This is a commission for a guy called Martyn Adams who is writing a novel about a parallel earth. People are the same but their society and culture developed differently from ours. The people are called the 'Naha' and they live a more communal life in a buildings and collectives called 'Nahum'.
This is the final illustration entitled 'Tola's Morning'.
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| Tola's Morning |
This scene is from quite early in the book. The main character - Tola - has been bereaved of her partner and is coming to terms with it.
I turns out her first assignment, when she goes back to work as a Law Enforcer, is to visit our version of Earth to track down some rogue agents.
I thought I would show you some of my very sketchy sketches and development.
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| Character sketch of Tola |
These are my thumbnails for the Illustration, thinking about content and positioning.
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| Initial garbled sketches for the illustration |
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| Progression |
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| Selection |
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| Refinement |
As you can see I left out Iyan (the dude sleeping) in the final thing, mostly for the sake of the composition and it doesn't quite make sense in this picture.
Learning about a whole other Earth can get very complicated, as you might imagine. There is a Naha language, different customs and lifestyle and their technology is much more advanced than ours. I did quite a bit of concept sketching, developing the look of characters, technology and architecture.
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| Concept sketch for 'Nahum' structures with a good portion of the buildings below ground |
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| Tola arriving for briefing |
The main type of transport in the book is in a Relkim. It is a floating, flying vehicle which looks like pretty much like a big metal pillow. Drawing it was pretty easy. What was harder was figuring out what's going on inside.
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| Development for 'Relkim' wear and masks |
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| 'Relkim' concept sketch |
The Naha also have implants for
computing and communication, but that's a whole other story.
