As technology advances, it becomes available first to governments, then to corporations, and finally to individuals. Once space is exploited by corporations, being in space becomes a job—even a labourer's job. Space welder becomes just welder who happens to be in space. That's the blue collar space.

here we go again

July 6, 2018

Well, I wasn't wrong. The next step to a new project, even if I'm not remotely sure it will ever be anything, is to make a cover. I just dig designing covers, I think, so any old excuse will do.



Here's the process. I'm excited! The playtests are fun! There are images in my head! They must get out! So in our playtest, at one point the characters steal an armoured car adn in my brain it's a later WW1 or early WW2. A Mercedes is what I had in my head. And that scene stuck with me. So I find a reference!

Of course Wikipedia is my first stop. And there's pic in there of a Fordson operating in Iraq in 1941. Well there we go! I grab that image (yay public domain) and move it to my iPad.

Over there I sketch it up in pencil. Make a few modifications. Trace the bits I'm not comfortable with doing by eye (tracing is just working by eye but with zero parallax so I refuse to feel bad (also artists trace all the time (shut up))). It looks cool! Still enthusiastic!

Then inks. In this case just one pen size. Try to catch details but also I want a slightly rough look. If it echoes Herge even a little bit, it worked. Then values. I work it over with seven shades of gray brush until it gets that front-lit early morning light I want. Done! Move it to the desktop for work in Illustrator.

First I live trace it to turn it into a vector image. That's not so much for rescaling (though that is very handy) but rather so I can take the background away trivially. Convert the trace to shapes, grab the unwanted shapes (the sky, the space under that guy's arm, and so on) and delete them.

Next drop a background field in desert tan for the ground. Add a blue sky as a rectangle, tilt it a bit, and make it a little transparent so the desert tan mixes. This gives me a nice coherent palette. It looks sweet but too simple. So I complicate it.

Grab a public domain image of smoke, make it very transparent, and paste it over the sky. Sandstorm! Add a dark outer glow to the ground to shade the base of the sandtorm. Make the ground a subtle gradient instead of a flat tan so it goes light (the rising sun on the left) to slightly darker. Keeps the eye engaged.

And then text. I grab a nice distressed stencil type from TypeKit. It's nice and it has the one gimmick I need in a distressed font: the upper and lower case are the same upper case letter but with a different distress pattern. For some reason I really despise distressed type where two letters are identical. Destroys the whole illusion for me.

Tinker with the text placement and its fill, make a chaotic edge to it, and step back.

Sand Dogs!



