As several folks have already commented, artist Richard Bartrop ( rjbartrop) passed away last week.

I'd known him online and off under various names (a couple of which I didn't know were the same person at first) for many years now. Heck, up until last year, my folder for his work was the largest artist-specific folder I had on FA. While I wouldn't call us close friends (we didn't talk back and forth really often enough for that) we definitely had close friends in common, and a number of specific interests in common, not the least of which was a preference for more 'pin-up' style art over more explicitly X-rated work.

Given that I'm at least somewhat aphantasiac (I don't really 'see' mental images the way a lot of people do), I tend to rely on artists capable of working from verbal descriptions to give me a first visual image of what a character actually looked like, and Richard provided the first picture of more of my characters than anybody else. Especially given his own work with Zaibatsu Tears, that included my own cyberpunk characters, such as Huntress.

MFF was also last weekend, and it had a 'heist' theme... so I was showing around /view/30930627/ to a number of folks at the con, even before I'd heard the news. When I finish the book, I think I'll need to add his name to the dedications.

I'm honestly not sure what to say, I just wanted to get a few memories out into the open.