UK artist Matt Pattison displays his highly original retrofuture designs at his blog Culprit Tech. Really fun collection of stuff and a signal-to-noise ratio that is pure signal and no noise.
OG's BLOG
JOURNAL of ARTIST and WRITER STEVE OGDEN
Categories: visual design
Cassie's security cruiser
Another day, another design. This is Captain Cassandra Quinn’s security cruiser. Yeah, I was on the fence about the other designs… some are more like little cars, more like a rookie security guard’s ship and what-have-you. Ultimately this is the design that feels like it’s from the same universe as the Moon Shark, and since that’s my design bar, this is the design that won.
Security Cruiser thumbnails
Time for another sketchdump. Here are a bunch of designs for Quinn’s Security Cruiser:
I have several favorites, and am having a tiny problem deciding which one is best for the long haul. It’s a good problem to have; usually I hate all the designs, so this is a luxury. One of the designs is a holdover from the Future Noir phase of Moon Town’s development. It’s a car that looks like a 1950s cruiser, and also looks a bit like a fedora. It fit Ace Tripline when he was a Rick Deckard-type, but now that we have a young, green female Security Guard in this role, the fedora no longer seems the proper visual metaphor.
Right now, I’m leaning hard toward the football-shaped sketch in the upper middle of Sheet#2, or the little bubble ship in the upper right corner of Sheet#2, or one of the Flying Cars on Sheet#1 (middle right, if you must know.)
Off to mull if over. Your comments and suggestions are welcome…
Jimmy Revealed
In a post the other day I showed you some scribbled designs for the Flying Ace and Melvin Tripline. I told you that buried in those scribbles was a design for another character, a mechanic named Jimmy, and asked if you could figure out which one he was.
Sardtok and Mathias made light work of it, guessing correctly right off the bat. Jimmy is indeed third down on the right in that sketchdump, the guy with the baseball cap. Or… see above.
Congratulations and I’m sure I’ll come up with another puzzler thats just as fun as that one, if not MORE SO… very soon. OK, back to it.
Space Ace – or – Melvin
More of my process… (or failed scribbles?) HERE is a page of sketches on the main character of Moon Town.
As you can see, there have been plenty of revisions over the years. This is partly due to the changing nature of Moon Town. It started off as sort of a tribute to the cool TV shows of the late 50s and early 60s – Rocketship XM, Thunderbirds, etc. At one point, it was really dark, sort of Blade Runner, future noir (sketches on this to come). And in the back of my head is Marc Craste and StudioAKA pinging at me to Keep It Simple, so you’ll occasionally see little capsule-shaped characters with just a circle for a face.
HERE‘s another page. Variations here include Whacky 60s Spaceman Flying Ace, Future Noir Caricature, Super Simple, and some strange cross between Buzz Lightyear and Mister Incredible. This character’s name used to be Ace Tripline, and he was to be the Coolest Flyer in the Sky. (yawn)
But here you can also begin to see the design turning toward his new incarnation, a miner named Melvin. I thought it might be interesting to see one of these stories of interstellar intrigue not from the point of view of the Super Cool Flying Aces, but from someone like a miner or a space truck driver. That’s where the story is going, anyway, and you can see the sketches turning that way. Or at least I can. Maybe you had to be there at the time? But there are pages and pages of sketches featuring this sort of schizophrenic design where sometimes it’s Ace, and sometimes it’s Melvin. *shrug* At some point they diverged and I was the last to know.
Also hidden amongst the many characters here is another character, a mechanic named Jimmy. Can you guess which sketch he is?
Scribble-a-rama
Friend-of-the-Blog Mathias was asking me about my process, in light of the fact that he liked my Moon Shark ship design (see previous post). I told him I’d been sketching and sketching for quite a while before I came up with anything I liked very much.
In digging through my sketches, I’ve discovered it’s worse than I thought. I’ve been drawing, sketching, and designing stuff for Moon Town almost subconsciously (even on the margins of pages meant for other stuff, and notes done in meetings) for over two years now. There’s practically not a scrap of paper in this house that doesn’t have a spaceman, spaceship, or alien scribbled on it, and looking back, I can see I’ve been trying to puzzle something through.
HERE‘s a typical batch of doodles, this one featuring spacemen and aliens. I should point out that I’m sure the spaceman will look nothing like these sketches, and neither will his spaceship. The alien… well, I may be onto something here, but we’ll see.
When the Shark bites
I proudly present the first design for Moon Town. THIS is the Moon Shark, the chosen mode of attack for the Bad Guys.
My Projects:
