Sustained Investigation #12

The main idea that guided this artwork is wanting to both work out the design of the space station that will be the opening shot of the comic and to expand my material use by trying out charcoal for a project. For the purpose of the story I needed a space station as a central location for the characters to growed them close enough to each other that they could reasonably find eachother again but still explore larger places planets as locations. The station itself is can be broken into three parts, the central part with the large black holes is a gigantic hanger for all types of ships to dock and take off from. The top half is internally  mostly a giant space hotel for aliens, with some of the parts floating off being more relevant to the story as research and data is conducted and stored there. The bottom half has a rounded dome that functions as an arena, the space stations major attraction were aliens fight for wealth and glory, this is were AJ will find herself at one point in the story. 

This work was made using mostly black and white charcoal, a material I have not used since foundations of art. I tapped of the edges of this piece using painters tape to create an inch border. Then I sketched out the space station using pencil and a ruler to keep it symmetrical. I am not used to working with charcoal but I tried my best to get the base values down and blend everything out with a cotton ball, after that I went in with an eraser and white charcoal pencil to lighten up certain places and create the highlights. I went area by area to create detail, the final touches to the actual station was taking a black charcoal pencil to define of the edges. The flair from the star behind the station was hard to do without lossing the lines from the station but in the end im happy with the glowing effect. The final touch to the whole piece was taking an eraiser to the black background and creating stares. If anything the material connects to the piece because it is gritty. 

 I had a few different ideas for what this space station could look like. I didn't want something round like the death star, though I was mildly inspired by some of the lesser known stations from Star Wars like the blockade ship from The Phantom Menace that is a circle with a giant ring around it. For me the hardest part was getting the proportions right, I wanted a shape that looked like a top and originally, the station was completely symmetrical. But making it to long made the whole thing look brittle and small when put on paper and a shorter shape was not imposing enough. Only when I got the first skech down did I decided against making the whole thing completely symmetrical and detaching the painted ends off the station. I find the asymmetrical look a lot more interesting.