Capstone Part 2: Rocks

Perhaps the largest task I'll have during this sprint is creating rock assets for our terrestrial planets.  Looking at retro travel posters for reference, the mountains and rock formations are very simple.  Each has maybe 2-3 colors.  My other big reference for these rocks are the backgrounds of the Wile E. Coyote cartoon, because they have really interesting formations.

Using these references, I drew up a series of thumbnails.

Capstone Part 1: Ship of Dreams

For our capstone class, we will be creating mini-games for a game called Kidscom.  As the only artist in the class, it's up to me to create all the art assets.  Our game is based on a Lunar Lander game where the player must land a ship on a planet without crashing, and my first task to create the final ship asset.  Below are some thumbnails I came up with to create an idea of what ship could look like.  To create a good thumbnail, a concept artist should use as little value as possible, that is, only using white, a mid gray, and black.  These three values create a very readable image, because our eyes immediately pick up shadows and uses those shadows to create form. 
1 and 2 were drawn from retro sci-fi movie posters, sort of the classic rocket ship.  However, most of them looked pretty similar and not like a lander.  For 3-5, I tried more of robotic drone look, and while I think they look good, they didn't fit the aesthetic of retro-futuristic.  6-10 fit the aesthetic the most, as they feel very Jetson's or Marvin the Martian.  11-14 are some of my favorites as I tried to combine elements from all the other ships, but they look too shell-like.  In the end, number 7 was chosen to be the final asset.

After choosing our final ship design, I took the thumbnail into Illustrator to create a final vector image.  I haven't used Illustrator in quite sometime, so this was rather difficult, but after a few hours, I managed to finish the asset to my standards.