3liza:

Deep Map Pilots 2: Rehani
digital
2012

REHANI saw space before she saw the sea. When she finally stood at the edge of an ocean, at night, all she could really see was something black and chilly and sparkling, with the sketched suggestion of islands out in its deeps. Rehani was disappointed. She flies for Big Island, a great floating city that surfs the cloud-tops of Venus at two hundred miles an hour. It’s wider than the Central African Republic, and moves across a misty vastness you could lose every ocean on Earth in. And it spins in something that is blacker and colder and more sparkling than anything, anything she’s ever seen. It’s never disappointed her. It’s the only sea she needs.

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DEEP MAP PILOTS: A Series Of Five Pictures From Words
MARENKA – REHANI – CAMEO – JINJING – ASCENCION

[Process: Deep Map Pilots is a five-part science fiction vignette series in collaboration with Warren Ellis.  Ellis writes; Gauger illustrates.]

I already did a more thorough breakdown of the steps I took to make the first in this series, MARENKA, but I thought I’d add some behind the scenes stuff for this one, too.

Rehani’s HUD, as it appears before being Spherized onto the surface of the visor, and mirrored so she can read it.

dumb cheesy mockup of Venus I did for the background, using this venerable “realistic planet” tutorial.  There aren’t any really good photographs of Venus in true color.  It’s mostly a ball of slightly yellow fog.  In the final pieces I ended up overlaying it with some Earth photos of clouds because it was too misty looking and not interesting enough.

Sheet of concepts, including one in the middle (the pencil one), which was courtesy of michaelk42 helping me figure out a way to combine the “silhouette over a bright void” of A, with the cool closeup visor-and-hand-shadow of D.