He’d been out here several years. The work was hard but never boring and seeing the big tugs pull small mountains from the outer regions never got old. Once he, and the thousands like him, had broken them down, the fleets of small utility tugs would come in and do their synchronised dance – grabbing, pushing, pulling their catch to the refinery where the rock, more than a millennia old, would be broken down and furnaced to extract the metals that kept the traffic-ways full of hulls.

Rock tug.

From the very first sketch tale in the book, the tug is the first element I had actually started to give proper design thought to and had been playing with it on an off over a number of months – from design sketches, comic style panels and doodles.

The design I liked the most, and designed the least, came from a doodle set into a comic style panel. I turned it into a little animated image for fun to see how the feeling changes when you take an image into a different medium.