Participation for a ship making/designing challenge during September. Just a fun challenge and no prizes (except for being featured in the host channel, and the satisfaction & feeling of accomplishment).
This year I wanted to do some concepts in the style of Neferith and Cleosethra, basically (fantasy) airship powered by rune circles. Not looking for daily entries, aiming more for polished works. Done a preliminary warm-up with this one :
… and felt rather confident for the full challenge. Turned out, however, the pattern/motif detailing and shading works took too much time (and fun) in finishing one design. I even used black background to omit necessity for ground shadow (and for better contrast), but not helping much. Near the end of the month (around the third week), I can only finish these three works, whereas I was predicting would be able to finish like 9-10 designs :
The designs was not all disappointing, and I managed to feature some rare rune circle arrangement that I liked such as in design #2 and #3. However, as I still have some arrangements that I’d like to jot down, so the choices available are continuing with the same presentation style on the next month(s); postpone it until next year; or try to make them in somewhat lesser level of detailing and aiming more for speed. The first would drag the works outside of the month (felt less of a challenge), the second one could feel like waiting for the heat death of the universe, so chose the third one as I wanted to complete them all in September. Here are the results, all done in the final week :
Simplified pattern/motif details, no panel lines, and no shading. More like brainstorming session. Obviously less polished than the first three, but was able to bring out those in my mind into 2D concepts in the remaining time. I won’t deny there are still more combinations and alternatives to try, for example arranging the rune circles in vertical position, but for now I’m somewhat satisfied with the result.
These works are top view and all are made with Inkscape. I have no plan to wholly ‘translate’ these into 3D models, though I will mostly use parts of the results (particularly the rune circle positioning) in ideation of next airship 3D models in this style.
Thanks for having read this rambling up until this point, hope you enjoy it!
See also the works for previous years :
[ 2021 ]
[ 2022 ]
[ 2023 ]
[ 2024 ]
-ober