SPACE! The Gallery Show!

My piece for Mike Mitchell's SPACE! The Gallery Show, opening this friday at Gallery 1988 in LA! (with a ton of other amazing artists, oh man!)

I'm a lifelong sci-fi fan, and when I was deciding what to contribute to the SPACE! show I thought of my more memorable sci-fi experiences. Watching Silent Running with my dad as a kid both fascinated and terrified me, and I've been interested in how nature fits into a space travel ever since. What are the logistics of putting something so beautiful and complicated into a very fragile & isolated location?

In the 1970's, NASA, with the help of Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, studied a variety of plans for space colony designs. I think it's notable that there was a lot of awesome original art created for these plans to inspire people and generate interest in space travel. It's amazing that these same designs have also informed so many modern day depictions of space stations in books, tv and movies!

In the spirit of those NASA illustrations (and after doing a silly amount of additional research) I made a travel poster for a new ecological space habitat of my own design!

Shoutout to Sam for inspiring me to use Google Sketchup....I've been watching him use it very effectively to make simple environment/perspective reference and decided to take the plunge myself. No way in hell I'd be patient enough to draw an inverted curved perspective otherwise!


Some of my preliminary process steps:

Having good perspective reference is invaluable. I made a simple mockup of my space habitat in Google Sketchup & took a screenshot to use in PS. It's a fiddly program...but it's free, and was definitely useful for this!

After taking the screenshot, I deleted everything except the lines in Photoshop, and colored them white. I drew my rough color sketch underneath so I could figure out what goes where!
 

Once the rough color sketch was in place, I started working out the colors and details more. (using adjustments/adjustment layers to fiddle with color)

Once I got the color figured, I added in even more rough details. After this, it's just a matter of polishing up the lines and shapes and adding some bits of texture on top!

Summer Vacations...

...aren't always the most relaxing. I was asked to illustrate an essay in Boston Globe magazine written by an author who prefers to just stay HOME during the summer and let everyone else clog up the roads and sweat out in the heat.

My AD suggested an uncomfortable roadtrip, and I thought that adding a glimpse of the cool and relaxing house she's leaving behind would be a nice contrast. (as a homebody at heart, I sympathize)

I myself will be moving apartments not once but TWICE this summer--in two different states no less--so I'm getting geared up for my own "uncomfortable roadtrip" haha. But! I'll be living it up in Brooklyn at the end of it, so here's to some future summer fun!

Thanks again to my AD Ryan Huddle!