I’m both a huge fan of poster art and a huge geek about travel to fantasy locations, so I’m doubly entertained by this batch of posters from the fun-loving artists at NASA advertising a bunch of possible travel locations in our solar system and beyond, available in resolutions high enough for printing at poster size:

Source: Visions of the Future

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

As a huge fan of poster art, I’m delighted that Jay Lake linked to Timothy Anderson’s Art site, full of retro posters (and retro book covers) for sf and fantasy books and films.

Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

The Italian language text is a clever way to reference the spaghetti westerns. Of course, Esperanto text would have been a much better choice.

I always like poster art. In particular, I like the way poster artists manage to make such effective use of a limited color pallet. Several of these are excellent examples:

Exoplanet Travel Posters

[Update 2016-02-14: That link seems busted, but a search still finds the exoplanet posters: http://www.chungkong.nl/?s=exoplanet]

With just a few shades of the same color, the Chungkong paints a whole alien world.

—via Jay Lake.

Poster detail showing loom setup

I was feeling kind of glum yesterday. It was just brain chemicals, I think—the result of a gray day when I was already feeling a little discouraged about my progress on my novel. (My recent post on how I’m not suffering as much from seasonal affect disorder notwithstanding.)

I was already feeling better today (it’s sunny), but decided to do something cheering anyway. So, I went to the Krannert Art Museum, which turned out to be showing an exhibit of turn-of-the-century poster art. I’m a big fan of poster art and art deco, so it was full of wonderful stuff. By merest coincidence, I’d earlier in the day happened upon this Art of the Poster 1880-1918 site, so I got a fun double dose of poster art.

Plus, one of the posters featured a loom, which I thought Jackie would appreciate.

There was also an exhibit of student art in the lobby outside the art museum that was much more interesting than 90% of what was in the museum itself. I couldn’t find a link, which is too bad. There was a lot of good stuff—some pretty, some funny, some thoughtful.

When it comes to dealing with glumness, I think it’s basic things that really matter—nutrition, exercise, getting enough sleep, spending some time out in the sun whenever there’s a sunny day. Once I’ve got that covered, though, the best short-term response to short-term glumness is to fit something cheerful into the day; preferably something that’s not just cheerful, but also meaningful in some way. For that, I particularly like going to museums. Something that’s merely cheering is worth doing. Something that’s cheering and also feeds the soul is even better.