A selection of recent work

Twelve New Works

I’ve not made a proper post here in a long time, and decided to fix that with a selection of my relatively recent work.

However, if you want something more frequently updated, I post most days on Blue Sky and Mastodon. (Gave up on Twitter a long time ago). Also I publish fairly regularly on my Soviet Space Substack, covering Soviet Space History as well as my visualisations, and restored archive material.

The Red Star

Red Star CGI Starship, Illustration style

This design was based on a small illustration from the Soviet era. There was plenty of room for ad lib-ing the details, and I incorporated ideas from a Tsiolkovsky station, Daedalus Nuclear Pulse , and other elements. I’m really pleased with how this came out.

FREA pulse class ship at Proxima Centauri.

FREA Pulse class ship in front of a Red Dwarf.

As you may have noticed if you see me on other Social media, I’ve been doing a LOT of work for the Enzmann Archive AKA FREA, and this is one of my favourites. Continue reading “A selection of recent work”

Out of the darkness, and into the light, final.

A collaboration with Ali Ries.

I was very interested when fellow IAAA member Ali Ries offered me the chance to use some of her glorious nebula backgrounds. I’m not very good at using strong colour, and this seemed like an excellent chance to get some practice in.

(You can see her work at Deviant Art).

I found a nice starship in the file libraries at Foundation 3D, and set about it.

I used a yellow distant light for the key light, matching the colour of the bright star. In exactly the same position I had a red dome light – dome lights are extended sources, (often a whole hemisphere), my idea was that the red light would produce a subtle warm edge to the shadow borders.

I experimented with a blue fill light, for added colour, but without a blue light source onscreen, it did not look right.

After experimenting with a warmer tone for the side light, I decided to go for some very small limited range point lights, acting like running lights on the ship. I struggled to choose between blue and red, but in the end I decided to do both!

Here are the results:

In case you are wondering, I got the title from a misremembered Hawkwind lyric – I liked the idea of a starship once again receiving the light of a Sun after an incredibly long journey.

As usual, all my bits were done in Lightwave 3d.

Daedalus – A serious starship design

Daedalus was a serious design by the British Interplanetary Society, for an interstellar flyby mission that would reach Barnard’s Star in 50 years.

There’s some more info in this video I made:

Here’s a BIS page on the project:

http://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/projects/project-daedalus

And another nice article by David Darling.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/Daedalus.html

Continue reading “Daedalus – A serious starship design”