When the blank page or screen is staring at me waiting for me to fill it with something illustrative and I don’t really have a solid idea, I doodle digital science fiction textures. I play around with colors and shapes until I cobble something together that piques my interest. If they turn out well, I put them aside figuring that they may come into play should I get another book cover assignment like Rimworld or Ice which I recently completed.
These digital doodles may wind up as part of the exterior of a space station or a corridor within a starship. A pattern may wind up being the chainmail on space armor or the ornate walls of an alien throne room. It all depends on how I interpret the work of the author I may be working with or it may be whatever happy accident looks “kinda cool.”
All of this work is vector art produced mainly with my absolute favorite vector art program Affinity Designer. Vector art is infinitely scalable which is a nice thing to be in case I have to blow one of these things up to poster size. Some of it is done in Adobe Illustrator like the columns above. They started as a shape in Affinity and were extruded in Illustrator. If Affinity ever works an extrusion tool into their suite, I’m pretty sure my days as an Adobe user will be over. There will be no looking back. Affinity makes fun tools!
I am slowly building a library of these illustrative elements. I chuck them into a virtual junk drawer which I will be rummaging around sooner or later.
