Welcome to my First Blog post on my art. We need to get something out of the way quickly. I suffer from Dyslexia and will try my best to make sure these blog posts make sense. However, I will miss things and believe in being true to myself and honestly just writing without the pressure that it needs to be perfect.
Battle for Mu Station is the first in Sci-Fi series based around a story idea I have. I wanted to create a narrative series within the NFT space. Each piece will tell the story.
I wanted to make a Sci-Fi fantasy setting and wanted to mix elements of nature with machines.
The inspiration for this station comes from Laputa castle in the sky. I loved that movie and always liked the idea of floating cities.
I thought, why not move it to space? You can see pipes and structures around the tree and the glow from spheres below because the station is running off the tree's energy. A smaller detail is you can actually see some roots sticking out the bottom of the station in the center platform.
The station itself sits just outside the outer rim and is the last station before, affecting no-man 's-land for space.
Groups of space pirates often control the outer rim until the situation gets too bad that the Calvak have to show up.
The Calvak is the dominant force with the region and, in effect, the police.
Because of the outer rim's remote location, they often avoid it, leaving it open for space pirates to claim planets and resources as they see fit. I wanted the space pirates to be anything but tech-savvy, and you can see they use a chunk of an asteroid to fly around. The smaller detail you will see here is pipes leading to the crystal that is glowing. It's that crystal that powers the ships.
Here you can see the detail of a Calvak first-rate ship of the line turning up via the gate.
The gate on the sign actually says entanglement gate open, and please select entanglement device.
This implies ships can travel long distances via entanglements, although probably not possible in a science term. Yet, I wanted to create something interesting.
I also kept the naming of ships to a Navy standard, with the above Calvak being a first-rate ship of the line. You can see it says Calvak First R.
I also wanted old-style gunning decks like navy ships.
You can also see on the asteroid pirate ship a small city on its back, sadly getting blown to bits. I like the idea of moving cities in this world and enormous ships carrying hundreds of thousands of people.
There are plenty of little details in this piece that ground the foundation of the world for me. I always need some reason it exists or the role it has in the world.
Old school 80s 90s anime and the styling of Ein Hander mainly inspired this piece.
Ein Hander, the color palette is what I really wanted to recreate, I loved this when I was younger, and the styling has always stayed with me.
The other major influence in style came from Xenogears.
These have always been enormous inspirations in my idea of fantasy sci-fi, and I really wanted to capture the styling of both. You will see more of Xenogear's inspirations as I move forward with the series. However, this should give you an idea of what to expect.
I can't say my artwork is mainstream. I don't think it's any stream. I enjoy creating stories within my own little worlds. Each piece I do has a story behind it, and I don't create to create.
My idea behind a piece is always light and color. I don't follow any set rules or methods; I don't even have a workflow. I build every scene from scratch. I do not plan out beyond having a rough idea, and I tell the story as it unfolds.
This may seem like a crazy way to some, but it's how I work: I don't want to force anything. It also means my art can have no structure. Or be all over the place.
This also means I can keep adding and adding and adding to a scene, and it is becoming too chaotic as parts of the story unfold. It is a hard balance. In reality, my pieces should never be too similar in terms of structure, with some totally different.
This piece has taken around 35 hours to complete, including me restarting it. I was unhappy with the first final version. I wanted to push myself more technically and scrapped most of the project—the one thing to remain as the global ship.
You can again see in the middle is an actual city, and the red sphere powers this on top. I wanted to show this total difference in style and power source, giving the impression they have traveled elsewhere.
You can now see the major themes that run through the piece equally: the writing on the middle of the ship is done alien and not in English like the other logos in the scene.
I have 28 backups of this in various forms and have almost lost the work once, but it is now finished. Not sure how fun or interesting this was, but hopefully, it lets you see the piece a little and shows you some cooler details.
Until next time.
