Poster project: The Deady mantis

 

I watched this old sci-fi film this week and it was much better than I remembered so I decided to add it to my little movie poster project. I painted the mantis in Krita. Luckily, that was my plan, as my Huion tablet was all over the screen in Affinity and only less so in Krita. Huion has not updated the driver in years and the image started at 24x36" so it was LARGE. I had to cut the size in half to get decent performance on my 10 i9 processer iMac.  Irritating but I did it anyway. I used shots from the film and references of real praying mantis for pose. 

Icons series: Lost in Space

 I drew the three elements for this a LONG time ago and then forgot I was going to add them to my icons series of designs. I just had to make the logo and place them. Laxy I guess. Not my favourite TV show by a longshot but it does have its place in history and the robot and Jupiter Two spaceship are great designs. 

Games: No man's Sky Voyager update.

 

No Man's Sky had another huge update recently. As usual with me, there are a bunch of major improvements I won't really use but they are great additions to the game. Now you can make a ship you can walk around inside and basically have a flying home base. You can also invite other players along with you, not something I am likely to do but what a great thing for those who love online play with friends.

I noticed my graphics were better, it has been a little buggy. My character gets caught inside objects at times and game will open with the screen split into mirrored sides and I have to put the computer to sleep and wake it up to fix that. Overall it's pretty sweet.

Making your own "corvette class" ship is easy enough for the basics but you can get vert creative and some people have already made some incredible ships. I made one and then recently remade it with some tricks I learned. My original ship was massive. So much so I couldn't land it in many places. This new one is easier to land but all the corvette ships are much larger than the standard starships and they can't dock on landing pads or in your freighter, which is a little limiting. You can decorate the inside and set it up as a home base though you won't be able to fit some of the larger machines inside you might use on a planet bound base. 

There is a mutli stages mission with the new updates and they are better with multi-players I would guess. You can leave the spaceship while it's in space and fall to the planet surface or spacewalk. I have not tried either yet but, maybe. 

Game: No Man's Sky made by Hello Games

 

I was given No Man's Sky as a gift (thanks Mike!) after being very curious about it for a long time. One question I had about it was how "combat heavy" it was and most of what I saw about the game seemed to suggest  - a lot of it.  That turns out not to be the whole story. One reason I was given this game is it has a "creative mode" which lets you keep out of multi -player, combat and the ins and outs of trading and building things and lets you just explore and enjoys the created worlds. Totally my kind of thing.

I have learned how to play much better over the last 100 hours of play and really like it! I made a base near a lake and then put an underwater base in that lake that I can travel back and forth to. I did go on a couple "missions" that didn't involve contact with other players and I found them... interesting. I came across an abandoned ship underwater and went on a search for it's crew and I started to look for a lost alien named "Artemus" and  another named "Apollo" related to to finding the first alien but stopped actively pursuing it when I was told I needed to make space in my base and look for technicians etc to continue the search. Maybe someday. I completed... ? The Atlas station mission only to find it can't be completed definitively. 

Since starting a few months ago the game has had 2 huge updates, one for a mission I wasn't interest in and another mission involving collecting fossils. I wasn't interested in the mission group thing but I could still collect fossils, make and display specimens on my base and found that super fun. Hello Games seems pretty motivated to keep the game growing and changing. 

Problems? Sure there are. It can be buggy. Sometimes I sigh in and my character drops from orbit back to the place on the planet he was last. I don't like there doesn't seem to be a way to manually save or that while you collect ships to fly around in you really need to buy a freighter to keep them in. I was hoping to have several launchpads on my home base to pick and choose the ship I wanted but it doesn't work that way. There could be more building options and I think they will get added over time and some of the creatures and places are repetitive even though overall, the scenery is pretty stunning and fun to explore. The space station look amazing but inside they are all alike. I am sure these are from issues stemming from a game that is generated on the fly as you play. It takes a few minutes for the creatures to appear after landing. I also found some of the rooms in my underwater base had fish swimming freeing around in them.

None of this takes away from the game as I play it. maybe if I were interacting with others it would be annoying or hinder game play but it's easy for me to ignore since none of those things will affect my outcomes. If you are looking for multi-player action and combat or running a small village on strange planet, those options are open to you but I can't speak to how well that works or how involved it is. I am happy playing as I do! 

Poster: Earth VS the Flying Saucers

(Image was updated after getting some feedback)

 
Another in my sci-fi series of posters done with affinity designer and publisher. I watched it the other night and thought it would be a quick and simple project and it was. The saucers are pretty basic and the alien didn't have much detail. 

Poster project: Flash Gordon poster ( finished (?)

I did redraw much of Flash's face as I was very unhappy with it. I showed Ming to a couple people they really liked it a lot so maybe Flash suffered from being my first vector portrait as well as me giving into some of my worse tendencies like making him too pale, especially the lips. For the ship I used a 3D model I made combining several Flash Gordon designs. I used it as a special effects test years ago. I was able to position as I wanted for the poster and drawing it was fairly straightforward. 

Poster project: Flash Gordon poster - Ming The merciless

 I finished Ming and so far I think I like it... and of course, now I had the Flash portrait. I might start over or at least remake the eyes and mouth and see how that comes out. This one was going to have Ming's hands and his rings showing but I didn't want Flash, the focus of the poster to be a floating head and Ming to be more complete. I think Ming might have worked out better because he is much more of a cartoon with his heavy eyeliner and giant collar. The thing that really brought his face together when when I added the ears. 

Poster project: Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe version) poster

 

I have been starting and stopping and restarting this project for years now. I wanted to make Buster Crabbe front and centre with Ming, the spaceship and the cloud city as elements but I wasn't sure if I could get the likeness strong enough, especially when I decide I wanted to make it in Affinity Designer all in vector drawing. I more recently have been wanting to make portraits with AD and thought if I want to get to a place to do that this Flash Gordon project might be a good training ground and test. Afterall, all the people I'm drawing are dead and can't be mad if I do badly. 

This will work for the poster, though I am not sure I got the likeness as close as I would like. I used layers of shapes with blurred edges overlapping to get the soft blending for a more natural look over the overly clean 3D model look vectors can have. I think I really got the overly dyed blonde hair right. There are 100s and 100s of lines to make the hair and I added shapes for shading underneath to keep it from looking too flat. His shirt was inspired by but not copied from any one shirt or another from the series, there were a few to look towards for ideas and I think I get something with a little of all of them in it. 

I can still make adjustments as I go and likely will. I wasn't going to do Ming but now I think I will start him and see how it goes. 

The final poster will have an art deco feel and I don't think I'll do a logo or anything like that. I made one from the original movie version but it's pretty ugly and not having it will give me more options when making the composition. 

Poster project: War of the Worlds (1953) (finished)

 

I decided on a look I thought fit the film and it's style. The stars are a photo I took in Colorado years ago with my brother and the earth is a 3D render I made in Cinema 4D years ago. I had the planet mars and the martian probe ready for the poster but that was way too crowded and counter to my ideas on what I wanted it to look like. The title is remade from the original poster and I used Paramount logo from the 50s. 

Poster project: War of the Worlds (1953)

 

Another poster project caught my interest. I love the martian designs in this movie and the film is really good despite it's departures from the book, maybe because of some of them. The Martian probe and war machine are pretty slick looking. I remade the original poster logo and I would like to draw the arm and three fingered hand of a martian. Not sure how I will fit it all into a poster. My plan is to draw elements I find cool basically and then see what i come up with.  All drawn with Affinity Designer like the last poster. So far anyway. 

UPDATE: Martian arm

Poster Project: The Day the Earth Stood Still (finished!)

 

After about 35 hours of work this poster is done. I thought I was done earlier but I rewatched the film and noticed some robot details I missed. After drawing the elements in Affinity Designer I moved them to Affinity Publisher and composed the poster, added the title and other information. I made a 1940's- 50's style earth that was to go under the hand of Klaatu but it didn't look right and didn't really add to poster for me. Gort, the robot, was a bigger challenge than I thought as he is smooth, reflective the costume lacks some details, his superman undies always look a little goofy to me but I knw why they are there from a practical costume making viewpoint. 

I would like to make a "war of the Worlds" poster from the George Pal movie but I have come up with a decent way to pull it off. I might have to make a 3D model of the spaceship, the creature, the martian probe... maybe all of that and work out my composition when I see what looks good or not. 

Distraction project: Updated space station

 I decided to remake my old space station project in Blender. I haven't tried animation yet I have to learn how to rotate the disks. Some day I will. Below are two older version done in Cinema 4D which I was very happy with at the time but not so much now. The oldest version is really not good, no sense of scale, the details are too large. Below it is much better but the new one above has a tone more detail and I was able to make very quickly. I like the 3D earth better in C4D that was free plugin that looked amazing, the Blender earth I used has texture issues at the poles. There is a Blender add-on for making a few planets in the solar system that includes some NASA hardware like the actual space station but I will need to budget for it. It is not expensive I am just too poor right now. 

Illustration: Lost in Space Robot

 

I have been pretty sick all week among other things happening and decided to do make an illustration just for the fun of it. I am not a fan of the TV show to be honest but I love the robot and I might do the spaceship and the chariot transport if I feel like it. 

I drew Robby the Robot a few years back, designed by the same guy, and was very happy with it. This I'm pretty happy with as well. I used 4 reference all of which differed in details here and there. So if this is missing or adds elements some purists don't like... draw your own. LOL

Infinity Designer - which is really the most comfortable vector drawing program I have used. Not sure what my style is with these things but there seems to be one. 

EDIT: Could not leave well enough alone and made the Jupiter 2

Another Damn EDIT: CThe Chariot, the thing they drove around in. It had curtains! 

Star Wars posters series

Well... why not?  Click to see larger versions.

The Star Wars models I downloaded from the internet over the years are a much higher quality than the 2001 models. I think that has a lot to do with the fans being so numerous and picky about  authenticity. Another factor has to be the age difference between the two properties. I have a feeling many of the 2001 models were made closer to the beginning of the home computer revolution while the Star Wars models are more recent. The models based on the Kubrick film seem to be super simple as if they were made for less powerful processors and with older 3D software. So there was some playing with textures but the overall geometry and details were spot on in most cases making the poster process much faster. 

Icon project: Babylon 5

Yes. another. Babylon 5 is one one of my favourite science fiction shows. I re-watched the entire thing...  all 5 years, the movies, the spin-offs and the 3 short films that came out more recently on iTunes. The original show and movies really hold hold up which is amazing considering I think it was the first show to use 3D graphics for the effects work. All done on an Amiga originally, my old favourite computer system. The Vorlon was a challenge as I haven't done robes in vector before that I can remember.

I tried some different techniques and learned more stuff about creating in Affinity Designer. I also cheated when making the station itself. It is a really detailed object and I wanted to see how rendering the 3D model I have of it lying about in a folder would look rendered as a 2D image then traced to vectors. I did not want to go overboard with the details and I was able to tweak it in designer with some additional shading. The symbol on top is the Minbari counsel symbol... I think. The background  Shadow ships are super simple, I loved them in the show.