I’ve been playing a lot of No Man’s Sky lately. It’s the best simulation of hiking through a lurid 1970s sci-fi paperback cover I’ve ever seen. I think it might be my game of the year.

This is my headcanon of what’s going on when I play it with the ex hanging out on the couch next to me. And one of the rare occasions I spend more than an hour or two on a drawing – I think this was about eight or nine hours over three days.

Some friends who saw WIPs of this did me the honor of namechecking Jim Burns when reacting to it, but mostly I was thinking about the zillions of Baen books with covers by Stephen Hickman. Dude’s an absolute master of stylized shiny things. The signature on this one is a riff on his to pay tribute.

Me being me, of course, I made Illustrator do a lot of the work for. All those little seamlines with the shinies next to them? I drew a handful of art brushes and quickly slashed out lines using them; if the one I chose didn’t quite work, I could just change to another one or draw a new one.

The purple stuff is in multiply mode, the yellow stuff is in screen. Works great. I’ll probably be using these again in the future.