Pyramid: Evening”, an oil on canvas from 1751.

Here, let me zoom in to the part that struck me:

I just kind of stopped and stared at that part. I mean, what was a pyramid with Roman columns doing on a seashore? And a functional one, at that? It sent my mind reeling, and of course ultimately (as always with me), made me think of sparkling and sizzling gates to artificial pocket dimensions where boundless adventures awaited.

Doesn’t that happen to you?

The artwork for this lore card was based on this, then. I wanted ruins beside a seashore with dudes working their gear along the lines of an exploration party, and I imagined the oriel gate as a shimmering window to another world up on the ruins.

The piece that heads this article is the end result: a paintbash of numerous elements, some of which were drawn from an AI art generator using prompts relating to what I had in mind. Once I composited all the pieces and bits together in Photoshop and color graded everything to match, I tried another trick.

Take a look at this work by Milan concept artist, Edvige Faini:

I am not great with color palettes. In Photoshop, you can match an image to another image’s color palette fairly readily. What I had produced so far in my process was too brown, too plain. It didn’t stand out like I’d hoped, and my adjustments to color and vibrance and hue weren’t giving me the result I wanted.

So I used Edvige’s piece here for the color scheme, matching my art to her color palette. I don’t know what you think, but to me, it’s wonderful. I’m a little overly attached to turquoise, so I’m biased. But still, I like the final product quite a bit.

This was the first lore card where I added the text over the image magazine-style. I’ve been reading a lot of graphic design books so wanted to experiment a bit.

Download the new lore card here.

Till next time, guys: