Planet Blender

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.

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.