First ship in a long time. A friend asked me to design an underwater aircraft carrier that resembles a clam, a twist on the SHIELD hellicarrier. A couple minutes later this came out.
It feels a bit cartoonish, maybe that's the scale that I drew the details in, but at the same time I'm thinking it would be nice for it to be simplified and rounded like that to make it stealthier as well as easier to clean.
This idea has been in my head for a while, wasn't sure if I'd be able to draw it... well, I guess I can but I don't think I'm doing it justice. This is Dragon Colony, the dystopican uber-metropolis in space that Page and Sasha called home.
The dragon is all glass... if there are skyscrapers and landscrapers, I guess this is a space-scraper. It's where the rich and powerful of Dragon Colony love and play, while the lower classes, the criminals, and the workers toil away in the dirty city inside the rock.
And here's my first concept for the Officer's quarters on board the Iron Star. It keeps the brutalist aesthetic but I think it makes it a bit mora agreeable. It also reminds me of the quarters from DS9.
Having the shelves in that divider keeps the area airy, I think... the design itself is brutalist but I think the decorative touches would be more minimalist to try and take the edge off. I haven't decided what retrofits would be in there yet.
First attempt at designing a cylinder space colony... the sails don't really fit, I like them but they're more organic so I think I'll try to add more of that into the next design. The cylinders are made by a super-advanced species (known to us just as "the builders") and no human has ever seen inside. But I wanted the exterior to look more advanced, intimidating, and detailed than the ones I had seen before.
The outside is solar accelerator sails, which create energy and magnify light into the cylinder (which rotates, though we only see that middle pillar actually spin from the outside. The candy bar looking struts are docking bays for ships.
At some point, I'm going to dive deep into Planet Earth and similar documentaries to study and doodle animals, I'm sure I'll find a more nature-inspired way of tackling this thing.
More attempts at designing/understanding Japanese mecha designs.
I recycled my old car desk tape adapter thing and stuck it on top of a soundbar that just happened to have a notch the same shape as the tape... got my mind going on what modern day, minimalist tape players or floppy disk readers might look like. Just a bit of fun.
A corridor and exterior doodle. Inspired by a gift card box that I got for Christmas.
Some concepts for lizard creatures, I was kind of picturing them more on the "authority" side of the Iron Star-verse. And of course, one wound up looking way too much like a ninja turtle.
Honestly, I think that last creature design is for the birds.
A few selections from drawings I've been doing recently.
The first is the roughest, I realized that I didn't have a layout for the inside of the H4D35 complex, so I sketched out the basic layout.
I was thinking this whole thing would have to be a big miniature, it's the only way to get all that detail on camera... and probably have to be shot upside-down too. Once I realized that, I started thinking of little items that could be used to make it. There's parts of vaccuum cleaners and toner cartridges for the extraction machines near the bottom.
I've been toying with this motif for a month or so, this sort of half cloak half jacket SF uniform.
I've also got this backlog of Japanese superhero shows I need to watch, y'all know how nuts I am about those. Well, I watched the first episode of Metaldar and did quite a few pages of sketches, here are two.
The first are studies of old man Neros, the nightmarish shape-shifter. Never been a fan of his apple-face form, the others were always much more nightmare-inducing.
And some loose studies of Metaldar's complicated helmet design. I'm going to try to break it down further. I have a couple pages of simplified helmet designs and riffs, but as is always the case, there's something lacking in them.
And now some old school ships, salvaged from a 2006 sketchbook.
A giant blob-like creature... possibly a ship... and a possible control panel for it.
This was a couple of light lines, but when I started fleshing out the shapes, it began to look like a key. Maybe there's a place for it in the Iron Star-verse. Cages, keys, you know?
Drew one half of this ship.... had to mirror the other half.
This thing has been in my clipboard FOREVER. These little ships in...whatever the last Divergent movie was... I thought they looked like cats. So I tried to draw them as cats. I figure that might be a useful ship at some point.
This is just wonderfully stupid. I have a Red Guy on my desk in front of a giant red cup, which to me always looked like the red guy was wearing a big poofy ballgown. So I HAD to start doodling that.
Ideas for Runabout-type ships.
Another ancient set of ships, from that Cat page. Not really nuts about these, but maybe there's something to them.
Chairs for... some sci-fi thing.
Big old sloppy pigs, intended to be aliens or inspiration for aliens.
So pages ago I posted this waterworld/post-apocalypitic girl. I tried to do some studies of her face, and they were okay not great. And I wanted to get rid of the page, so I started playing around with them, adding warpaint and so on. Rough spitballing, but maybe something I can build off of.
Thanks, I forget what inspired them, they were in my clipboard for a while. I'm not even sure which ship they'd even be appropriate for... maybe for the pilot house in one of the prison transports, but we never really see in there (plus, some of them are just straight-up automated).
They say God created Arrakis to test the faithful...
A few years ago I watched this extended cut of Dune and I thought it was interesting... certainly a parts movie, if nothing else. I started toying around with ideas for re-casting (in fact, I just had a new one today... that I still didn't write down!), points of reference, etc...
Above was something that just came to mind, what the facility on Arrakis would look like. I like the idea of continuing that "bug" aesthetic with a massive locust on the top and having the tower descend into the dirt... and several stories beneath it. And when I did the circuitry version, I got the idea that maybe it's converting that sand into brick and glass and computer chips, so the tower is constantly growing. That could be interesting.
My favourite, though, is probably that obelisk.
I'm not nuts about these, the idea was meant to be a shuttlecraft designed like a helicopter. It just doesn't work for me.
I saw a leaf that I thought would make a good design for a ship... but what little I could picture in my head, I couldn't transfer to paper.
More concepts for my remix of David Lynch’s Dune. I was trying to think of someone as out there as Sting for the role of Feyd and my mind went to Ruby Rose. And then I remembered the weird blue plastic pants and I got weak in the knees ^_^ The redesign I tried to make look like a statue was sculpted onto her body. It’s outrageous in the right way but I’d like to take another crack at it.
The leather suit feels like a first draft, I like it but it doesn’t feel alien or funky enough for that world. So I guess that’s just a proof of concept.
And the palace… I was thinking of making more ornate. Jupiter Ascending had the kind of production design that felt right for Dune, the result of generations of massive wealth. But I kept thinking of the nasty, industrial, scarred planet and figured that the palace would be the opposite of that.
And transitioning to my own stuff:
Still unsure of what the name of the big human government/empire in Iron Star is called, so I thought I would try designing a symbol for them and let that inspire a name.
At some point I though of “The Oath Of The Horatii” with the three spears combined, an alliance between three worlds or universes. But that’s a bit complex, and it turned into a trident, which I liked. Simplifying the shape into a hexagon gave me an idea for the visual motif for that empire. Hexagons everywhere, everything connecting together. Maybe a bee/wasp thing?
The other image is a set of generic flags, not quite sure what I was doing them for. They’re not grand enough so maybe they’re flags for individual planets and organizations. Maybe intentionally dull so as not to inspire patriotism or loyalty. Loyalty to the grand organization should trump local loyalties for them.
Scavenger concept from my take on Dune (which I realize I should title "Blue Neumann's David Lynch's Dune")
And more tech-y:
A toku-inspired robot horse... has both horse and human mode. And the day after I drew that I wound up having more ideas for upgrades. Not sure how to extend that armour into a centaur without it being repetitive, though.
Rough ideas for what office space in the Iron Star might look like. Half space brutalism, half mundane. Honestly, I feel like the Iron Star's designer would have done something interesting for the crew side of the station, a la Frank Lloyd Wright's office building designs, but I worry that the IS would feel too nice. Plus, the new owners wouldn't really appreciate it anyway, and TV budget means tinier sets meaning something like this is probably more likely.
Random props for that office. Given that they can't have cell phones on the Iron Star (and I think that ban would go to the crew as well), I figure there would be landlines. And space needs more numbers, so a screen for the interface. Wanted a mix of old and new. That free standing console, I don't know what it's for yet, but it looked like a cool stamp or something and I like it. It could just be put wherever.
Scope from a rifle, modified into a thruster for a militaristic ship (definitely like the idea of a military ship being made from weapon parts, it just kinda works).
Watching Alien Covenant the other day, the engines on the ship reminded me of electric shavers. So I started playing around with that, thinking they would be good stock thrusters.
An idea for an old-fashioned sci fi terminal. Had the idea that it would be gas plasma displays, so simple red texts and shapes. It just felt right.
Thanks, so do I! I'm tired of holograms or just obvious flatscreens, I want something that feels like a bit or hardware. Plus the displays themselves beg for something more interesting than just the strings of text and icons and ditties, it would be fun to see (and design) screens that have a mix of modern mentality and old school simplicity. Strip away the excess that muddies up the image and just show us what's what as simply and as beautifully as possible.
That trailer was so awesome, it feels like an actual "western" Godzilla movie, you know? Established character actors (like Charles Dance, hooray!) and a kind of stunt casting with Eleven, they put all the monsters in and tried to make them look impressive... the blue is the only thing I'm not really digging (sick of that airplane toilet look) but I'm kinda hoping that's only in the trailer to keep everything looking mysterious and a little more uniform./
There's a couple of things I want to play more with, the claws, I'd like for it to be a bit longer and stringier, I don't think it's disgusting or scaly enough.
I figured this thing would be used as a creature to fight in space gladiatorial comab.
Brutalism studies for Iron Star, including ideas for Keeley's cell. The wall design has been escaping me for some time, I knew I wanted something that would refer to cinder block wall patterns, and I wanted something brutalist... the kick was it had to be interesting, but not too interesting... and I kept thinking that blank wall shouldn't be the same as the others.
Do the little orange bits... I had this idea for a ladder built into the wall, it would be steps and between them would be enough space for shelves, the orange is a backlight to give it a little more interest. I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out and I'm not sure how big a fan I am of it, it throws the proportions of the cell off... but it's interesting.
Hey, Like the Iron Star stuff, here are a couple of IS inspired cell block views. I noticed on one you wrote "Too Busy," but if it were rendered out, or a practical build, I don't think it would be. I used a cinder block texture on these. I didn't let them render all the way out so they are a little grainy:
OH MY GOODNESS! Holy cow... I LOVE these! Dude, you... you made my night man, these are just unreal! The grain works, actually, gives it an old filmstock look which is great for a prison. And from the thumbs I thought they were real photos. The big lights on the ceiling actually remind me of 70s sci-fi (a little Moonbase Alpha going on in the corridor), so that's cool too!
The reason I did those brutalism studies was because I wanted to retain that cinder block look but realistically they wouldn't use cinder blocks... though the paneling might make a good substitute.
The "too busy" wall design I was thinking might be behind the bunks... which probably WOULD be too busy.
Concept ideas for a futuristic sleeper pod, thinking a fantasy-tech kind of thing.
Rpugh concept for the command room in the Iron Star. I don't know how often we'd see this set, so I wanted to keep it simple. Need to come up with a design for the doors and some more details, but it seems basic enough.
Riffing on a helmet from Excalibur... turned it into a gnarly boar helmet. I don't know why I keep going back to pigs for creature designs.
Freaky buildings inspired by the second episode of Lexx... like that nightmarish callback to Giger and wanted to play around with it. The hair and trying to decay it made me think of Ankor Wat, I want to play around with that idea some more, maybbe play with a jungle setting or something like that. Not sure yet.
Also toying with an idea for a revamp of the Lexx design itself (I figure I'll want to redesign a lot of that show).
Sketches exhumed from a sketchbook I took on vacation last year. Cleaned up the deets so I can integrate them into my reference folders.
The cops in Italy had these decorative things on their lapels. I was getting a circuitry vibe from them so I decided to explore that a bit more. Not quite sure where I'll use that yet. But the sleeves? Silver on black? LOVE that, definitely need to integrate that somewhere.
I saw a sign spinner dressed like this in a small airport, all green tinted, for a postal service or something. I really liked that. I want to put that in a space station or something, maybe for Sprinter, show that humans are trying to get back into the wider universe and that all these little industries and courier services popping up.
I saw some logo that inspired the "Zap!" logo and I love it, think it's a recharging station for transport pods and maybe even civilian starships. And I can easily hear the advertisements, "Love that Zap!"
I keep taking sketch books on holiday, I keep not sketching... Perhaps I need to find you in RL and attach jump leads to you or sommet.
All this stuff looking awesome. My project has some gorilla style species, though not as plate armoury as yours, let me know if you ever plan to expand that more in a 'uniform' direction.
Posts
It feels a bit cartoonish, maybe that's the scale that I drew the details in, but at the same time I'm thinking it would be nice for it to be simplified and rounded like that to make it stealthier as well as easier to clean.
The dragon is all glass... if there are skyscrapers and landscrapers, I guess this is a space-scraper. It's where the rich and powerful of Dragon Colony love and play, while the lower classes, the criminals, and the workers toil away in the dirty city inside the rock.
And here's my first concept for the Officer's quarters on board the Iron Star. It keeps the brutalist aesthetic but I think it makes it a bit mora agreeable. It also reminds me of the quarters from DS9.
Having the shelves in that divider keeps the area airy, I think... the design itself is brutalist but I think the decorative touches would be more minimalist to try and take the edge off. I haven't decided what retrofits would be in there yet.
First attempt at designing a cylinder space colony... the sails don't really fit, I like them but they're more organic so I think I'll try to add more of that into the next design. The cylinders are made by a super-advanced species (known to us just as "the builders") and no human has ever seen inside. But I wanted the exterior to look more advanced, intimidating, and detailed than the ones I had seen before.
The outside is solar accelerator sails, which create energy and magnify light into the cylinder (which rotates, though we only see that middle pillar actually spin from the outside. The candy bar looking struts are docking bays for ships.
At some point, I'm going to dive deep into Planet Earth and similar documentaries to study and doodle animals, I'm sure I'll find a more nature-inspired way of tackling this thing.
More attempts at designing/understanding Japanese mecha designs.
I recycled my old car desk tape adapter thing and stuck it on top of a soundbar that just happened to have a notch the same shape as the tape... got my mind going on what modern day, minimalist tape players or floppy disk readers might look like. Just a bit of fun.
A corridor and exterior doodle. Inspired by a gift card box that I got for Christmas.
Some concepts for lizard creatures, I was kind of picturing them more on the "authority" side of the Iron Star-verse. And of course, one wound up looking way too much like a ninja turtle.
Honestly, I think that last creature design is for the birds.
The first is the roughest, I realized that I didn't have a layout for the inside of the H4D35 complex, so I sketched out the basic layout.
I was thinking this whole thing would have to be a big miniature, it's the only way to get all that detail on camera... and probably have to be shot upside-down too. Once I realized that, I started thinking of little items that could be used to make it. There's parts of vaccuum cleaners and toner cartridges for the extraction machines near the bottom.
I've been toying with this motif for a month or so, this sort of half cloak half jacket SF uniform.
I've also got this backlog of Japanese superhero shows I need to watch, y'all know how nuts I am about those. Well, I watched the first episode of Metaldar and did quite a few pages of sketches, here are two.
The first are studies of old man Neros, the nightmarish shape-shifter. Never been a fan of his apple-face form, the others were always much more nightmare-inducing.
And some loose studies of Metaldar's complicated helmet design. I'm going to try to break it down further. I have a couple pages of simplified helmet designs and riffs, but as is always the case, there's something lacking in them.
A giant blob-like creature... possibly a ship... and a possible control panel for it.
This was a couple of light lines, but when I started fleshing out the shapes, it began to look like a key. Maybe there's a place for it in the Iron Star-verse. Cages, keys, you know?
Drew one half of this ship.... had to mirror the other half.
And a cool chair.
This thing has been in my clipboard FOREVER. These little ships in...whatever the last Divergent movie was... I thought they looked like cats. So I tried to draw them as cats. I figure that might be a useful ship at some point.
This is just wonderfully stupid. I have a Red Guy on my desk in front of a giant red cup, which to me always looked like the red guy was wearing a big poofy ballgown. So I HAD to start doodling that.
Ideas for Runabout-type ships.
Another ancient set of ships, from that Cat page. Not really nuts about these, but maybe there's something to them.
Chairs for... some sci-fi thing.
Big old sloppy pigs, intended to be aliens or inspiration for aliens.
So pages ago I posted this waterworld/post-apocalypitic girl. I tried to do some studies of her face, and they were okay not great. And I wanted to get rid of the page, so I started playing around with them, adding warpaint and so on. Rough spitballing, but maybe something I can build off of.
Nice work
A few years ago I watched this extended cut of Dune and I thought it was interesting... certainly a parts movie, if nothing else. I started toying around with ideas for re-casting (in fact, I just had a new one today... that I still didn't write down!), points of reference, etc...
Above was something that just came to mind, what the facility on Arrakis would look like. I like the idea of continuing that "bug" aesthetic with a massive locust on the top and having the tower descend into the dirt... and several stories beneath it. And when I did the circuitry version, I got the idea that maybe it's converting that sand into brick and glass and computer chips, so the tower is constantly growing. That could be interesting.
My favourite, though, is probably that obelisk.
I'm not nuts about these, the idea was meant to be a shuttlecraft designed like a helicopter. It just doesn't work for me.
I saw a leaf that I thought would make a good design for a ship... but what little I could picture in my head, I couldn't transfer to paper.
More concepts for my remix of David Lynch’s Dune. I was trying to think of someone as out there as Sting for the role of Feyd and my mind went to Ruby Rose. And then I remembered the weird blue plastic pants and I got weak in the knees ^_^ The redesign I tried to make look like a statue was sculpted onto her body. It’s outrageous in the right way but I’d like to take another crack at it.
The leather suit feels like a first draft, I like it but it doesn’t feel alien or funky enough for that world. So I guess that’s just a proof of concept.
And the palace… I was thinking of making more ornate. Jupiter Ascending had the kind of production design that felt right for Dune, the result of generations of massive wealth. But I kept thinking of the nasty, industrial, scarred planet and figured that the palace would be the opposite of that.
And transitioning to my own stuff:
Still unsure of what the name of the big human government/empire in Iron Star is called, so I thought I would try designing a symbol for them and let that inspire a name.
At some point I though of “The Oath Of The Horatii” with the three spears combined, an alliance between three worlds or universes. But that’s a bit complex, and it turned into a trident, which I liked. Simplifying the shape into a hexagon gave me an idea for the visual motif for that empire. Hexagons everywhere, everything connecting together. Maybe a bee/wasp thing?
The other image is a set of generic flags, not quite sure what I was doing them for. They’re not grand enough so maybe they’re flags for individual planets and organizations. Maybe intentionally dull so as not to inspire patriotism or loyalty. Loyalty to the grand organization should trump local loyalties for them.
Scavenger concept from my take on Dune (which I realize I should title "Blue Neumann's David Lynch's Dune")
And more tech-y:
A toku-inspired robot horse... has both horse and human mode. And the day after I drew that I wound up having more ideas for upgrades. Not sure how to extend that armour into a centaur without it being repetitive, though.
Rough ideas for what office space in the Iron Star might look like. Half space brutalism, half mundane. Honestly, I feel like the Iron Star's designer would have done something interesting for the crew side of the station, a la Frank Lloyd Wright's office building designs, but I worry that the IS would feel too nice. Plus, the new owners wouldn't really appreciate it anyway, and TV budget means tinier sets meaning something like this is probably more likely.
Random props for that office. Given that they can't have cell phones on the Iron Star (and I think that ban would go to the crew as well), I figure there would be landlines. And space needs more numbers, so a screen for the interface. Wanted a mix of old and new. That free standing console, I don't know what it's for yet, but it looked like a cool stamp or something and I like it. It could just be put wherever.
Scope from a rifle, modified into a thruster for a militaristic ship (definitely like the idea of a military ship being made from weapon parts, it just kinda works).
Watching Alien Covenant the other day, the engines on the ship reminded me of electric shavers. So I started playing around with that, thinking they would be good stock thrusters.
An idea for an old-fashioned sci fi terminal. Had the idea that it would be gas plasma displays, so simple red texts and shapes. It just felt right.
Rough ideas for an ape robot.
And more cool... to me at least...
Jet Eater! Concepts for claws and heads for a toku-inspired fighter jet/robot dragon combo.
The Slag, a big, old, oily warehouse on a catamaran ship for a not technically sci-fi story I've gotten a second wind on.
And a slightly more realistic creature design
There's a couple of things I want to play more with, the claws, I'd like for it to be a bit longer and stringier, I don't think it's disgusting or scaly enough.
I figured this thing would be used as a creature to fight in space gladiatorial comab.
Do the little orange bits... I had this idea for a ladder built into the wall, it would be steps and between them would be enough space for shelves, the orange is a backlight to give it a little more interest. I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out and I'm not sure how big a fan I am of it, it throws the proportions of the cell off... but it's interesting.
The reason I did those brutalism studies was because I wanted to retain that cinder block look but realistically they wouldn't use cinder blocks... though the paneling might make a good substitute.
The "too busy" wall design I was thinking might be behind the bunks... which probably WOULD be too busy.
Concept ideas for a futuristic sleeper pod, thinking a fantasy-tech kind of thing.
Rpugh concept for the command room in the Iron Star. I don't know how often we'd see this set, so I wanted to keep it simple. Need to come up with a design for the doors and some more details, but it seems basic enough.
Riffing on a helmet from Excalibur... turned it into a gnarly boar helmet. I don't know why I keep going back to pigs for creature designs.
Freaky buildings inspired by the second episode of Lexx... like that nightmarish callback to Giger and wanted to play around with it. The hair and trying to decay it made me think of Ankor Wat, I want to play around with that idea some more, maybbe play with a jungle setting or something like that. Not sure yet.
Also toying with an idea for a revamp of the Lexx design itself (I figure I'll want to redesign a lot of that show).
The cops in Italy had these decorative things on their lapels. I was getting a circuitry vibe from them so I decided to explore that a bit more. Not quite sure where I'll use that yet. But the sleeves? Silver on black? LOVE that, definitely need to integrate that somewhere.
I saw a sign spinner dressed like this in a small airport, all green tinted, for a postal service or something. I really liked that. I want to put that in a space station or something, maybe for Sprinter, show that humans are trying to get back into the wider universe and that all these little industries and courier services popping up.
I saw some logo that inspired the "Zap!" logo and I love it, think it's a recharging station for transport pods and maybe even civilian starships. And I can easily hear the advertisements, "Love that Zap!"
Not sci-fi, but fantasy: a concept for Azteka's decaying treehouse.
All this stuff looking awesome. My project has some gorilla style species, though not as plate armoury as yours, let me know if you ever plan to expand that more in a 'uniform' direction.