Writing: Sketches from the Void

Even though my own drawing skills are very amateurish, I do endeavor to sketch out certain scenes and designs from my work from time to time.  For my current novel in progress, Void, it's somewhat helpful and important to draw out what a starship, an alien, a planet, or any number of other futuristic things could look like.

Thus far, I've taken the time to make the following sketches, to help visualize certain scenes and figure out what certain things might look like.  They aren't anything terribly great or detailed, but by my standards, I'm fairly proud of them.

Above is the dorsal (top) hull of the Sprite V1 starfighter, the main fighting machine used by the characters in the story.  You'll notice that unlike the fighters you see in things like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, there is no transparent canopy.  The idea here is that the pilots are encased in a totally opaque and heavily-shielded cockpit, and the walls project the image of the exterior (with relevant HUD overlays).  This fighter is also directly controlled by the pilots' brainwaves, so most information (such as speed, direction, distance, danger, etc) can be pumped directly into the pilots' senses.  In this specific scene, I have this fighter floating through a nebula (all the weird blobby things in the background), but I currently have no specific place in mind yet.

This was an older drawing I made, in an attempt to conceptualize the enemy craft.  I thought it would be far more menacing and interesting to make the ship less mechanical and more organic in nature.  At the time, I didn't have any specific idea of what the hull's composition would be or how it works; it would be completely alien, for all intents and purposes.

In this close-up of the alien ship's tentacle-like structures, which I've drawn as having a mechanical-looking exterior, but with an organic-looking shape.  Upon drafting the book, I've described this as having neutronium hulls (the same substance as what's found on neutron stars, which are super-dense), but are flexible enough to move and "breathe" like an organism.  These structures can suck in and absorb ambient light and energy from the universe to fuel the rest of the vessel.

The alien vessels in this story can destroy planets with shocking ease, thanks to a special invisible whip-like weapon.  The idea is that it strings together a long chain of ionized particles, and makes each particle so dense that it carries its own gravity.  It's a thin thread so dense and disruptive that it can cleave entire planets, or entire groups of spaceships, with just a few lashes.

In one of the major battle scenes, a group of starships are able to defend a planet from alien attack.  Even though the enemy hulls are made from neutronium, the other ships are able to modify their weapons to penetrate the dense armor.  They make short work of the first enemy craft, but more follows.

The face of the enemy:  The Korzoch.  As part of the story, these aliens evolved on a rogue planet that orbits a black hole (in theory, live evolved on the planet totally independent from a light source with matter that accreted around the black hole falling on the planet and evolving into strange, scary-looking things).  As a result, the Korzoch evolved into a nocturnal race, with just a single optical visor-like eye across their faces.  Their heads are covered by a weird hood of skin, much like the hood of a cobra.  Their bodies are pretty fleshy and somewhat flexible, and they'd have a tail growing out of them.  Even though they appear humanoid, the closest thing they could be classified as would be like a worm with a head, hands, and feet.

Those are the best drawings I've done so far on this project, and there is a chance I might make more.

If you have even the most basic drawing ability, I certainly encourage you to make sketches of scenes, characters, objects, and other things from your story.  You may find that drawing out a vague idea from your head can give it a shape and form you may not expect, or might find appealing.  It's a good way to let your imagination run free, and it could help come up with new things to insert into your own project.