Despite various delays due to other pressing work, the development of Freak Show is proceeding steadily, and after months of preparation and concept art I’ve finally started working on the actual panels.

I’m not sure we’ll share the whole panels before the comic has evolved into a more final form (or maybe yes? Note to self: talk to John).
In the meantime, in order to remain immersed in its universe, I’m also devoting my lunchbreak doodling sessions to Freak Show related subjects.

Since I had already designed one of the main ships in Zbrush as a reference for the comic, I used the mesh as a base for a quick mood study.
By quick I mean that I really really meant it to be quick, and then it turned out being a couple of weeks worth of luch breaks.

Anyway, here it is, N945 in all its glory.

I’m not spoiling the very first page by describing what this ship stands for or what it does, obviously.
I’ll just say that I spent quite some time figuring out what most of the various bits and pieces on its hull were for. So, what looks like random “tech stuff” visual noise should actually have a place in the Freak Show made-up technology.

I would have liked to post a turn-table animation of the 3D mesh, but for reasons I – and the several internet people I asked for help – couldn’t understand, the view in ZBrush was locked into some weird drawing angle setting, and the resulting animation would have looked very bad.

As an alternative, here are some occlusions renders made in Blender and Luxrender.
Good old Linux to the rescue.

As you might have noticed, the last one is the shot I painted over for the illustration, which as always was made with Krita.

Over the past few weeks I’ll be able to dedicate a lot more time to Freak Show, so I’ll be posting more of these soon.

by Paolo Puggioni