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Beeship
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After reading the novel Starwings, British computer artist Matt Allen asked what the small fighters I had described in a battle scene looked like. I didn't know. All I recalled was that they were like a swarm of bumble bees with yellow and black markings. Those colors probably came about because of another British artist, Chris Foss, whose work I had discovered about the time I wrote Starwings. Foss had painted several of his space ships yellow and black. Matt proposed that if I ever modeled the ship he wanted to make a stab at illustrating the battle scene. Months went by and one day while playing with distorting a sphere in TrueSpace2, the ship was born. It and a larger vessel have been sent to Matt for texturing and rendering. With luck Matt will allow his final work to be presented here or will place it on his own website (check the links to get there). So, presented here without the yellow and black markings, but with a simple metallic texture is what I'm calling the beeship.
The Swarm
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The nice thing about ships modeled as 3-D meshes is one can use them again and again in different images. Here's a swarm of beeships moving in on the cruiser.
Arrakeen
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Frank Herbert's Dune has been a favorite of mine for more years than I want to count. I've always wanted to do a series of illustrations based on the novel. Here's a start. Pictured is an ornithopter above the city of Arrakeen.
The Arrival
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The image of an alien vessel arriving with the space shuttle in orbit had been floating around in my mind for months, but there was something missing. Fellow TrueSpace user Paul Hake sent a model of a space station my way and suggested I might find a use for it. The missing piece! Originally I planned an organic alien ship, but that has become overused. Instead I looked backwards for something that appears as though it escaped from an early Frankenstein movie.
Carryall
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The second illustration of Frank Herbert's Dune depicts a Carryall lifting a Spice Harvester from the surface of the desert planet. Herbert describes the Carryall as a "flying wing" and then as a giant ornithopter. When I 1st read the novel in 1969, it was the flying wing that stuck in my mind.
