Elijah McNeil

This is Fujin City. It's on the Seisai planet, I believe, in the Centauri system.

How does that all work? Did you draw all of that yourself?

A lot of it is drawn. There's some photo texturing that's used to further enhance the painting. But it starts off as a sketch, moves into colors, or sometimes I'll just start with rough colors. Really quick and block out shape.

Yeah, this one was actually the first concept for the asteroid hangar. But I'm guessing design passed on it because it wasn't exactly as modular as they were looking for.

It's very important for us to be able to scale these things because people out there have lots of ships. And then there's the asteroid hangar right now, right?

Yep. That's the current version. There are still some modifications being made, but this is pretty much what it looks like as far as concept goes.

Yeah, well, the masters, of course, like Da Vinci and Bernini and Michelangelo. But I'd say modern influences are a little bit of Ryan Church. He's really good. I mean, amazingly good. And Stephan Martiniere is another one. Aaron Beck, who did work on Elysium, Ben Mauro, a lot of these guys who are doing some really hot stuff right now. I look to them for some inspiration.

Yeah, I finished. Well, I was doing a lot of my work, and one of the teachers who knew Chris Olivier had seen my stuff, and Chris Olivier pinged him because they've been friends for a while. And he said, do you have any 3D modelers? And my friend Vince said, no, I don't know any 3D modelers, but I do know a guy who's doing concept, and he knew that we were in sort of the pre-production production thing that we've got going on. So he's like, yeah, and they contacted me. But things were so busy with Chris O transitioning that after that it was kind of silent, and I got nervous. I was like, what's going on? And then a month later, one of our producers, who's no longer with us, he said, oh, can you be in in a couple of days?

It was just a concept, very early, sort of like previous stuff, exploring character tones, and that's the Xi'an fighting the Vanduul.

The helmets, what are these helmets here?

These were just Xi'an helmets that I was concepting out. Because I had done a sketch of the Xi'an fighter and bomber, but before I moved on to detailing it, I thought it would be good to get sort of a style of the helmets and then think, okay, how does this look, before jumping into finalizing and detailing out all the bits for the ships.

Yeah. Well, all this, I'm responsible for all the image. I painted everything. Of course, the 300i was done by Kemper Millard and then modeled out by Chris Smith. But these space stations were these checkpoint rings for a race. That's another one, the racing illustrations for Jump Point.