On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

...that'll be going to my sister's family on the day. Perversely, I don't have the money to buy cards made by other people right now, but I've got the hardware, software, ink and paper to make my own from scratch in the house. For now, at least.

So, I think I've found a vector clip-art silhouette or three that could populate the landscape on the front of the card. I can make the footprints in the snow, the stars in the night sky...but trees were a problem.

Now to see how to add curves to the snowbank without turning the snow from white-to-pale-blue to solid black. I know there's a way to do it in Illustrator CS4...and I just have to rediscover it.

Update 1: my colour printer is throwing up this message:

"There is a problem with the printer or ink system. Turn printer off, then on. If problem persists, contact HP."

"Cyan - cartridge has failed". The others, I've been defying HP re: where I get refills from for a couple of years now.

Update 2: Some cartridge-swapping, and a few shutdowns later, the card I designed was finally printed. Victory is mine, Hewlett-Packard!

Inspired by the news that the script for Infinity War I and II is cleared to use 67 characters from the various comics series:


Admittedly, the running time on the label design is a guesstimate on my part. I rummaged through my DVD collection and went with something in the range that arose from that.

Started laying down function areas by colour code. Green for commissaries, blue for gravity field projector arrays, orange for lifts, and purple for the IRBM silo for on-board satellite launch capability.

"IRBM, you say?"

It was Eliot Brown's idea per the first Marvel Universe Handbook of the early 1980's, designed as an "in case of nuclear war on Earth and the planet still needs defensive comms" satellite-launching feature and the regular Nick Fury series - starring Nick Sr. at the time - took that idea and ran with it as a plot point about a decade or so later. So, it's in this drawing.

Colour-coding is subject to change, of course...

This has been gnawing at my brain for a while now. If a classic Kirby-style Helicarrier is as long as a Nimitz-class CVN, what should the innards look like in a "Master Systems Display"-type cutaway, such as you'll see on the TNG/DS9/VOY-era Star Trek shows?

So I took scans of Eliot Brown's work - other people had put them up years earlier - and started running with them.

The dorsal radome encasing the "island" needs work to make it symmetrical, and there's a lot of work after that to get it to the level of an Okuda or a Hansen...



Note to Disney/Marvel legal staff: If you'd rather, I'll take this down. I hope you'll leave it be, as I need the mental exercise of this project.

So I've been fiddling in Adobe Illustrator tonight. Half-tempted to revert back to CorelDRAW instead for this sort of thing, but never mind that for the moment.

This afternoon and evening, I spent part of the time fiddling with that Helicarrier tech art from the Marvel Universe Handbook from 1983. The working assumption being, if its length was about the same as a Nimitz-class CVN, what should its internal structures be expected to look like?

( Screengrabs after the cut! )

Making a little more progress on that Legion-era map from "Earth-TMK"!

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