I've been making art almost daily, but for some reason I've been fixated on creating science fictional scenes. Digital art, and especially the fractal art, lends itself very well to this.
"Carrier"
The fun thing about the space art is that it lends itself well to story sparks. You can look at something that started out as a blank fractal (well, in this case, three) and start adding painted elements until you have built a scene from a story, but it's still not the whole story: that can only come to life in the imagination of the viewer. I started teaching myself digital art in order to create covers for my own work, especially short stories as it wasn't economically feasible to buy art for the amount they would bring in. But what was a necessity quickly became a passion, and now the art is how I relax. Most of the time. Until I start swearing at Photoshop, and then the First Reader turns and asks if maybe I need to take a break?
The really interesting thing is when I create a piece of art, post it, and people start saying, 'oh, that's from...' when in this case, it's a movie I'd never even heard of, let alone seen: Outland. I have it in my Amazon watchlist, though, and I'm going to check it out, because Sean Connery. Sean Connery in space re-doing High Noon! Oh, yeah...
nebula created with Apophysis. Once I figured out how to do this, courtesy of a tutorial that taught how to do underwater effects, I was off and running for the week. Full of ideas. When I got the first nebula, and it clicked into focus (the program does a slow render from very fuzzy to close to WSYIWYG), I laughed out loud. The First Reader wanted to know what was so funny, and I told him it was just because I was excited, this was so perfect.
The nebulas can be used for background elements, implying a distance of many lightyears, but still bright enough light cast to reflect off the massive station. Once I was off an running with the nebula renders, I started playing around with color, details, and discovering that sometimes close-up can be even more stunning than the distant glow of stars and gases. How realistic is this? Likely not at all. The Hubble images these emulate are artificially colored. I love to think that we're close in our imaginings. Space should be as gorgeous as this. Somewhere, out there.
Why just have an exploding spaceship when you can blow up the whole damn solar system? I left another render running when I left the house this morning. I could do this every day... at least until I decide I'm in the mood for watercolors, or inks, or... My work is available for licensing, or I can create a cover layout for a book if something strikes your fancy from this art. To commission art, or ask about rates, drop me an email. If you want something to look at, you can grab them as wallpaper, and if the spirit moves you, hit the tip jar in the sidebar. If there's interest, I'm debating setting up a Patreon for the art, too. For a downloadable wallpaper version of Fast Ship, click here.