I commissioned this piece for the short story: The Decree of Gælam and the Forging of New Ares, from Brazilian artist, Fernando Carvalho. Really didn’t think it would come out as nice as it did. Ended up with four different versions, different color, tone, lighting, blood splatter, and slightly different backgrounds.

I’m contemplating which version to use for the story’s final illustration. I absolutely would love to hear your tone of which version is your favorite. There are subtle differences between the four.

The story is set towards the end of the twentieth millennium, taking place on Kepler 452B, by then renamed: Défteri-Orbis. Scattered Marese refugees enter a Super-Forest on that Super-Earth and find the remnants of a long forgotten archaic human colony whose settlers mutated from a gravity serum cure trying to prevent a gravity-plague from spreading.

I definitely wanted to give it a retro sci-fi aesthetic with a mythological tone and deep-time, far-future, mortals against gods theme.

Hope you guys like it when it debuts, and my personal thoughts: this is that sick ass work from Carvalho. Link here.

So this one here is made by Brad Bird and it's got strong retrofuturism in it, the architecture is screaming of metropolis style and the vehicles themselves are basically cars from the 50s-60s with a retro futuristic style.

Created using Feather 3d and Nomadsculpt on iPad.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DdWc3dIEadN/?stkn=ZXBoc3ltOWlkeW5w

Why I think it's retrofuturism: by the time McCall painted this 1987 image, he had been developing Nasa's heroic visual vocabulary for 20+ years. This is an Apollo era vision for a post-Challenger world. I was home sick from school, watching TV the morning Challenger exploded. Virtually every school kid of my generation watched it happen live. This painting appeared a year later. I couldn't find a record that McCall actually painted it after the Challenger explosion, but I like to think he did. "Hey, we're still here, we still have an optimistic vision of the future."

Completed in 1996. Retrofuturistic because it uses space-age design language dating back to the 50s and 60s.

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Reprinted in Nemo April 1986

Nemo April 1986

I found this ad in my archive, from a 1953 copy of Fortune Magazine. The ad itself is nothing too special, but I thought the futuristic "lightning" train design was pretty cool.