Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/02/11/a-spaceship-called-the-artful-dodger/

I’ve reached page 218 of the science fiction novel that I am reading and, at the same time, illustrating; and at last a spaceship has caught my eye.

The spaceships from the book – The Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton – are of a very futuristic kind indeed. The spaceship on page 218 is described simply as a purple ovoid on five bulbous legs. There is no hint of surface detail and the characters from the science fiction novel are antigraved on board through an opening in the hull  that smoothly opens. So, as the basis for my illustration, I have a lump with no doors, no engines, just a shape. An amorphous shape made of some exotic mix of materials or other .

I normally prefer the spaceships in my illustrations to be a little lower on the rungs of the technology ladder, with engines and gun pods etc. but that wouldn’t be remaining true to the book – I couldn’t resist adding a couple of windows though. There is of course no hint that the spaceship in the book has anything as primitive as windows, but they sure are pretty and the illustration lacks a certain something without them.

My spaceship design is probably a more complex shape than the author envisaged as well, it even has the suggestion of wings, but there is another spaceship in the book with wings – heat sinks in fact, but they look like wings – so I can claim some justification.

The basic design is done with trueSpace, a free 3D design and rendering package, with details added in Photoshop, which is very, very far from free, but indispensable to an illustrator. If Photoshop is on your hard drive then cherish it, however it got there.