WIP: alien body for “Aliens & Spaceships #2”

This is taking me longer than I indented, but I’m enjoying it. It’s a nice challenge, making up my own aliens and spaceship, and for this one in the series, based on H.G. Wells classic, “War of the Worlds” and also the two movies made. I’ve read the story, listened to the radio play (that people thought was real), and so on. I’ve seen lots of renditions: fabulous ones. So, this is my contribution, so far.

Below you can see all the parts I’m working on. The composition will change, and there may be a second ship and third alien, both in the distance.

I’m rocking this “retro-future” look here, but not being derivative. It’s original retro-future. I’ve never seen these aliens or that ship before, or I wouldn’t bother making them.

I don’t know how I”m going to resolve some things. The ship is probably about 85% designed. I have to connect those flippers with the weapons on them to the bod of the ship, work out the joints on the fly-like legs, design the feet. The relation between the front of the ship and the bottom isn’t resolved. I’ll try creating different solutions and then combining them to get some solution.

And then I have to work out the values. Then the color. Then the finishing flourish.

I’m not formally trained in any of this. The drawings skills ate things I taught myself in HS and could do when I was 18. The computer skills I taught myself after I got my MFA (and at least half of my college education was in “conceptual art” and “contemporary art”). I would NEVER have gotten away with making imagery like THIS is art school. No way. And yet, it’s what I really feel like doing right now. And I could also justify it as “fine art” or “contemporary art” NOW. Aliens are an obvious surrogate for the human condition (er, when I do them), and not just automatically sinister forces with no apparent interiority. That’s the most interesting part. What with an alien’s inferiority be like. Also deal with issues of “the other” (in this case humanizing the the most extreme other, while highlighting that “the other” is a construct masking the identical nature of consciousness, being, and existence that are the foundation of all of us). I could go on and on. The retro aspect is the good bit of Postmodernism, perceiving cultural construct as a reality of its own…

~ Ends