2012ths: Deep Map Pilots

Deep Map Pilots was a five-part science fiction vignette series in collaboration with Warren Ellis.  Ellis wrote; I illustrated.  The Deep Map Pilots will continue in 2013 as Deep Map Pilots: eXtended Flight Log, the first installment of which is visible as the very last image above.

• Deep Map Pilots are available as posters here
• The Deep Map Pilots tumblr tag
• Deep Map Pilots on Warren’s site
• Deep Map Pilots in my portfolio

cthulhucore:

3liza:

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.

[larger image] [original size image]

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.

Wait… the text overlay… Isn’t that a post by Ghost-bong?

Really, really good catch.

ectoplasmosis:

Though women fighter pilots were seen amongst the crowd within the Rebel Cruiser briefing room earlier in RETURN OF THE JEDI, it was believed that none were seen in the actual final battle above Endor…until now, with the Blu-ray revealing that one of the brave A-wing pilots was indeed female (as seen in the above image) but, for reasons unknown (probably an accident made during the Post Production dialogue re-dubbing phase in the US) replaced with a male actors voice instead (with one line: “Got it”).

http://starwarsaficionado.blogspot.com/2011/09/girl-power-jedis-female-fighter-pilots.html

I sat down to process orders today and made a stunning discovery.

An order from Chile was unusual enough—I ship to Australia and the UK and Canada all the time, but other international destinations are more rare.  My interest was piqued immediately, but when I clicked the order to start printing shipping labels and such, I was absolutely floored.

The Gemini Observatory is one of the most important observatories working today.  They hold the honor of taking the first image of a directly observable exoplanet. They produce images you have almost certainly marveled at, and the chances that their images made up some of my reference material during the creation of the Deep Map Pilots illustrations are very high.  My father is a science fiction novelist and my grandfather was a NASA engineer.  This is, personally and professionally, huge.

I just told Warren.  He said, and I quote, “That is INCREDIBLE.”

They ordered complete sets of both the photos and the postcards, but they’re going to be getting a lot more than that.  I owe them big.  We all do.  And the fact that they like my art enough to buy it, well.  I’m sorry, there seems to be some stardust in my eye.

EDIT: I also got an order from someone at MIT.  Honestly, this makes it all worthwhile.

Warren and I have been toying with expanding the Deep Map Pilots universe.  His working title, sent in an email two days with no other text, is “Deep Map Pilots: eXtended Flight Log”.  In response, I dumped an idea I’ve had for about fives years on him (this bit of writing below) and whipped up a spot illo when he asked to put it up on warrenellis.com, which is where you’ll find it now.

I don’t know where we’re going with this.  We’ll let you know.

Kuiper homesteading program, 2176 AD: start life anew in the off-off world colonies. Smiling posters, Leyendeckeresque, urge the new generation of hopeless intelligentsia to never go home again; There Are No Jobs, anyway, so bootstraps yourself right out of Sol and claim your slice of the diamond studded garter of our mother system. Join the space cowboys, rolling in the deep.  Billions of ice and mineral bodies are loitering unclaimed in the deep system!  The United States Federal Homesteading Office is prepared to award low-interest loans to every hopeful who has the cojones to shuttle hop to Styx Station 14 and hire a charon to buzz them into the denser regions of the Disk–maybe the site of a recent collision’s debris field, or the rumored location of a really big body, maybe a comet or a big iceball–the kinds of tips you pick up in mining canteens a little farther in, from men too old or too smart to go after it themselves. It’s the closest you get to a sure thing, and its better than trying to claw a smaller, surer claim away from someone who got there first, in one of the already-plumbed regions. You’re sick of neighbors. So you cram into the tug with the stinking pilot who doesn’t bother learning your name (he learned his lesson about that early on), clutching your Homesteading Kit™ in your lap and your scanner on top of that, and he flies you out in the direction of your choosing until you tell him to stop, and lets you out.

The kit’s autodrills will bite into almost anything, kicking up little jets of dust or vapor. You pick something mostly spherical, a few meters across, an object the scanner tells you is made of something that won’t shatter if you hollow it out, and when the drills are done they ping your HUD and you squeeze yourself, in your long-haul sumo suit, into the tunnel they dug for you. The homesteading kit’s cabin bladder is rubbery and flexible, some kind of self-repairing plastic, about as thick as a gym mat. It unflops fatly into your rock’s empty belly, and when you find the airlock attachment you stuff it through best you can into the hole, pull the long neck (like a balloon) back out into space, and then turn around and climb inside, pushing your canisters and flashlight ahead of you.  You’ve heard this is when most of the freakouts happen, the rubber cabin bladder and the sumo suit and the vast, vast emptiness all pushing in on you at once–people can’t handle it; tear their suits off, scream into long range channels, kick off from their rocks and throw their kit components away from them, one at a time, just to get some extra velocity in the direction of “home”.  They never make it, of course.

The atmo canisters strain at their leashes, gouting oxygen and your other favorite gasses, and gradually inflate the bladder from a body bag into something like a “room”, but you wait many minutes after your HUD gives you the go-ahead before you dare to take off your helmet. Your ears pop painfully, your sinuses empty, the smell of new plastic is almost overwhelming, but you’re breathing.  Exhausted, you decide to rest before you set up your rocket crawlers and dashboard.  The silence is deafening, but it means you aren’t hearing leaks, and the wet throb of your heart in your ears keeps you awake for a long, long time.

always reblog your own work.  Thanks for tagging this with my name, by the way.

I’ll use this opportunity to mention that Deep Map Pilots prints are happening very soon.  It will likely involve preorders, which I hate to do, but so it goes.

elizagauger:

Deep Map Pilots 5: Ascencion
digital
2012

ASCENCION is four billion miles away from home, and that’s the way she likes it.  She’s seen the stained egg of Haumea, and the misty red lump of Makemake, and dozens of other things that no-one had ever laid eyes on before.  Ascencion dives the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune and Pluto.  It’s the graveyard at the end of the solar system.  Failed planets, dead comets, lost moons and all the strange dark rubble left over from the formation of the worlds we know.  She’s out among the spectres, flying through ultimate history to places where, quite literally, there have never been eyes before.  The Kuiper Belt is vast.  She wants to see it all.  She wants it all to herself, in a way that no-one else has ever been able to understand.  She never wants to go home again.

[larger image] [original size image]

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

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

Before I started this one I had a nagging suspicion that Warren had written it with me in mind (“last of the Kuiper Bedouins” is a common subtitle on my social media profiles).  He confirmed, by using the system of grunts and grimaces we’ve worked out over the years, so I went ahead and made this a self-portrait.

blueruins:

x-ray delta one: 1962

elizagauger:

CAMEO is a rock dancer. Not everyone wants to make the run to Ceres. You have to like scientists, for one thing, because there’s nothing inside Ceres but hermit physicists and their weird globular microgravity labs. You also have to like dancing with rocks. On a good day, Ceres is riding between Mars and Jupiter with a family of a thousand other objects. On a bad day, it’s like being shot at by seven armies. Shot at with asteroids. It takes a lot of craft and more art, and no-one gets through even the first month without picking up some bulletholes and powder burn. They say that, to do the Ceres run, you either have something to prove or you want to die. Cameo says she just likes dancing.

[larger image] [original size image]

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

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

elizagauger:

Deep Map Pilots 3: Jinjing
digital
2012

JINJING makes the jump from Titan to Enceladus the same way, no matter what their relative positions might be on launch day. She’ll make her approach trajectory for Enceladus while she’s on the other side of Saturn from it. Enceladus is in the E Ring, the one furthest out from the planet. So Jinjing gets to spend a whole half-orbit skipping across the top of the E ring. It’s a glittering ghost road three hundred thousand kilometers wide. There’s not a children’s story, nursery rhyme or fairy tale that ever competed with riding a road of diamond dust to a moon where stations drift across a wide warm underground sea. Sometimes Jinjing laughs out loud, at the thought of having grown up into a life that no childhood dream was ever big enough to capture.

[larger image] [original size image]

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.]

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.

[larger image] [original size image]

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.