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some early sketches perspective grid

	some of the very first shapes of the final version can be seen in this sketch	The story begins with this illustration of Professor Vernon’s experimental new turbine prototype aircraft. Its lone passenger and pilot is a super-computing, experimental robot named Kele. He is an autonomous black ops "synth" (synthetic biped) who possesses incredible technology to perform meteorological measurements in order to predict weather more accurately than ever before. The drawing began with Kele as a flying robot. At first, he looked a bit like a scuba diver with wings and probably not capable of supersonic flight. While the idea of crashing and damaging his ship for the sake of the story seemed like a good idea at first, I realized he had to be a passenger in an aircraft that looked more sleek and experimentaI. Initial drawings were pencil sketches. Gradually, the linework got to the point where I could scan it and place it in Adobe Illustrator to clean up the vector geometry, but I didn't want to create a model with a 3D CAD program. Although I have used such applications in the past, I wanted these drawings to appear more analog than digital - as if they were still drawn by hand. For colour, parts of the ship were shaded with the gradient mesh tool, but the final shading was done in Photoshop. By the time I got near completion, it felt more like a painting with digital layers similar to colour glazing with oils. There's another version of it with a different background on the home page of my personal web site: www.CoutlandShakespeare.com	the new wings
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