New Landscape Painting and New Starship Hull

My good friend the Spiky Alien Landscape has been getting a lot of grief lately, and I wanted to add my opinion to the chorus of people discussing the subject. The main reason its getting poo-pooed is because if your goal is to make a portfolio that will get you hired as a concept designer, filing it with Spiky alien landscapes won't get you very far. They don't really have much in the way of design. They can show you know how to paint or photobash. They can show you know a thing or two about light and atmospheric perspective. But as an actual IDEA goes, they tend not to be very deep. So I agree completely that a portfolio filled with these things is not going to get you that dream job as a designer. But that said, for practice, for fun, for relaxation, for sheer visual joy, the Spiky Alien Landscape is just what the doctor ordered. So don't stop making these landscapes, they have their own place in the world of art and I do enjoy them dearly. But just remember, design is about ideas, its about coming up with a new take on subject while still grounding it in reality, it's about function and how that affects form, and there are many many other subjects that show off these skills far better than the Spiky Alien Landscape. Use our Spiky friend wisely. This landscape was inspired by a painting I saw in the Louvre on my recent trip to France.

One of a number of starship hull test images. I made these images to explore variations in greebling and hull plate shapes and configurations. The tests are a little less practical and a little more abstract, but they have been really helpful, and should be a great source of inspiration and practical experience the next time I decide to make a full fledged 3d model of a starship, space station or even a mechanized planet. 90% of this is painted in 2d inside photoshop, some pipes are rendered from 3dsmax and then photobashed into place to create more complex configurations, and many patterns were inspired or produced by Darktree, Bercon Noise and Filterforge procedurals.