Not quite fireball

When this is finished I'll put it up, there's not much left to do, except for making a decent background a few odds on the hull. I started it because I wanted an illustration for a fireball xl5 inspired piece of fiction. Had a look round to see if could find any mesh files, which I did but although it was okish, I wasn't happy, so I had a go myself. It's quite hard work working from the photos, and you notice some inconstancies in the models when you examine them. For that reason I decided to go for a Mike Noble look, slightly simplifying the outriggers and some other details.

Update

Haven't done much to the model but I did change the lighting, which has done quite a bit to enhance the image. I put a blue reverse highlight in, now that is very Mike Noble. Of course he's not the only artist that was fond of that technique, it's quite standard practice in comics, it's generally used to delineate elements in a scene. I've even seen it used by Ford Maddox Brown in one or two of his paintings and of course some cinematographers used the blue lights to fill in shadow on night scenes, The Professionals, a western with Lee Marvin has some particularly nice examples. Here it would be more effective slightly lighter, against a darker background but I'd also need to monkey with the shadow colour too, to keep the outrigger from disappearing while trying not to lose the terminator effect on the curved surface of the hull.

Update

Created my own background and while it looked great while I was doing it, it hasn't translated too well in context. Some detail is too clearly delineated an it needs some broader tonal movement like in the version above, which would prevent the shadows from making the outline disappear.