Someone recently pointed out a disturbing absence of spaceships in my portfolio, so there you go, here’s a spaceship.
Now, spaceships are a quite tricky subject.
The thing about them is there’s a LOAD of them on the Internet, so it doesn’t matter what you do, more often than not someone has done something slightly similar to yours, only slightly better.

Well, this applies to pretty much everything you do and post on the internet, so it’s no big deal.
Then there’s the matter of how you approach your spaceship.

Should it be something completely void of any technological coherence? After all, it could be built like a million years into the future, and you can’t possibly fathom what kind of magic our descendants would be capable of. Therefore you can just go nuts, put a bunch of shapes together, chuck it on a starlit background and there you go.
Or should it be something more plausible, which could be set a hundred years in the future? In that case the design could be pretty close to today’s taste, materials would be pretty much the same and all the elements (windows, thrusters, communication arrays) would be just an upgraded version of those we already use.

I knocked out this one in a fairly short time, and to be honest (being as it is my first break from Fantasy in months) I went for the safety of a well-established look. If I were to do it for an actual game (or had I given myself some more time), I would have developed something a bit more imaginative.

For the time being, here’s just a spaceship.

As a matter of fact, I’ve recently been complaining to a friend about some repetitiveness in the designs you see around lately.

In fantasy, as well as in sci-fi, some visual languages have become excessively archetypical, and most artists I see around seem to mix up ideas that are a bit overused at the moment, without giving it too much thought.

Aliens have spikes and fangs, villains wear black, wizards have a beard, elves dress fabulous and so on.

Hell, I’m one of the worst offenders, sometimes you can’t really do whatever you want, especially when you are paid for it, and your audience expects a certain kind of image.

Anyway, my complaining sessions resulted in the outlining of a project that I’ll be working on in the next few months during my spare time.

I’ve got nothing at the moment, so don’t hold your breath.

It will be a sci-fi setting, deliberately designed to avoid well established clichés.

So well, hopefully I’ll be drawing more imaginative spaceships.

In the meantime, remember that spaceships are like pizza, or sex. Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.

by Paolo Puggioni

2 Responses

1. Toby Deveson says:

   April 23, 2013 at 15:17

   “In the meantime, remember that spaceships are like pizza, or sex. Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.”

   Fantastic quote…though I guess mouldy pizza or rape don’t really count 😉

   Reply
2. maffa says:

   April 24, 2013 at 09:15

   “In fantasy, as well as in sci-fi, some visual languages have become excessively archetypical, and most artists I see around seem to mix up ideas that are a bit overused at the moment, without giving it too much thought.

   Aliens have spikes and fangs, villains wear black, wizards have a beard, elves dress fabulous and so on.”

   thats why i totally loved the Witcher saga: pretty much all archetypes are overhauled, and as a result elves are bums, dwarves are underpayed labour and so on…

   Reply