I just realised I’m starting to lack some proper concept artwork in my portfolio so here’s some spaceships studies.
It’s not that Interesting Things can either be dragons or spaceship (well, it kind of is, actually).
But when you open Photoshop with the intent of drawing random stuff that’s pretty much what my brain picks first.
I don’t know if there’s a Concept Artist around who thinks “ah, this evening I’m so designing some bath room decorations, or maybe a nice sofa bed”.

Anyway.
As I said, I’m starting to have more illustrations and card-games related artwork than anything else on my website, hence the spaceships.
Not that I drew them intentionally to fill in some gaps, but I usually post the finished artwork and don’t bother saving the small thumbnails studies and scribbles.
However, they’re a good chunk of what we do at work, so why not?

There wasn’t a precise purpose in this, they were more something to keep my hands busy while watching Boardwalk Empire S03E08.
Generally these are supposed to be spaceships of human design. Individual transport have a more dynamic shape; fighters are even more dynamic with more aggressive angles; big trasport are more squared; rich people yachts have a silly expensive shape designed to compensate a small penis.

As a side note, the other day I was going through the Halo 4 Concept Art book with a friend (and colleague) of mine, and we noticed how the design for sci-fi human spaceships and architecture has become pretty much standardized. Despite how fricking cool the artwork might be, the visual language throughout many games and movies has become pretty much the same combinations of straight lines and corners.
So much so that you could have used concepts from Halo for Prometheus, for example, without risking to be too inconsistent.

I realized I did pretty much the same thing with this series of thumbs. Next time I’ll try to put some actual thought into them, and maybe come up with some original design.

by Paolo Puggioni