Do you remember the brief on this [the Scythe]? Do you remember what Chris said he was looking for?
TL;DRChris wanted the Scythe to feel dangerous, so Martin went with sharp, lethal shapes, then moved to asymmetry and a flying-dagger form, added armor plating, and built a scratch model.
He pitched me the idea of the aliens that we were fighting and that he wanted the ship to feel dangerous. So my first pass was, well, okay, if you're going to do dangerous, then you want it to be kind of sharp. You want it to feel lethal, which in a visual sense means it's not going to be soft and curved and gentle. It's going to be kind of spikes and blades and this and that. And my first pass is kind of a little bit of a, well, let's not do the bat wing. But you have to work through those. So I drew a lot of that, and I remember Chris reacting to it going, "Have you thought about maybe doing something asymmetrical?" And that was a very important moment in shifting to asymmetry, doing something a little bit more unique. And we started to work our way to the blade shape, which Chris said, "Hey, I like this. What if it was kind of like a flying dagger, a flying knife or a blade?" And that really kind of locked in the path. And then we could take it to some tighter ideas and eventually get closer to the finish. Now these aren't in any particular order. This obviously isn't blade shaped. That would be the lethal disk. Didn't make it. Then we got to this, which also Chris wanted to start working in the idea of armor plating to echo the soldiers inside. And then I went to a scratch model, which is basically just do a model that you can paint on top of, but really start to lock it into a 3D reality so that it's not just a one-view ship. Hey, that looks good, but what does the underside look like?