Galaxy Prime Art 7: Battleship

Available at Amazon.com

It just dawned on me the other night, that I've been sharing the art of Galaxy Prime with you for almost two months now, and I've never bothered to show you the cover of the book that all my work appears in. Now, first of all,

I DID NOT CREATE THIS COVER ART!
This was painted by the very talented AMY FANNING.

I did, however, do a lot of work on this. It was painted on a large canvas board and I had to scan it with a standard flatbed scanner. I believe there were at least 8-10 scans to get it all. I then had to stitch them together and do some color correction. It was quite a bit of investment in time and technique to get it all to look right.

I did design the logo, though (two of them, actually -- this is the second... the first was more Star Wars inspired and creator James Shade wanted something a little more modern). I also chose to use the purple band at the bottom. This was a necessity because the vivid colors at the bottom made it too difficult to read James' name. This purple bar solved the problem by making it easy to read, and it helped provide a nice anchor to the page.

If you're interested in getting a copy of Galaxy Prime for your own, you can buy one at Amazon.com (among other places).


Don't Sink My Battleship
This week's image was a simple one, but one of the first where I used the rough lines to give it the retro feel that I was developing for this project.

GP pg. 103, "Long-range starships are used by explorers, merchants,
and anyone who wants to travel the stars in style and safety."

Although this one came out okay, I do think it looks better in the book because it was in the equipment section on starships, so the static shot (rather than an "action shot" of it in space) fit in well with the section's design.

Also, for those of you who are interested, here's another look at the original color render from Strata Design 3D.

Original color render.

In this one, you can see the highlights and shading that formed the basis of the image above. It is worth mentioning (again, for those of you who are interested in this sort of thing), that this is an exaggerated color render. By this, I mean I specifically used odd colors so that the various parts would stand out from each other. If everything were just a simple shade of white or chrome, it would be very difficult to recolor it into the b&w image that made it into the book.