Tola's Morning

This is a commission for  a guy called Martyn Adams who is writing a novel about a parallel earth.  People are the same but their society and culture developed differently from ours.  The people are called  the 'Naha' and they live a more communal life in a buildings and collectives called 'Nahum'. 

This is the final illustration entitled 'Tola's Morning'.

Tola's Morning

This scene is from quite early in the book.  The main character - Tola - has been bereaved of her partner and is coming to terms with it.

I turns out her first assignment, when she goes back to work as a Law Enforcer, is to visit our version of Earth to track down some rogue agents.

I thought I would show you some of my very sketchy sketches and development.

Character sketch of Tola

These are my thumbnails for the Illustration, thinking about content and positioning.

Initial garbled sketches for the illustration

Progression

Selection

Refinement

As you can see I left out Iyan (the dude sleeping) in the final thing, mostly for the sake of the composition and it doesn't quite make sense in this picture.

Learning about a whole other Earth can get very complicated, as you might imagine.  There is a Naha language, different customs and lifestyle and their technology is much more advanced than ours.  I did quite a bit of concept sketching, developing the look of characters, technology and architecture.  

Concept sketch for 'Nahum' structures with a good portion of the buildings below ground

Tola arriving for briefing

The main type of transport in the book is in a Relkim.  It is a floating, flying vehicle which looks like pretty much like a big metal pillow.  Drawing it was pretty easy.  What was harder was figuring out what's going on inside.

Development for 'Relkim' wear and masks

'Relkim' concept sketch

The Naha also have implants for computing and communication, but that's a whole other story.