Fantasy Fighting Airships

Some pencils for future pieces.

Aerial Dreadnought

Sketch for new image. Here's my little descriptive blurb:

"What a ripping scene! Hull holed, dorsal vanes shredded, the RAS Recalcitrant emerges from the cloud wrack over the village of Much Nadderby to bravely reengage the invading Brungarian aerial dreadnoughts!"






OK, here's an image in progress... Still need to do foreground bad guy and village and landscape below.












Final image: (update, added aerial  shell bursts)

I added a second, larger airship in the background, the RAS Steerpike:

RAS Recalcitrant As Astounding Stories Cover

Cover made from this image. Mr. Moorcock never wrote a story with this title, but I'm basing it on Oswald Bastable's adventures in time (Warlord Of The Air, etc.). My version of the airships use boron hulls as Moorcock described, but instead of helium or hydrogen, they employ vacuum vessels, which would have enormous lifting force. Update: added more explosions.

Dragonfly Astounding Stories

I turned another of my favorites into an Astounding Stories cover. Worked pretty well, considering it was horizontal before.

Savoia Marchetti Regatta Fish

Update -- never liked the little people I added for scale. So I stole Emilio Ponticelli and his wife (with some extras). He was a character in 'Those Magnificent Men And Their Flying Machines.' He kept buying really dangerous experimental 'aeroplanes.'

Robber Baron Dragonfly

Flying Botanical Gardens, 1900 Paris Exposition

I had this idea of an alternate universe where the tropical plants were housed in beautiful flying vivariums that were only reachable by aerial taxis (roleurs au ciel).

I found this great panorama of the 1900 Paris Exposition, so I added a lot more sky, expanded the parchment border, and started rendering the flying gardens. I used Strata 3D to model the gardens, the taxis and most of the people. I discovered it was easier to just illustrate the people, and splice them in via Photoshop later.

A happy accident: when looking at maps of the 1900 Paris Exposition, I discovered that the horticulture section is directly below in this view. How appropriate!

By the way, it's worth your time to Google the Exposition. Amazing level of technology for 1900. They had electric moving sidewalks in parts of it. There some are images here.

Source for city view

Final

Details

Pencil sketch

Windup Assassin Cricket

Every gentleman or lady should have one on hand.

Another Mechanical Fish

I was playing around with Illustrator, pondering how to create fish or snake scales elegantly, and I ended up with this image (I finished in Photoshop).

Update: I did a color version and added details.

Update: I changed the water, colored some scales a steel color, and made all the rivets steel.

Victorian Airship

I have been working off and on on this one. I started it after being inspired by rereading Mark Twain's 'Tom Sawyer Abroad.' I made up the name of the inventor and his invention: 'Dr Chas. Bigglesworth's Incomparable and Omnidirectional Aerolocomotulator.' The rigging is getting more and more complicated, and I keep adding more golden decorations to it as well.