Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas - The Ends of Invention

The Ends of Invention accelerating away from Vavatch orbital.

When Banks described Horza seeing stars from an elevator, to realize they were lights from a vast spacecraft, a General Systems Vehicle, I pondered the difficulties of drawing such a big object. The only way I was going to be able to get an overview of the 'Ends', was to zoom out and for any convincing sense of scale, shoot perspectives of a queue of ships waiting to board her. The boarding ships, themselves as large as cities would have to be seen close enough to spot buildings, then again at the GSV as a dash of a pen. You see the challenge, any windows or details on the GSV itself would only begin to be visible a lot closer in. 

I included the three tiers of air pressurization described by banks, that the CAT flies/falls through. I love these details, a passenger wanting to travel from the base of the ship to the top would have to do it gradually or like a deep sea diver get the bends. The rear landscape is based on where I live, next to the Peak District, for all you can see through the clouds. 

If you look closely the front landscape has a mountain and a lake. 

The spacewalkers' drones fields are a happy orange!

In the end it was 3.5x A3 sheets stitched together. I forget how many hours/days/weeks! Being in space is great because there is no right way up, it still makes sense on its side or upside down.

Below is an earlier stage shortly before starting with the colours. The challenge was always the slightly twisted perspective of the GSV. As objects got further away I had to ditch black outlines and any details and fade into colours.

The way I add colour hasn't changed since I was a kid, mum used to tell me off for colouring in our books. Pictures like this were way too tempting when I had coloured pencils.

I tried to get this effect in the far off landscapes, the way clouds level in the atmosphere, although I was only vaguely successful.

Here are some studies I did for the Clear Air Turbulence. I liked to think the three fusion motors would spread out in flight revealing a central warp engine! 

...yes I know, all spaceships are phallic, right?

Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas poster

Only read on if you want to see stages of development, there are no plot spoilers.

I looked at these covers which gave me an idea of what to develop. All I knew was I wanted to include the orbital.

I set out to do my version of the book cover, as you can see a wraparound design in the sketch.

From the sketch above I upscaled the right page to some heavyweight A3. Organising flightpaths of shuttles, vapor trails and improving detail.

I realized the mistake of adding text to the artwork, at the top this worked into the artwork.

At the bottom the text was erased as I would later stitch two A3 drawings in photoshop.

Like in other work of late objects in the mid and foreground have a strong black outline. Since the Iain M. Banks tribute piece I have used techniques from Piranesi etchings. Objects you want highlighted are drawn out exactly as if you were designing a tattoo, keep it simple and bold. Up close it can seem crude and basic but it lifts objects crisply from the background.

As I worked on it I opted instead for a longer vertical composition with the intention of including hovercraft in the mid-ground with visible passengers to give a sense of scale. So much for the book cover! A poster then. 

I had a chance to include fluid dynamics in the circlesea in the wake of the hovercraft. The swirls and eddies give the composition a bit of interest and mood and came from Da Vinci's studies of water movement.

Finally this included Perosteck Balveda in the foreground pondering the scene. In terms of the narrative this is a made up event during the evacuation of a megaship, Balveda has just arrived at Vavatch orbital and perhaps it's at the point that Kraiklyn's crew are en route to Vavatch. Without giving anything away it seems Balveda really struck me, which is why I included her and not a gun toting Horza.

Books that left me changed completely

A while ago I was moved to do some illustrations for two popular books that left an indelible mark on my outlook of the world. Orwell's '1984' and Samuel Beckett's 'Molloy', in different ways excited me to draw, yet I abandoned both projects...

...I felt I wasn't getting the necessary steel of 1984, which appears almost pastoral in my approach. I was thinking about Winston and Julia's place of escape, but was finding the brutal parts of the story harder to visualize in any original way. The film version with Richard Burton seemed to get a lot of things right, and the Radio 4 version with Christopher Ecclestone has a good sense of dread.

The way the book is punctuated with the regime propaganda in newspeak serves to begin to grate on the reader, making you feel Winston's rebellion. I felt the same way when reading Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, the way Patrick Bateman's internal monologue of jealous hate in the endless lists of his tastes and brand names eventually leaves you sure as much of the authors politics as of the condition of Bateman's mind. I suppose the fact that B.E.E. was still a young man as he wrote American Psycho accounts for the humour and light touches that are drained from Orwell's book.

With Orwell dying as he wrote 1984 in solitude, what moves me is the transparently autobiographical heartbreak of a man who had been so let down by socialism's failures in Russia. Sadly my drawings could sustain none of that tension, so all there is are these sketches of the book that haunted me for years.

Carrington

Syme

Four Minutes hate

Beckett's 'Molloy' was a lesson to me on old age, almost as much as spending six months as a care assistant. The confusion and then bursts of lucidity, as old Molloy rambles around had me grasping for a way to convey it in drawing. 

It was clear this had to reflect in the marks made, so there was a freedom from defining shapes. I enjoyed this so much I made a painting in which I tried to get a sense of Molloy's sensory frustrations. 

I felt liberated from my usual stylistic and technical concerns!

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - The Spies Revisited

Something of a stylistic experiment with a nod to William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley.  The diminutive Gallivespian spies! From the left, Lady Salmakia, at the back Lord Roke. At the front the very cool Chevalier Tialys. They appear to be confronting a Magisterial spy. Their names are split into syllables not to be pretentious, but for how the words look. Very Arts & Crafts, and so English!

 I was taken by something I read by Richard Dawkins, saying that we as humans don't concern ourselves with things like surface tension on water, as we are too large to notice it. As I drew the 4 inch spies, I imagined it being great if their long thin feet could walk on water, insect like.

Lately I've been trying to improve textures and reflected light, going back to exercises like this below.

I decided to knit the scarves of the spies, as I designed them, on a 1:1 scale. I added them to the first watercolours I did of each character on dowel poles above the pictures.

I'd like to share some sketchbook pages showing how I developed the characters and images. One of Pullman's greatest inventions was mounting the spies on dragonflies, which I am developing into a layered drawing. You can see Lord Roke's Lodestone Resonator. To get a sense of the spies' scale they jump from Lyra's shoulder.