And the last sketchbook page for now…

Here are a few more concept sketches for the interior of the Khoruysa Brimia, most notably the lounge sitting area of the main commons room, as well as the opposite side of the room, the door and window into the galley next to the dining table.

I also redesigned the cockpit chairs for this story arc, since the chairs in Bad Goods were a bit clunky and had too much detail to draw over and over again. As it turns out, these new cockpit chairs are also a bit too complicated, so I may end up doing another simplifying pass to make them more “drawing friendly.”

Look for them in Arc 3!

Two more Bonus sketchbook pages to go!

Here we have a few concept sketches for the interior of the Khoruysa Brimia. I did a few Bonus pages a while back about the Art Tweaks I did to the ship interior. Basically, the original designs were a bit too plain and visually uninteresting. They also didn’t have much of a sci-fi feel to them. So I went back and did a second pass on the interiors, trying to come up with something better, while still being mindful of not making it overly complicated and detailed, since I knew I’d be drawing it repeatedly going forward.

One thing you’ll notice is the recurring theme of the elongated oval shape, which is basically a rectangle with rounded ends. I wanted that shape throughout the interior of the Brimia as a visual callback to the ship’s exterior, where the main part of the ship, the cargo hold, has the same shape.

Here I went back and did another pass on the Bocce farm house to figure out something that fit with the environment a bit more. Sticking with the same general design aesthetic, I based the new version on a clay structure instead of sheets of corrugated metal at its base. I also decided on terra cotta style roof tiling since that seemed like something more earthen that could potentially be created on site. The other significant change was that I made the central room of the house square in shape, since I found the previous circular shape to be too similar to the Ulon Dosi village huts. Here’s the revised panel…

With this page, I started to figure out the basic look of the buildings for Bocce’s farm. I liked the idea of a central room with radiating U-shapes. I also repeated the U-shapes in the doorway arches and window frames to try to get a nice unifying theme going on. It’s also pretty apparent in the stables, both in the roof shapes and the feeding basins.

At this point, I still didn’t really know what I wanted the textures to be. When I actually drew the story pages, I originally made the house and stables constructed of more mechanical bits and steel plating, but it just didn’t look right. The farm was out in the middle of nowhere so I wasn’t sure how they would have gotten all those building supplies there. So I went back to the drawing board to do a second pass. Here is the original version…

The next several sketchbook pages will focus on the farm from the Bocce Flashback sequence. I was at a real loss with this one when starting out as I had no idea what I wanted. Usually I have something in mind that gives me a nice starting point, but here I had a crippling blank canvas. The only thing I knew was to rule out a whitewashed adobe look since that would be too much like the Lars homestead from Star Wars.

On this page, I was just spitting out building shapes to see if anything grabbed me. Not much did. They all seemed a bit too busy, especially for simple farmers, and none of the shapes were terribly distinctive or memorable. I did like the U-shaped buildings at the bottom, which were based on the U-shaped cuts in Bocce’s shirt collar. I thought that one design element would be a nice way to tie back to the cultural look of the clothing, and it ended up being a nice starting point for the basis of their architecture.

With the more recent sketchbook Bonus pages, I tried to pair them up with the actual story pages for that week, but the next several don’t really fit the bill. They deal with the Bocce flashback scene and are showing up now since I didn’t have the space for them earlier. Anyway…

With Bocce’s flashback design, I knew his outfit would be based on the one he wears in the present. Since his present-day black outfit is a cultural thing, I figured his flashback outfit would only make sense to have a similar look. The only thing I tried to do with it was to make it a little more rural in feel to go with the farm setting.

And the hand-towel around the waist. Because who couldn’t use a hand towel every now and then. Especially on sloppy joe day.

This page shows the various concepts I did to come up with the Kaagan-Vas tattoo. I pretty much covered the thought process back on The Big Snow Job #3, Page 9. Basically, I wanted something that would be easy to draw, fairly aggressive and tribal looking, and something evocative of a pirate ship Jolly Roger skull and crossbones. I have to say I’m very happy with the design I came up with, and if anyone out there is in the market for a nice back-of-the-head tattoo, I’d highly recommend going with a Kaagan-Vas mark.

And here we have the final versions of all three Kaagan-Vas rustlers. I wanted to give Baso a hat to make him stand out from other Ulon Dosi and to also match the other rustlers. Obviously, his doesn’t have any  neck covering though since he doesn’t have a KV tattoo that needed to be concealed.

With Warsaw, I finalized the look of his hat and also added some pattern detailing to his outfit to match Baso’s poncho pattern. With Uskulon, I ditched the lower body coverings and changed his hat. Ultimately, when I got around to actually drawing the story pages, I changed his hat one last time on the fly. I decided that this one was a bit too similar to Warsaw’s and I wanted them to be a little more different. So I went back to the rice paddy look.

With this page, I finally settled on Uskulon’s hat, which I based very loosely on an asian rice paddy hat. I thought that would make for a fairly simple, wide-brim hat, and unlike all the previous hat concepts, it actually seemed to work with his poncho look. I then added the straps to the back since I figured those would be nice neck protection from the elements. But the real reason for the straps is that I needed to make sure both Warsaw and Uskulon always had their necks and the backs of their heads completely covered so you wouldn’t see the Kaagan-Vas tattoos.

One last note on Uskulon: you’ll notice in all these sketches that I originally had footwear for his tentacle feet. As with Cember, I did give some thought to whether walking on snow directly would be a bit harsh or if they should have foot coverings. In the end, I decided that the foot coverings just looked a bit too silly. And I also figure with different aliens, maybe they have different physiologies, so they aren’t affected by extreme conditions the same way we would be. There are seals and walruses and penguins after all, who walk around naked all the time on snow. But then if someone gave them foot coverings, maybe they’d be grateful.

Moving on to Baso, with my first design, I gave him a duster similar in style to Warsaw’s. But then I realized that he needed something bigger and looser to hide the big gun he’s be carrying during the story. So I added a poncho similar in style to Uskulon’s. I also gave him a nose ring to (a) differentiate him facially from other Ulon Dosi characters, and (b) to give him some sort of accessory that shows his cultural break from Ulon Dosi tradition.

As with Warsaw, the body design for Uskulon flowed pretty easily. And also like Warsaw, you don’t really get to see much of Uskulon’s actual body in the story since he’s covered in his rustler outfit throughout. But if you ever wondered what he looked like naked, as I’m sure you have, now you know.

With Uskulon’s early outfit designs, I started with some more basic snow jacket looks, but they weren’t terribly distinctive and didn’t have any of the cowboy/Southwestern look that I wanted. A few iterations later, I settled on the 2-tiered, banded poncho look, which worked much better. The hat again proved to be the biggest challenge. Given the snowy conditions, I really wanted all of the rustlers to have big brims on their hats to shield their eyes from the elements, and it was tough designing wide-brim hats that did not look incredibly stupid.

More on Uskulon on the next page…

The Kaagan-Vas leader, Warsaw, was a lot of fun to design. With the very first full-body sketch, I pretty much had the basic look down, and then it just took a few refinement passes to really nail the design down. He may be one of my favorite alien designs to date. I like the hermit crab shell on his back, even though you never actually see it in the story itself due to the clothing.

Speaking of the clothes, back on The Big Snow Job #2, Page 20, I talked a bit about the Western influence I wanted in the rustler outfits. The cowboy duster look came about pretty easily for Warsaw. Actually, all of the rustler outfits were somewhat easy to design. The hats were the killers. As you can see in this sketchbook page, I tried to go with variations of the cowboy hat early on for Warsaw, but they just weren’t working. They just seemed too glaringly cowboy-ish in an almost comical way, like he should always be saying, “Howdy, pardner!” So I eventually scrapped the idea and came up with a different type of hat altogether.

Next up…Uskulon.

More sketches for the Kaagan-Vas rustlers, this time focusing on a few body concepts. The concept in the upper left eventually became that of Warsaw, which you’ll see more of in the next sketchbook page…