Latest art.  This is the cover for a novel by William Johnson called: "Earth 2.0: Prison Planet."  

It was fun doing the spaceship for this piece, which I built with a program called Autodesk Inventor Fusion (which is like a smaller, easier to use version of Maya.  It doesn't do a lot of the stuff that Maya can do like work with textures and fancy lighting - it's basically a crude sculpting program.  Which is exactly what I wanted, because, well, Maya has too many buttons.  Whenever I open it up, I feel like I'm sitting at the controls of the space shuttle, and I have no idea what button does what I want it to, and there are a million buttons, and if I touch the wrong one, the whole thing will crash.  Inventor Fusion strips away almost all the buttons, leaving only a few key functions for sculpting.  This I can handle.  Yeah!



In the second image, on the far left, you can see two pre-final versions of the spaceship.  I wanted to design something with big scary guns.  The idea is that the guns use tremendous amounts of energy, so it makes sense that they'd be tied in directly with the engines.  The green glow, in addition to being a little scary (like the green skeleton ray in "War of the Worlds") visually and mechanically ties the engines and weapons systems together; they are linked like arteries in a neck.  And the ship is basically wrapped around these systems, with deep cutouts for the guns and engines.  

In the second image, I'm playing with composition, using an earlier zeppelin I did as a stand-in.  And a stock photo image of mountains.  I had to de-draw everything, of course, so that it all looked visually cohesive - or, as Frank Kelly Freas used to say, part of the same universe.  Also, the photo of the mountains was taken from the wrong angle - above.  But the ship is see from below, or, at best, eye level looking up.  As is the zeppelin.  So all these had to be re-worked to make the perspective work.

You notice that, in the last panel, in addition to rotating the ship, part of it hangs off the page.  And part of it is covered up by the mid-ground rocks.  This is to make it look really big.  Psychologically, when something hangs off the edge of a page, it looks bigger.  The ship in the middle image looks smaller because it's completely encompassed by the page.

So there it is, the newest piece of art.