If you weren't already aware, Girl By Moonlight's Backerkit launched! You should check it out. I have been given the go ahead to add my Girl by Moonlight work to my portfolio. In the coming weeks I'll be trickling out some of my work that's been used in the promotional materials for the setting I illustrated, On a Sea of Stars like this image that functions sort of like the title page/intro to this setting.
You can see these two pieces in the promotional materials for Girl By Moonlight. On the left was the first Leviathan I designed for the project, designed to really show the scale of these things. Obviously Gunbuster's aliens are a big influence on my approach to their form as well as deep sea organisms. With The Last Bastion space station (right) I'm drawing a bit more, visually, on the shapes of ships in the OVA trilogy Gall Force, where they cover their ships in these large spiky antennae. You may also notice what I refer to as my "sherbet palette" coming out. I use a lot of greens, magentas and oranges and almost never use anything even approaching indigo or cold purples. I wanted my pieces in the book to be able to be clocked on first glance with colour alone.
First off, the Backerkit campaign for Girl by Moonlight is done at this point, and I'm so proud and happy with how the project did there. I keep putting off sharing what I did, but today I'm sharing the very first pieces I did for the project. Each setting had a main cast presented, and On a Sea of Stars was no different, with 2 characters designed for the playbook art and two portraits. Because all the pieces going forward were about this cast, I used this as a chance to have these function as my character design models to refer back to as I moved through the project.
Himna (left) was the character that most helped me realize the setting. She led an insurgency that sympathized with the leviathans and was imprisoned by the naval authority and was brought out of prison due to a lack of pilots. This gave me a lot to work with. I knew I wanted the military authority of the Last Bastion to be this ominous shadow hanging over the setting, so I'm drawing a lot on colour schemes present in factions like the Titans in Zeta Gundam. I have a separate file on my PC that is just a flattened version of Himna's leviathan/orchid tattoo so I could paste and warp it into whatever piece she appears in. Falin (right) was a failed experiment born from an advanced experimental batch of pilots. They were described as more muscled and thick-limbed and I wanted to make them a bit on the bigger side of things, as it was important to me to try and vary the body shapes of my main cast. I think you can probably tell just by looking at this design that I was deeply influenced by the incredible character designs Guillaume Singelin did for Citizen Sleeper. I love the degree to which those characters just teem with small details.
Van was the representative of The Stranger Playbook and is described at the top of my brief as a "Cold and Distant luminary". We wanted her body language closed off and a little stiff. She gave me the most opportunity to define the look of like the Naval Authority side of things. In general you'll see me using orange accents on military personnel and green ones on more science and maintenance folks. This was also my first crack at the helmets, which I'm taking pretty heavy influence from Space Runaway Ideon on the structure of the split-glass visors. Her Engine is probably my favourite mech design in the set,
Surt is the Time Traveller playbook and comes to the setting from a different era, when human goals were a little more hopeful, scientific and exploratory rather than military and desperate and his design is meant to reflect that side of things. Because his life has been spent in majority zero g, Surt requires the use of a wheelchair in settings with gravity. I'll get into the mech design side of things at some later date, but Surt's Engine in the back there was meant to be the kind of early prototype of the stuff I would design later on. It's much more humanoid and has fewer elements that directly reflect the Leviathans themselves, but shares some key features.
I really liked getting to build this image. Showing hints of the cryosleep pods in the background. Having a bunch of bit characters from the Naval Authority to evoke characters we don't really get to meet intimately. You can see my fake Hamon Karn in the back there, and I had a ton of fun designing an R&D sicko just to the left of Himna there. All the status screens were also a ton of fun to design. I wanted to subtly show the way that systems are slowly failing and humanity's struggle to survive is getting desperate, so you have things like the screen in the upper left where you have fuel shortages and certain blocks are losing power. Finally, you also get to see a thing I do that's really important to me: making our epic space fantasy feel more lived in, so I made these two comms workers having a much more every day moment in the foreground. Buddy is stressed about his job and sometimes you gotta just suck on your nutripak and listen to him whine about it.
This is just about the most detailed shot of the mechs you get, in the book. You can see that I've used Falin's maintenance uniform to design the work crews for the Engines. Some of them are more safety conscious than others. You'll see some of them strap themselves in. That's both for fall safety and loss of gravity. You'll get to see that in action in zero g later on. You'll see these four engines featured throughout the series. The closest is the one Falin eventually steals, then it's Van's, Himna's and finally the prototype engine that Surt pilots. You can see I'm reflecting parts of the leviathan design in the shape language I'm using for these things, the most obvious things being the magenta reflective orb-like elements (they are not eyes) and the tubes of a similar hue. In my mind these are filled with nutrient rich proteins that would both power Leviathans and Engines and also be what enables rapid plant growth when a Leviathan is crashed into a planet. Maybe it's also partially the source of their sentience? I don't know. One detail I like in this image is that Van's engine's middle horn usually has that halo floating midway up it, but because it's in a powered down state, that halo just sort of hangs at the base of the horn.
One of my favourite pieces was this like... suiting up before the mission shot. Getting to show Surt as being extremely used to zero-g environments, letting his gear and snacks just hang out with the full knowledge of how to manage them. Himna you get to see in her full flight suit here, where I'm still using the dark grey/orange scheme that I use for the more militarized arm of the Naval Authority, but I've also tried to keep it less formal and suggestive of her status as a released prisoner. You can see I used the linework from the cover image's leviathan to create the mission briefing she's reading on the slate. Van and Falin I imagine are not doing much in the way of conversing back there, but you can see that each of them has a little magnetic grapple device on their belt that is a sort of nod to Zeta Gundam's use of the same type of thing.
This is the only engine I designed outside of the main 4, but I do love to draw wreckage. Here's the evidence for those shiny "eyes" on the Leviathans being filled with nutrient and energy-rich fluid, as you can see it leaking from the cracked chest orb on this crashed Engine. The shuttle was a design I did pretty late into this series, so it was fun to try and extrapolate what one would look like in this setting given the ship designs I'd drawn already. I'm also fond of the survey engineer's little Navi drone. It's also nice to get to draw a mech doing labour that isn't combat. I like getting to show this slow ambling carry that Surt's Engine does.
