Decorating your Simple Space Ship



Tutorial 1 (Drawing with Flash) --- Tutorial 2 (What to Draw - Simple) --- Tutorial 3 (What to Draw - Complex) --- Tutorial 4 (What to Draw - Decorations)



Hi, I'm Ace the Super Villain. I'm here to show you the ropes of simple spaceship design so that I don't have to look at awful cross-eyed triangles in my scrolling shooters EVER AGAIN.

So you've picked out a frame, filled it in, and it looks like crap. But don't start bawling yet! All we need are a few decorations!

The frist obvious one should be a cockpit. My cockpit is dark because the rest of the ship is light. You should color your cockpit so that it stands out against the rest of your ship. You also typically have lines somewhere on it to give a more 3D appearance. If you want to make something with a smooth, rather than sharp appearance, use gentle color changes instead of the heavy dark lines. (This one looks terrible, but I'm improvizing) I'm not going to continue shading the rest of my examples like this because it would take too long, but you should do this with your own ships.

Next we have intakes, vents and thrusters. Intakes and vents are used to break up the shape. (You don't want large segments of solid color in your graphics) Intakes are usually more appropriate along the edges, while vents go well in the interior of the shape. These are usually darker than the rest of the ship. You can substitute intakes with reverse thrusters if that would make more sense for your ship. It's good to make thrusters brightly colored or otherwise contrasted with the rest of the ship so that they are obvious to the viewer. I'm also using a bit of what I call "hieroglyphic shading", which means I am drawing parts of the thruster (the bottom), that you wouldn't actually be able to see from the view we are using. This allows me to pack more detail into the subject than I could otherwise, which makes the ship look better. (Before saying that this isn't realistic, bear in mind that with a real object, you'd be able to tilt your head up, down, left or right to get a slightly different view of the object, which you can't do with 2D graphics like this. In a way, it's actually more realistic.)

This one is panels, open circuitry and blinkers. With panels, just make random lines along the ship in quasi geometric patterns. These should be similar in color to the ship to give it a soft contrast. The idea here is once again to break up the shape and avoid any large solid color fields. Diverse angles are better looking than solid geometry. If you're not sure what you should be doing here, just imagine practical things like wing flaps, maintenance hatches, sensor covers, detachable sections and the like. Open circuitry appearances were widely used in Star Wars with ships like the Millennium Falcon and the Star Destroyers. The principle is the same as paneling, but you want to be more bunched together and more chaotic. For colors you can either contrast the ship like this, to suggest that the circuitry is internal or otherwise a distinct section from the rest of the ship, or use similar colors, if you want it to look like part of the hull. Either way, you should multiple colors, either different hues or just different shades, to boost the chaoticness of it. Blinkers are just colored lights that you can put on the ship to add a bit more color and a bit more stuff to it. These can represent laser cannons, microthrusters, landing lights, alien technology or just be decorative. Mine are on the outside of the hull, where they show up well against the black background and add to the shape of the ship.

Here are paint, wings and antennae/spikes. With paint stripes, it's best to use angles like this. If your image is big enough, you can also paint in text or insignias. For color, you want something that is different from from the rest of your ship's color, so it doesn't look like a panel or vent, but not too different so that it doesn't look like a thruster or blinkers or something. These paint stripes are red with a saturation of 160, instead of the default 240, so that they match the grey better. (as a rule, you should never use any of the default palette colors. I'm only using a few here because I'm lazy) These wings are supposed to look like they're jutting out slightly up or down, instead of in the same plane as the rest of the ship, so they are a slightly different color. I'm never sure if lighter or darker or brighter or greyer is best, so do your own experimenting here. I also like to give my wings flaps, like on real planes. Antennae/spikes give ships a very aggressive and sometimes more alien appearance. Mine are all on the underside and outside the craft so as not to obstruct the other decorative features, but you can put them wherever you want. I have various sizes and angles to portray a chaotic and slightly organic look. I have the ones in the back flay outward slightly, though this could be interpreted as a 3rd set of wings facing downward. Color for wings and spikes should usually be similar to the rest of your craft, but you can sometimes do interesting things with exceptions.

Next up is the organic-looking ship. This is not the full-on bio-ship, which we will cover next, just a mechanical ship that looks slightly alive. The Zentran, Mon Calamar and later Romulan ships have used this style. You want to go for rounded features here, instead of sharp, angular ones. The bulbs in the back of the ship help this along. The cockpit is replaced with an eye-like portal, with a pair of extra ones to the side. The weapons have a pincer or claw like shape and are housed in muscel like bulbs. There are a pair of tail like protrusions near the thrusters and the thrusters themselves look like squid nozzles or something. You often want to include gill, carapace, underbelly or tentacle like features to these ships, but I have run out of room. Antanae/spikes are also a staple of this style, but I did that already.

And last is the bio-ship. These are intended to be fully organic space faring lifeforms that have naturally evolved or been genetically engineered to shoot lasers and eat people and stuff. The cockpit has been replaced with a fully organic eye, the hull has carapace like segments and is covered with bristles and there are tentacles and horns sticking out of everywhere. When making these ships, you basically just want to take a spaceship frame and start tacking on animal parts. The weirder the animal the better.

As you can see, the trick to this is not to stick to any specific feature, like just wings or just paneling, but to fill your ship with as many decorations as you can fit. This is a very open ended part of ship design, so experiment and look for inspiration all over the place to make the best ship decorations you can!

Here are close-ups of the ships, so you can see more of what is going on:



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