Lurking Spaceship
This sci-fi illustration of a spaceship was produced using a Bamboo Graphics Tablet , and painting it this way was a lot of fun. I was making marks with the stylus that looked a lot like oil painting. Actually I just made a nice big mark with the brush and then blurred it with the blur tool, like you would mix real-life oil paint., but it was a very nice effect.
Of course the more I experiment with the graphics tablet, GIMP and digital painting the more I learn. With this digital painting, even though I ended up producing a colour illustration, I started out painting it in black and white. I then added colours on top, once I had got the shading worked out a little bit, and it worked very well. This is actually an old technique, often used in portrait painting, although there they use green and white for the base layer to get nicer skin colours – like subsurface scattering on a modern 3D app.
A simple image like this one, with just one machine and a background, and with not too much going on can be painted quite quickly, and that's something I'm very interested in at the moment as I update and build my portfolio.
The Zoner is a cheap little fighter that is often taken along for protection by larger spaceships. It can be stowed away in the hold or a hangar in case needed to fight off a horde of space pirates, or that non player character nemesis on your character sheet, whatever the game can throw at you basically. It is an unsophisticated design that is not capable of FTL travel and which has very basic armour, but it has a big gun, and for many deep void defence forces in the Tarazet game universe, these are the deciding factors in deciding what spaceships to use. the Tarazet DVN has many examples of this cheap little spaceship, along with some more sophisticated designs used by its fighter aces.
A pilot is not required for the Zoner as it can be operated as a drone from the base spaceship or it can be piloted by an AI. There are of course places in the game universe where the cheapest option is to put a sentient creature of some sort - either human or alien - in the cockpit to pilot this spaceship.
Another common use for this design, as can be seen in the illustration, is leaving large numbers of these nimble little fighters strewn in a natural obstacle like an asteroid field and then driving your enemies toward them, springing your trap at the last moment as the inert spaceships come alive and have at your enemies from behind.
