Just what is it about this drawing that has so many people excited? The piece was designed to be a 'wow' and it looks like I was right on target.

There is about 40 hours work in this one. The drawing has NOT been digitally enhanced. What I love about this drawing is it is very much a DRAWING. The detail is everywhere yes, but I have not 'redered' the object to make it look 'realistic'. The lines from which it is made are still recognisable as lines.

As for planning... this piece came together on the paper rather spontainiously. What I do is lett my imagination and hands rip, and then inject as many craft tricks as I can on the fly. It feels a bit like acrobatic water skieing - control amid chaos - its quite exhausting.

Yes I use a .03 micron pen. I also use a 0.02 and an 0.01. I am moving away from single size pen work and swapping to heaver pens on the wing, to block out large area and shorten total drawing time.

I have long been convinced that large scale structures in space will be 'grown' rather than built. The lack of up or down in space has always facinated me. I get a bit tried of 'easy ways' around this like 'artifical gravety'. Even spin generated gravety has profound limitations in space that many people are not aware off.... it is certainly not the easy fix that sci fi movies make it out to be. The gravety does not work at all like it does no earth - things 'fall' in curves. Long term exposure to spin gravety does wierd things to human perception.

Actually I am rather pesamistic about the future of humans in space.

Take this contruction platform for example. The ship docked is probably a generational interstellar colony ship and is probably several kilometres long. It would take years to build - a long time for something to go wrong. Much of that time both the ship and the station would be an orbiting bomb just waiting for an accident to happen. There is no way a structure of this size could be made in earth orbit. It would just be too much of a risk. The thing is way too big to burn up in the atmosphere... its a city killer.

Such a project could only be done in orbit around Mars or one of the Lunar Legrange positions between earth and the moon. Somewhere where the whole thing could be kicked into a solar intercept tradjectory if the whole show went pare shaped. The interplanetary colony needed to service such a construction project would be enormous. I don't think humans are going to live in space unless the human body is genetically engineered to deal with the long term consequences of microgravety and radiation. Such modifications would probably make the individuals unable to live on earth. If 'we' leave Earth, we are going to need to make at least one new type of human.

Maybe all of the 'aliens' SF has imagined over the years will be of our own making in the far future.