What are your influences that tend to work their way into your work?
TL;DRThe artists cite influences including music, aviation and car design, Japanese anime, real-world spacecraft and a fondness for chevron warning stripes.
I get inspired a lot by music. It all depends on the design that I'm doing.
What music is influencing your work right now?
I'm listening to the soundtrack of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
And how does music influence your visual art?
That's something really personal, because I hear the sounds and the scenes and everything, and I imagine how this ship will look with this as a soundtrack, and it will sound cool and look cool. So it needs to match the coolness.
So for me, it's a lot of real-world influence. I was always very obsessed with aviation, still am, and car design. So a lot of product design, sleek forms, stuff like that. In terms of media, I would say a lot of Japanese stuff. So classic anime like Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor, Evangelion, that kind of stuff. I would say the media I like is disproportionately from Japan.
I also get inspired by some anime stuff, a lot of the same stuff that Jacob's mentioned, but also just space in general is pretty cool. I like to look at real-world spacecraft where I can, because even though the stuff we do is obviously very far removed from anything that NASA is doing right now, it's still good to understand a lot of the principles going on there. Understanding why real-world rockets and ships and cars and whatever look the way they do, I think that's very helpful.
Coolest real-world spacecraft?
Saturn V is pretty good. It's kind of hard to beat the Saturn V.
Favorite fictional spacecraft?
Oh, I like the Venture Star from Avatar. It's like a full 10 seconds of screen time. It's pretty cool. It's just a big, long tether.
I don't know my influences. I guess there is a lot of Japanese stuff. There's definitely a lot of chevrons. I always get to put chevrons everywhere.
What is a chevron?
Warning stripes.
Big white-red stripes. The chevron technically is the one that is directional, but I put them everywhere. I just like chevrons.
Alberto, your Instagram profile name is literally Nostromo Industries.