Ugh, this was challenging. I spent about a week making silhouettes and several newspaper sheets of rough sketches before finally coming to this strange conglomeration of a lobster, a butterfly, and a humpback whale. Machine. I was painting it last night and while I liked how it was coming along, it was very monochromatic-bronze. So at the last minute I took a file that was composed of flats making up the machine, colored them in a way I thought was nice, and Overlayed/Soft-Lighted/Something-or-other them over the machine.
While I am decently pleased with the current color scheme, the painting aspect is definitely not finished, which is disappointing. It's something I plan to come back to soon because I still have some momentum from working on it. Ideally, it will become painted enough that I can drop the sketch layer, which is flattening out the ship.
Otherwise, it's also looking a little static, but that's something I'm hoping to fix once it becomes more rendered.
After placing the ship and very quickly blocking out its silhouette for composition, I completely painted the clouds because I wanted to decide how light would be reflecting from them, before even attempting to paint and color the ship itself.
