Spaceships

Shark-like spaceship design with exaggerated perspective

By The Illustrator  |  2010/02/26 20:11 Posted in Illustration, Illustration Friday, Illustration Friday, Spaceships, role-playing game  |  Comments (2)

From now on I’m going to be coming at all my sketching from a spaceship or science fiction point of view, because it seems to be what the vast majority of visitors to this site want. Every week I’ve been producing sketches for an art challenge called Illustration Friday, and these sketches are going to be no exception to the new sci-fi spaceship ethos of the site.

The word this weak on Illustration Friday is “perspective” and this seems the easiest thing in the world to turn to a spaceship theme, after all it is very common for a sci-fi artist producing an illustration for their spaceship design to show off it’s vast size by adding exaggerated perspective to the image.

I’ve done something similar in the image above, by exaggerating the perspective of the spaceship in this image I have added to the feeling that it is screaming along – although in space nobody can hear you scream – very low over the surface of an asteroid.

I created this sketch very quickly, which is one of the aims of Illustration Friday, but I’m actually very happy with it. The spaceship looks very dangerous and powerful indeed. I have given it a little streamlining so that it can land on the planets of an unsuspecting role-playing game universe, but it is still very much a large spaceship. It’s very at home in the empty voids of the spacelanes of any game setting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I make time to work this image up into a finished illustration, using either GIMP, Inkscape, Blender or all three. I might even take time to work out some floor plans, complete the design and statistics and write some fluff about it. I’m really quite pleased with it.

Spaceship Illustration, Early Stages in Inkscape

By The Illustrator  |  2010/02/26 02:27 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape, SEO etc, Spaceships  |  Comments (0)

I’m slowly – very slowly – getting on with stuff.

I’m adding vector shapes on top of one of my spaceship sketches, as I promised to do in an earlier post. I’ve already drawn about thirty shapes on to the sketch to represent such things as hull plates, greebles and other surface detail. I had the sketch zoomed in quite close as I was working on the spaceship image in Inkscape and when I zoomed out and I saw how much of the spaceship I still had to do with this first step, I got a little discouraged. It sure is time consuming to illustrate this way, but I’m hoping the final effect of a nice detailed vector illustration of this spaceship design will be worth the effort.

The new-look Starbright site, with clean white gallery like design to better show off my illustrations and designs, has also been getting some attention. It now has three pages. It is taking longer than I thought because I have to familiarise myself with yet another new app.

I was using Yahoo Site Builder on my old Windoze machine – but of course that died, so I had to find a free open-source alternative that would play nice with Linux.

Happily I found one and now I’m getting to grips with Kompozer. Kompozer is quite a simple WYSIWYG web editor, but the simplicity might well turn out to be an advantage. It is so difficult to use whiz-bang effects and all-singing-and-dancing Flash elements that the pages I’m creating are very small and quick loading. According to a lot of the SEO advice I have read, that can only be a good thing.

OK with my daily blog posting duties done, it’s time to get back to drawing little pink polygons onto my spaceship.

New cleaner look for the Starbright Illustrations scifi art site

By The Illustrator  |  2010/02/24 16:13 Posted in GIMP, Illustration, SEO etc, Spaceships  |  Comments (0)

As I mentioned in my last post, all the science fiction sketches, designs, art, 3D renders and illustrations have always been the most popular element of both the Starbright Illustrations main site and the Starbright Illustrations blog. It seems that now might be a great time to refocus the site towards this sort of work, to make the site more unified and understandable, but hopefully still vibrant, varied and interesting.

As part of this process I’ve been redesigning the site to have a white background, simpler layout and new logo. The first of these new-design pages is taking shape here. I’ creating the pages in Kompozer, and one of the advantages of using such a simple app is that it creates nice simple web pages that download quickly. At lest they should download quickly as long as I keep my eye on the sizes of all the images I’m creating. When I remember I use the Save foe Web extension for GIMP to make sure the illustrations are as small as possible.

Installing it was a bit of an effort with Mandriva Linux however. I remember with the old Windoze machine – before it died – all I had to do was drop the extension into the right GIMP folder. With Linux I had to download extensions to my operating system and type in different lines of code, using Google to look up how to react to the error messages that were spat out in a little black window when the extension repeatedly failed for various esoteric reasons.

But as soon as the new look has spread across the site a little, it’ll be straight back to sketching spaceships and other bits of sci-fi hardware and working these designs into completed illustrations.

Scorpion, a new spaceship design sketch

By The Illustrator  |  2010/02/22 23:23 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape, Spaceships  |  Comments (0)

And I’m back doing what I do best, sketching spaceships. The spaceship tag at the top of this blog is the most popular destination on this whole site, and I’ve decided to stop ignoring that. I’ve started with a spaceship sketch that was a lot of fun to do. It’s a spaceship, with a little bit of streamlining, but not to much, and a heck of a lot of detail.

The back part of the spaceship is slightly curved upwards and so I decided to come up with some sort of name based on the idea of a scorpion. To decide what scorpion related name to use, of course I went straight to Wikipedia for inspiration. Scorpiones, was the name I came up with after a quick glance at the article. A lot of people are coming to look at my spaceship designs from a listing of my site at www.travellerrpg.com and I only wish I had more time to come up with Traveller statistics for every design, and even some floor plans so that their visits were even more rewarding than the spaceship inspirational sketches and designs that are here now.

There is an awful lot of Traveller stuff here at this blog, but it got strewn to the four winds when I updated to the latest Wordpress versions and the update process turned my hundreds of beautiful role playing game pages into blog posts and mixed them in with the other content, arggh, teeth gnashing noises.

So on with the design of Scorpiones. Along with the upturned tail a lot of other elements more or less suggested themselves as I was sketching this starcraft design. It sprouted two heavy warp engines and the casings for the engines were so robust looking that I asked myself if it might be able to enter an atmosphere and make planetfall on them.

While I was Googling around looking for other spaceship designs as inspiration, this nice collection came up. I don’t know if this is the artist’s official site, it seems strange that they would be using a flickr account, but what do I know. Anyway inspired by these images I’ve decided to try and add some colour to this spaceship, and after a very positive experience with Inkscape last time I had some colouring to do, I’m probably going to be putting that groovy free open-source app to use.

But before I start on such a complex spaceship I’m going to try Inkscape out on a simpler one. This simple spaceship design sketch from an earlier post.

A Digital Painting of A Wilderness of Stars, oh and of course, a spaceship.

By The Illustrator  |  2010/01/15 20:19 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Spaceships, Tutorials  |  Comments (0)

Green spaceship, looks mouldy.

Every week I go to The Illustration Art challeng website to get inspiration for a digital painting. This week the word on Illustration Friday is “Wilderness”, and me being the science fiction, space ship obsessed nerd that I am, the first idea that jumped to mind was “A Wilderness of Stars”; but where had I heard this evocative phrase before. I started Googling and found …

A Wilderness of Stars by William F Nolan

It seems it was a the title of a collection of science fiction stories, which included a work by the writer of that sci-fi classic Logan’s Run – man, you can find anything out on Google. That would fit for where I had heard the phrase, if it was the title of a science fiction book that might have been hanging about in second-hand stores in the 70s then the title could easily have lodged itself in my subconscious round about then.

I wasn’t satisfied with my Googling though. I wondered if a third rate hack science fiction writer could really have come up with a phrase like this. A phrase that is hard to forget once you hear it. It turned out that he didn’t, the phrase is part of a quote by Mark Twain.

“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God – man – the world – the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars – a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space – and you!”

If Twain got it from somewhere even earlier then I didn’t find out by just Googling. Anyway it seems to me to be perfect inspiration for a digital painting of a spaceship against a backdrop of the wilderness of stars. So I fired up GIMP and attached my drawing tablet to the USB port for some painting.

wilderness1

I started by sketching out the shape of a spaceship freehand using GIMP and my Bamboo graphics tablet. Sketching out these virtual paintings this way, is becoming surprisingly easy and intuitive after a couple of months of practice.

wilderness2

Next I chose a colour for the spaceship and added it to a new layer underneath the frame. I’m not sure green was a good choice for the colour scheme of the image, and luckily we are still early enough in the digital picture painting process to easily  be able to change it to something better.

wilderness3

I added some bright blue to a layer below the spaceship, then duplicated it and turned the transparency down on the two layers. Then I smudged the layers and it looks as though radioactive fire is shooting out of the spacecraft’s engines. Excellent.

This spaceship painting is still at a very early and developmental stage, be sure and pop back to the blog to see this abstract shape turn into a beautifully realised cruiser of the wilderness of stars.

GIMP Digital Spaceship Painting Tutorial part 3

By The Illustrator  |  2009/12/28 19:55 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Spaceships, Technique, Tutorials  |  Comments (0)

It's behind yooou!

This might be the third part of this GIMP digital painting tutorial, but it’s actually a good place to join. If you have been following this process from part 1 then, as you can see from the main image, a lot of progress has already been made since the start of this spaceship painting process, and even since part two of this look at the creation of a science fiction illustration.

pioneer_spaceship10

When we last saw the illustration it looked like the image on the left. The monster was still an abstract shape and the new improved space explorer had just been hashed in.

I was still a little unhappy with the look of the spaceman however, he looked a little too much like a superhero with bulging muscles.

 

pioneer_spaceship11

So after a little more work our intrepid explorer now looks a little thinner and more vulnerable. His spacesuit is the same colour – basically – as the spaceship hovering over the scene in the background and that pretty much ties him to it, I think. But it is a little boring, and there is almost the danger that he might be mistaken for some kind of expendable exploration droid. I’m going to have to be careful to do everything I can to keep him looking human.

pioneer_spaceship12

Here in this next image we can see that with a bright high-vis orange vest on his exploration/environment suit and some bright highlights he is looking a lot more interesting.

It’s still possible to mistake him for a robot though and he’s going to need a lot more work before he’s done, but right now the monster in the background is crying out for attention.

pioneer_spaceship12a

The monster is the focus of what we are doing in the next couple of images. Here in this first image I have started building layer after layer of detail onto the monster. When I’m happy with a particular look, or the number of layers has just gotten a little unmanageable I’ll blend the layers down, repeatedly using the GIMP function of that name, until there’s just one monster layer again, and then start over.

pioneer_spaceship14

Here this process continues with ever more detailed layers of light and shade being added to the monster using my Wacom drawing tablet. It’s starting to look less like a smooth and ugly frog, and more like a frightening crocodile thing that could really do some damage to an unsuspecting planetary explorer. I’ve added more detail to the foreground jungle too.

pioneer_spaceship15

Now the foreground jungle is casting a shadow on the monster. I created the shadow by adding a new layer, painting a black shadow on the monster, turning the transparency of the shadow down to something like 30% and then moving it about with the smudge tool (looks like a finger) to soften it. I was really quite happy with the shadow, it seems to turn the monster from a flat shape into a real 3D creature.

pioneer_spaceship16

The last touch – for now – was to work on the transparent data screen in the explorer’s hand. Using the shift button to make straight lines and tidy it up a bit. I hope it’s telling him to look out behind him!

The image has come a long way during the work, with 7 different jpegs showing different stages of the progress in this post alone, but there’s still a long way to go. When it is finally complete I’m thinking of putting all the images of the different stages of completion together into an animation. It might end up being quite a long animation.

I’ve found a live and active forum for The GIMP, includes art, resources and tutorials, but I don’t like it.

By The Illustrator  |  2009/12/28 14:45 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Spaceships, Tutorials, role-playing game  |  Comments (3)

 Heoric, no?

I love forums, whenever you have an IT or computer problem and go Googling for the answer it always seems to come from the kind people who hang out in forums. I’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out in GIMP lately and I’ve been looking for a forum to post my art and find answers to my problems, and here it is. GIMPER.NET – The GIMP Community – Index page. There does seem to be one big problem though. I don’t see any signature links, and when I created one and previewed it – it looked dead. If the site doesn’t allow signature links, then why should anyone create content for them?

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to keep looking for a proper GIMP forum who don’t mind the people who create the content for them linking away to their own site.

pioneer_spaceship4 In the mean time I’ve been working on my latest spaceship illustration. When we last saw it, it looked like the image to the left, but it has gone through quite a lot of development since then and as a tutorial-like guide I’ll post some of the iterations here.

 

 

pioneer_spaceship5

First I darkened the spaceman character in the foreground of the image. In this illustration the spaceship is to be an imposing presence, but despite that still a backdrop to the foreground action.

 

 

pioneer_spaceship7

Then I moved the spaceship to the top of the layers pile so that I could work on it without being disturbed by the elements of the image that would otherwise overlap it – a really good reason to keep each element of the illustration on it’s own layer. I added windows, greebles and other details until I was happy with it, for now, and then mixed all the spaceship layers together into one spaceship layer and moved it back down to it’s proper place in the stack.

pioneer_spaceship8

When the spaceship is in its proper place, it is behind a translucent white layer which nicely simulates the effect of seeing something far away through a lot of intervening atmosphere – the colours fade. I darkened the jungle foliage in the background of the image and worked into it to make a little more detail. I also muted the colours of the monster in the image – which is still a quite abstract shape – because it is going to be lowering in the shadows in the completed picture, if everything goes according to plan.

pioneer_spaceship9

With only a few light-colour trees in the foreground the brave interplanetary adventurer looked as though he was in the open, so I deleted them and blocked in a shape to better represent the jungle clearing feel that I was originally going for in this digital painting. The adventurer was beginning to look a little lost too, so as you can see in the image to the left, I resized him.

pioneer_spaceship10

And here we have the current state of play with this illustration. The space adventurer wasn’t looking heroic enough, and it seemed strange that he was looking through binoculars into this dense alien jungle where visibility can’t be more than a few meters, so I’ve bitten the bullet and started to completely redesign him.

You can see the very first stages of this image here, and I’ll be posting updates as I make more progress in bringing this digital painting home, so far using GIMP exclusively.

Spaceships, some of my pictures are on page one of the Google image search for Spaceship pictures

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/21 20:32 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

I was looking for some spaceships as sources of inspiration for my latest 3D spaceship and imagine my surprise when i did a Google search with the words Spaceships and pictures. Two of my images where there on page one.

I’m always a little mistrustful of typing anything into an online textbox. I have often typed 200 word works of genius containing my thoughts on science fiction, spaceships, robots and other indispensable themes so many times, then hit post, only to be told that the page could not be loaded. And of course when you hit back arrow to get to the previous page – it’s empty. NOOOOOOO…

So now I absolutely have to have a blog client on my machine. I’m offline right now and I just saved these first four lines, that’s how paranoid my dodgy computers and other IT technology has made me.

As this is a test post I’m going to keep it short just to see what happens, although I will try to hit the 250 word minimum I once read about in an article on SEO, you might have noticed that an awful lot of my posts are exactly 250 words long.

I have been using the version of Blender that’s now running on this Puppy Linux machine, after heroic efforts to get it to talk to my x windows and graphics card – and my latest spaceship is going well. Unfortunately when I tried to insert a copy of the latest renders of the spaceship interior, and exterior with a nice planet in the background Deepest Sender just asked me for the image location without giving me a browse button to find the file on my local machine.

Oh dear I hope that isn’t’ going to be a deal breaker.

But as I suddenly suspected according to www.surfthemind.com/index.php/2008/09/17/power-blogging-tools-deepest-sender/ it seems impossible to post images from deepest sender. I’ll Just have to give Scribe Fire (another) try instead.

Scribefire’s image handling is basic to say the least, but at least I can upload them from my computer. There switched to Scribefire, and here’s an image, and a rather fine 3D one, of a spaceship.

As you can see this spaceship still needs a lot of work, both inside and out to make the renders look like they are even approaching a nice completed CGI look.

But the 3D meshes are taking shape and it shouldn’t be too long before they are done. Even including delays caused by me playing with my new Bamboo graphics tablet and trying to change the language in Inkscape to English. There’s always something else to fiddle with…

Designing Another Spaceship (with mesh and textures) – Orbiting a Planet

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/12 20:59 Posted in 3D, Blender, Forum Thread, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, role-playing game  |  Comments (0)

A rubarb and custard planet, how peculiar!

Now that I have my second copy of Blender installed on my Puppy Linux laptop I’ve actually stopped faffing around with disk partition and installing codecs and started modeling again – not Kate Moss modeling, 3D computer generated art modeling. And it seems I’m not the only one, I recently found this this cool thread started by a stats obsessed 3D spaceship designer. Which includes this post from iliketosayblah

i love the stats…i wish all ships had stats…

… and I couldn’t agree more.

Blue windows, I gues they're watching TV. This was such an interesting thread to read; it had an argument about physics, it had advice on how to design spaceships, it had a crazy amount of stats, and I learned some new vocabulary. The comments on the meshes that the Blender artist posted included one that complimented the greebles on the surface of the spaceship.

Now apparently, according to Wikipedia,

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.

Now I didn’t know that, but you can bet I’ll be using these magnificent words a lot more from now on.

Abstract art or texture tile? You decide. I’m going to call the spaceship in this 3D image “The Packard” after the Packard Bell laptop which I did most of the design work on the mesh and basics on. I also produced the jpeg for the texture on the same plucky old laptop in Gimp, which was a pleasure to work with and seemed to be every bit as powerful as Photoshop, even though it opens in a fraction of the time.

There is a lot more work to come on this spaceship. It needs some smoother hull plates mixed in with the basic structure of this mesh, but not too many, because I want it to retain a low-tech feel. It needs a lot more greebleing in the area connecting the bridge of the spaceship to the main body, that’s still looking to thin and aerodynamic, like an airplane, and that’s not what we want at all in this workhorse of the planetary spaceways. And I might even look for another free science fiction table top role-playing game so that I can produce some simple stats to go with this powerful but workaday spaceship.

Fast like a 3d spaceship hyperdriving through a shaft

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/23 20:01 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Spaceships, Technique  |  Comments (0)

here'is that spaceship sketch

I’ve been experimenting at the interface between 2d black and white sketches, Lights, action, spaceship! and full-colour 3d images again – this time with one of my cute little spaceships. I had had a sketch of a small elegant little spaceship hanging around for a while, here’s that spaceship sketch as if first appeared on Spiralcat, but when I saw that the word on Illustration Friday this week was “fast” I decided to work on it a bit more – and maybe turn it 3d.

darker meener spaceship On one of my many photosafaris I had taken a picture of a corner of a train corridor which I thought would look very nice as a high-tech background to a 3d image. The spaceship sketch cut out and made 3d by laying it on a mesh in Blender was already starting to look more effective – but I wanted it to look even more 3d illustration like.

I spent a few hours messing with the placement and intensity of the lights and sculpting the mesh that was supporting The corridor already look futuristic, doesn't it? the spaceship sketch. I think the image is going in the right direction, but it’s far from complete yet.

I need to add a lot more 3d detail to the corridor that the spaceship is flying through and to the spaceship itself. Then the final touch will be using Photoshop to add some motion blur to the action in the background of the illustration. The whole thing has already come a long way from it’s individual elements though.

Spaceship artist out…

I always like these behind the scenes shots