The Anaether

If it hasn’t been obvious already…

Guns. Not my thing to draw, much less come up with original designs. Sem’s gun is pretty much a copied placeholder at the moment but at some point I’m going to have to hash out some original design to make it look more sci-fi-ish. Totally putting that off right now.

This is probably the piece of concept art I’ve done lately that I like the most. I keep trying to replicate my success with this piece but it’s been hard.

I’ve also realized that even though mag guns/rail guns/gauss rifles are probably way more practical in sci-fi or in outer space, they’re just not that sexy. Since I am a visual artist, I don’t think it’s fair to expect me to have my work be very hard sci-fi, because the absolute hardest sci-fi is actually in fact not that entertaining. My primary goal is to be entertaining and visually interesting.

So I switched from making the rifles boxy to just… something more appealing and looks more exciting.

The average audience probably doesn’t even know about mag rifles, and in video games that have them, they make sounds. In real life, mag rifles are quiet. That’s not very sexy.

If I did my research correctly, there’s no explosion, thus no smoke. I’ve realized that part of the appeal of guns is the response you get from them, including the explosion, the moving parts, the smoke and so on. Guns in popular culture are loud and sexy, so I don’t think the realism of mag rifles or guns would be as interesting.

I thought about having Vas hook up to their gun because mag rifles/guns need a bit of power, but I don’t think they need that much power in the first place. But again, the average audience wouldn’t know that, would they?

I’ve realized I really don’t need to try to impress astrophysicists and professional hitmen or something. Most people just see something that looks convincing enough and go “cool.” Those who don’t maintain suspension of disbelief will go “Spider-Man 2 was the dumbest movie ever. You can’t just drown that nuclear fission thing in the Manhattan river, it would have vaporized!” or something like that. And those audience members are probably among the minority. The average audience member probably has only a vague idea of physics.

… and this is one of the reasons why I am not very fond of using my brain as a writer. But it is a means to an end, and at the end of the day, I’m usually happy that I put some thought into my writing.