Hot Pursuit (Galaxy Prime)

Here's the next illustration created for the Galaxy Treks book coming out by Epic Age Media. This one is another reworking of an earlier piece I did for a sci-fi comic I'm working on. I had a bit of fun with this one, and once more I fell back to using what is fast becoming one of my favorite celestial bodies (at least visually): Jupiter's moon, Ganymede. It just has a really cool look to it (especially when I used a posterize effect on it).

In this one, the thing that gave me fits were the laser pulses.

Rather than just draw them in postwork (which, in retrospect, would have been easier), I wanted them to have a realistic rounded edge to them. So, I set up two rows of about 15 little "pills/capsules" in Poser and parented them to the pursuit ship. This gave me a great prop to work with that maintained the proper position and aspect ration as I put them into the scene.

Of course, this turned out to be a problem and I had a lot of issues with them. I tried all sorts of experiments to get a good look out of them, and they just didn't work. I even spent about two hours applying little, feathered motion lines after each pulse. That was a colossal waste of time!

I finally fell back on semi-transparent fills with a slight gray glow effect. All in all, it works well enough. And I am pleased with the dramatic effect of moving the lead ship off the page: it just screams of action.

© 2020 Mike Mitchell

Standard workflow applies: Poser Pro 11 and Clip Studio Paint.