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.
Here was the first chance I had to really define the interior look of these cockpits and I ended up going for a pretty standard look, I think. You can see that there are exposed tubes of that same purplish-red fluid behind the seat. This one is a little more zoomed in than some of the other work in cockpits I've done, but in my mind tubes plug into the back of the helmet as well as onto the bracers of the pilot. It's just out of frame on this one, but when I was creating the first image in this series way up at the top, you can just see that version of Van holding the controls of her Engine and for that hand pose I was actually taking a bunch of photos of me holding a Wii-mote Nunchuck to get the right reference and shape for the handles. The other challenge here was making sure that in an image with a bunch going on already, that I also was able to get the reflection of the oncoming Leviathan in Van's visor, while also not obscuring Van's face. Initially I had this framed differently with the camera basically in Van's lap looking up at her face, but because of the way all the images in the book have a 3 degree inclined crop, we ended up going with this diagonal composition to fit with the actual borders of the image.
There are 3 more posts of just illustrations for my work on On a Sea of Stars. This one is a pair based around Himna, tomorrow will be a trio about Surt and then a final one that might be low key my favourite of the set.
This is my favourite Leviathan design of the bunch. The "head" of it is very much based off of Atomos from various Final Fantasy games, but particularly trying to evoke the horror of it's appearance in FF9. Originally, this was a composition that I did without the mechs, and with Last Bastion replaced by a capital ship because it was meant for the establishing shot of Leviathans, but we ended up going with the one you see in the second post of this thread, and decided to re-use this composition for Himna's desperate charge. In my mind, the nebula-like gas you see throughout space in my pieces is actually being emitted from the Leviathans themselves as they move, and reacts to their hostility by tinting orange. It look a lot of work, actually, to get this piece to read properly, and I resized Himna's Engine a bunch of times, as well as having to do several iterations on her boost jets so that they felt big and powerful, while not totally obscuring other important parts of the image like, for example, the Engine itself.
Here is Himna having landed on the Surface of a Leviathan. This was gonna be the best full body shot of an Engine we were gonna get so I made sure to keep the scorch marks and steam to a level where you could still read the design pretty well. This is also the macro look at the Leviathans who we've only seen from afar thus far. I really wanted to get into those 80s and 90s OVA meat greeble textures as I did this. I wanted it to kind of look like a layer of slime mold had grown over a more mechanical chassis, and this also gave me a chance to tie the Engine and Leviathan designs together again, showing the way they would interface with one another. They are built from the same tech and it was important to try and communicate that visually.
This was part of a series of 3 images about reduced effect, harm, lost opportunity, harm and consequences, starting with Surt moving out alone into a dangerous situation. Here I imagine the Leviathan is not yet even quite aware of the Engines. Surt activating some kind of Barrier, but gunning the thrusters. It can be hard to communicate distress when you're drawing mechs, so in order to kind of show the reaction Van and Himna's engines are having in the background we employed some kind of comic symbology in addition to their poses being sort of exaggerated. In my mind, Surt is heading off the Leviathan and leading it on a chase to give an opening to the others.
We knew we wanted Surt to be flying through a debris field, and originally it was going to be an inside the cockpit shot, with this kind of action sequence only being in the first shot of this set, but we decided to change things up and this became our real action scene of the set, getting chunks of debris crashing into both the Engine and Leviathan as they moved through space. I wanted to come up with a way we could make Surt's Engine look like it was going even harder on the thrusters than before, so I created this kind of extended arm mode, where smaller verniers are paired between the segments. I wanted the debris to look a little more like a ship had exploded so in addition to abstract little shards I tried to incorporate a few, more in tact looking segments that could be like ship greebles.
In this shot I needed to try and communicate that Surt is in very bad shape, but not dead. I'd already done a shot with the view screens filled with warnings above so I needed to employ a combo of those style of warnings and then also bust up the cockpit innards. To show his comparitively older Engine, I've used older looking screens and switches for his engine. I also imagine Surt as being a little more openly sentimental than Van, which is why there are things like his note to himself that starts with "Be CAREFUL!" taped to his console and a polaroid of his sister and himself just visible in the top left.
One of my favourite images to compose in the entire set, I had to redraw this one due to my own fuck-up halfway through, meaning that originally the head innards of Himna's Engine looked entirely different at one point. As often happens, I think the second version is a much better, more readable version of things, it is always a harrowing experience to get that far into a drawing and then be forced to go back to 2 hours before that and redo that work. This was our real chance to try and make these engines look semi-organic and sentient, so I hope that comes across. This piece was also a blast to light, though took a lot of finegling to have read properly, value-wise.
