Base Ship Studies

…the point they dared not venture past as they were past any point anyone had gone before. Every metric collected, every byte of information relayed to the base hulls in orbit around the base they had setup for this operation.

It’s been a long road back to this place and, as lame as it may seem, social media is especially to blame for my troubled journey over the past few years. There’s no need to dive into it, it’s something that’s been written about many times, by many people, but the long and short of it is I rediscovered not only the joys of unbounded sketching itself, but the joy of accepting ‘this is what I do and the way I do it’.

Where I feel that finished images, be they 3D , 2D or something in-between, have reached the point where you can achieve outstanding results with the huge range of tools and machines, doodling, sketching… drawing are the heart of ideation and conceptualising and there’s no bit of software or AI that can, or will, ever replace it. It is, to me, a pure human thought process.

Here I am sketching ideas for ‘base ships’ which are mentioned in the introduction of The Silent. Returning to a design theme I had started developing over a year ago (which you can see on the concept cover – ‘Brutal‘), the designs and conceptual ideas I am working with are increasingly abstract in form, drawing on many different places of inspiration and ideas, none of which borrow from current and staid lexicon of science fiction design languages.

The bulk of the imagery I am doing for The Silent is sketch based, so expect to see a lot, lot more sketching! And if you’re wondering, I draw and sketch starting with a blue ‘lead’ clutch pencil (Staedtler) then go over it with a ballpint (BIC Crystal, medium point) and outline with a Pental Sign pen or Sharpie.