Additional design elements: To continue the aspect of believability, the designer can add further designed elements such as a exposed steering system.

Touchup: (Fig.07). Once the general lighting issues are sorted, the final aspect to consider is improving readability, bounced lighting and material texture and feel. This image, should serve as a good starting sketch from which to work up a more refined painting/illustration at a later junction.

Steampunk Reference - Visual Art Direction

This next segment deals with visual art direction and reference.

A good artist & illustrator has a reasonably well developed methodology of collecting, classification, analysis and application of reference. Well... (you would expect) at least the more successful artists would have had developed and coherent system to help bring realism and authenticity into their work.

Victorian-esque: Thus to develop a steampunk universe, the designer set about analyzing and collecting various bits, aspects and forms of victorian-esque objects. (Fig.08). These tend to comprise of jointed shapes featuring L-shapes or D-shapes (perpendicular 90 degree joints). These can subsequently be applied towards lighting, joins, geometrical supports and arches. A particular characteristic of British arches are the leftover aspect of the Romanesque period. Unlike Europe which tends to favour a more gothic and art deco/nouveau flavourings.



Industrial Exploratory Sketches: (Fig.09). Applying this approach, one can explore various elements of construction to simple small thumbnails - featuring basic composition, readability and layering of objects. In this instance, these sketches feature elements of a train turntable, tram & fuelling station and lastly a pumping station. We will later apply some of these sketches into a pen & ink wash collage.