Friday Art Attack

It seems like I just did one of these (because I kind of did) but how about let's do one on time this week?  Next week is going to be iffy with the Thanksgiving holiday and, needless to say, a complete disruption of my normal routine.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; the integration of some relatively hard(ish) near future science fiction tropes, like rockets going to the Moon, is still something that needs to have a place in the otherwise Flash Gordon-esque capes and lasers and swords in space setting that is AD ASTRA.  Some of the planets are airless rocks, still.

This isn't anything remarkable, so it could easily fit in DARK•HERITAGE or TIMISCHBURG either one.  It's a nice picture, though...

Isn't it a shame that we never got cars like this?  I mean, the closest thing around is the Polaris Slingshot, which is pretty cool, but not really the same thing.

A lot of people believe that "Lovecraftian" means really wimpy old men who faint and die all of the time.  There's actually a lot more action in many of Lovecraft's stories than people give him credit for, and many of the other authors who wrote in the "Lovecraftian" oeuvre did so even more blatantly.  (Especially Robert E. Howard.)

On the other hand, stuffy old pseudo-Edwardian scholars and linguists sitting around talking about a Cthulhu idol did in fact happen.  Of course, the backstory to this was a hair-raising raid on a swamp in which a number of police men and cultists were killed and injured.

I love rat ogres so much that I had to include them somehow.  Ratmen aren't unique to Warhammer, of course, although they often differ significantly from the skaven.  But my rat brutes are a deliberate homage to the rat ogre, which I have this very strange attraction to.

Probably comes from my Blood Bowl skaven team.  My rat ogre mini is my favorite of all my minis.

This is actually a sketch for a Lord of the Rings Easterling, drawn before (and without any reference to) the movies.  I tend to prefer a more historically resonant look than the weird semi-samurai elves and whatnot; having the Easterlings look like Parthian or Sassanid cataphracts hits exactly the right notes for me.

Rawr!  For both subjects of this illustration!  I don't really need to explain how this could fit in, do I?

A bikini babe, a black panther, a little monkey and a crocodile all in a fight... how can you beat that?  I've always said that we often discount the very real danger of big predator animals at our peril.  Not everything has to be a strange, supernatural monster, undead, demon or dragon to be fantastic.  In fact, those get significantly over-used, in my opinion.

A lot of the Doug MacQuarrie Star Wars concept art ended up being used exactly as is, pretty much, which is why it's sometimes fun to see this idea for the Millennium Falcon which looks very different.  The cockpit is familiar, though.

Exotic urban locations is one of the necessities of any good space opera.  

Sometimes even a very classic monster, like the chimera, can stand to be remodeled a bit and turned into something considerably more RAWRish than the way the descriptions come down to us from Hesiod and the odd Grecian urn.