Food Bloc Satellite

This is a satellite that the food bloc puts up late in the story, one that has onboard missiles to destroy the satellites of rival factions. I want to revise it with missiles mounted externally.

Here's the food bloc logo. I wanted it to be continuous tone and colorful to contrast with the other blocs. The bottom of the f stalk is supposed to be a shadow, I think to help that be clear I am going to make crop rows stripes on the field mounds.

Colored, Logo'd X2

Just wanted to update with a roughly colored and logo'd version of the Sikorsky.

Re: Fuel Bloc Logo
Here is the bloc logo you see on the fuselage and tail of the craft. The Fuel bloc is basically OPEC with Britain, and if the book were written now it would likely include Venezuela. I used red and green because a vast majority of middle-eastern countries use those colors on their flags. I like the tiny crescent moon in the top of the oil drop, very subtle nod to the Islamic.

Re: Craft Deco
As I mentioned, I wanted to go with a subtly camouflaged color scheme for the vehicle... something a country in a standoff would use for a non-military vehicle, but if hostilities were to break out it would serve well in that purpose. So I used some of the bloc colors (see the Fuel bloc logo, above).

The Planet Jem is stationery in relation to its sun, so the sky glows red-orange like a heat lamp. So it's a no-brainer to use red (which keys off the bloc logo color) for the undercarriage. The foliage on the planet is greenish, so I used that on the top. If I return to polish this up a bit, I might do some more broken color fields on the top. It's a fun challenge for a graphic person to design camouflage that doesn't look like camouflage, not to mention in a different color spectrum.

For some reason I thought if this happened now, a smart government would get have schoolchildren create artwork to add to the vehicle deco. It would be a gesture of goodwill and good morale for the colonists, but the hidden purpose would be to make a mottled arrangement of the art that would serve as camouflage if it became necessary. This may be an interesting story element to include, which would bed down some of the details that arise when you expand a novel into a visual medium. It bothers me when there is no nod to that in adaptations.

Bare-Butt Ugly Helicopter

In the middle of this drawing I was reminded of middle school. At that time I was playing Shadowrun (a futuristic book-based role playing game), mostly by myself, but occasionally at school. I liked developing new players, weapons, and vehicles. I was also playing Car Wars, another paper RPG, at that time. For one game or the other, I had designed a custom vehicle for the game, and had done my best to make a very crude drawing of the vehicle in what was then Aldus Pagemaker. Even the best computer artist at the time could not have got that program to produce a good drawing (it was really more for page layout), and I was far from good at that time. Anyways, I've got this crude print at the top of a stack of papers at study hall in school when I'm playing one of these games with friends. Some older RPG type-guy comes over to observe us, and he notices the rendering. He says "Man! That is butt ugly. That is bare-butt ugly!" Of course I made the excuses offered above, which doesn't seem to soften his disdain for this particular piece of art.

Got the basic drawing down before my brain overloaded. In my mind, to be perfect perfect perfect, I need to show the camouflage and faction logo (see last post). But I decided to stop and scan while I'm ahead, because I feel like I could ruin the drawing by doing either of those. In reality, that's not really that likely, especially since pencils have erasers. But that doesn't stop my mind from worrying.

The reference I used is from Sikorsky's web site. This is their X2 prototype, a helicopter with two main rotors for lift and a rear rotor for forward propulsion. For my purposes, it works because it looks so sleek and futuristic, and of course bare-butt ugly, like all things functional. It will do for now.

RAF Hudson

I'm psyching myself up for a vehicle drawing that I'm going to do in a few minutes. I drew this to get in the technical mind-set. On wartime planes, I love camouflage logic: showing a sky grey color on the bottom, and broken ground colors on the top, all jiggy jaggy, with necessary flags and emblems that stand out. Then during peacetime they repaint everything to geometric and simple.

The helicopter I'm going to draw in a few minutes is a sketch for an adaptation of Frederik Pohl's novel Jem. It's about rival factions on earth that each put several colonists in competing camps on a new planet. Because they're not technically at war at the beginning of the story, it will make for an interesting hybrid of civilian and military deco for the helicopter.

I'm also realizing that I haven't found my sweet spot with vehicles. On various projects I've sketched plenty of them, but I haven't found what it takes to put the finish on them. Figure drawings have an elegant way of drawing me back in, engaging my interest so that I can leave it at a good point. I look forward to slaying this dragon today.