From One Generation to the Next

On November 21st 2011 Anne McCaffery passed away at the age of 85 from stroke. Throughout her life she has created masterpieces though the forms of novels based on her Pern universe and her Ship that Sang series.

When I was a child her Dragonriders of Pern novels were what I grew up on. Reading her profiles then I thought this was from another dead writer until not very long ago. Sadly I have never had the chance to meet her as many did in the various conventions she had traveled to in her life.

You all know I rarely do fanart or tribute art, as this piece is, but Anne McCaffrey has pretty much been my strongest inspiration throughout my childhood growing up. Her written works spurred me to draw more than I ever had, based on the old style art covers from the book trilogy I had and still have today - Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums. Since those three books I had craved to read more and more of this amazing headworld she created. And for a child who's not even in her preteens I was already reading on a tenth grade level and plowing through these books like nothing and sketching firelizards when I could. The fascination even went so far as to create firelizard shaped gliders that I would fly around the house in Maine.

Since discovering her passing earlier this night, I felt compelled to come out in the open at last, if late, to show my appreciation for the inspiration her works have given me to keep at what I love best and deliver to you today what has taken years of diligent self-study to achieve. Her son Todd seems very promising in taking and continuing his mother's legacy despite his initial works produced.

In this piece you'll notice a few things automatically. The firelizard was intentionally made to not follow the two common forms seen floating around DA, but rather a hybrid of three. The long trailing tendrils on top of the head and the wing claws as well as the long tail were borrowed off of the version of the little critters I grew up accepting as their true appearance from the old-style covers. In the newer books the appearances changed and I balked at them, considering them less, graceful, than the former versions, but I've grown to accept that it is in the taste of the artist and the writer that determines appearance. The Firelizard herself represents the ancestor of the Dragons of Pern, or in this case, Anne herself, and the larger Gold Queen Dragon egg represents the future potential starting to bud that is Todd McCaffrey.

I plan to email this to Todd as a symbol of my appreciation for what his mother has done for many in sharing her joy of the Pernese dragons, and to show that I, and most likely many others of the fanbase, would like to see her dream continued in future installments of the world of Pern.

If you want to color your own to send in or simply post to show your appreciation for this amazing woman, I'll be posting the lineart shortly for you to download.

You can get the image here - [link]