Reality Foil, Spaceships and Aliens

We'll see you again in a little while, little explorer...

For anyone who has managed to talk to me about work lately, the conversation is usually along the line of:

Asker: So what are you up to, Kit?
Me: Painting spaceships~
Then later:
Asker: So what are you up to, Kit?
Me: Painting aliens~

This is actually rather marvelous– being able to be asked about my job, and actually being able to tell someone, in all seriousness, I'm painting/drawing/thinking about aliens and spaceships.  I love my job.  And we're working on some fun projects.  That is to say that the job I was hired on for, codename: Lambda, has been put aside for a little bit after our initial couple months of development.  Enter our current project, codename: Starship of the Line.  I can't say much about it, but there was a little talk of releasing some of the development work to get ourselves and others excited.  I'm excited.  I've been moving back and forth between a couple programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, Alchemy) and real media (pencils and copic markers), depending on what was faster or what I felt I could work best in on a given day.

So Cthulu and...wait...second row...Space Dwarves?  

We needed aliens and ships, and the design of one is sort of going to inform the other.  So the process started as doing some heads to choose which we all thought were interesting, taking those and making some bodies while I simultaneous started coming up with some different types of ships.  Before the ships got really underway, though, we needed some placeholders for engine, so I whipped up some that were simple and not really attached to any given racial idea.

A mishmash of silhouettes, basic turn around, ship-type sizing (fighter, warship, dreadnought).

We got into some story talks, with some art under our belts to get the brain-meat flowing, and now we're fleshing that out in some really fun directions.  Relatedly, I've taken the aliens we chose and started giving them bodies and spacesuits to try to match along with their story-lines/spaceships in our current proposed designs.  Here's a liiiiiiitttttlllle taste.  Really little, sorry, but we thought everyone would enjoy some of the designs as much as we do!  If you have a specific reaction or feel for any of these, feel free to share.

The design on these guys involved a lot of thought regarding cybernetics in Science Fiction-  how do most franchises depict them?  How recognizably human should they be?  How much, if they're very integrated with technology, do they themselves care about looking 'human'?  The head/face area is often a starting point since that's usually where we look.  The eyes especially.  But hands really struck me as well- lots of artists talk about being able to tell how skilled someone is at painting by how they do hands.  So looking at hands, and how hands look,  is something very "human."  Lastly was the bipedal, upright silhouette and average proportion.  Multiple legs, lack of regular feet, shifting the 'hip' width and joints were all things I was moving around.