Reggie is ready.

Working on issue #4 of Father Robot, and I had need to whip up this little piece to reference Reggie facing straight at the viewer.  Just thought I’d share…

Beneath the helmet.

One of the biggest hurdles to humans traveling the stars is radiation.  Unless we’re willing to line our spaceships with lead, all our interplanetary travelers will be continuously subject to high doses of cosmic energy.  I guess one way to keep people safe would be… better space suits!

To that end , I have set out to design the perfect cover for those poor, over-exposed solar sailors.  If you look through this blog you’ll see some of my better concepts.  However, this is not one of them:

As you can see, this unfortunate astronaut seems to gotten the worse of it somewhere.  I was afraid to ask him whether the seals failed, letting in zero gee flames, or maybe the radiation protection wasn’t thorough enough.  Either way, I’m afraid he’s suffered…

Still alive, though!

New, deluxe model.

With this rig, you’d be ready for anything.

I wanted this space suit to have the look of “too much” room inside the helmet.  One thing that always bugs me about the space suits I see in movies, comics, and even my own artwork is that it always looks like the person’s head is going to bounce off the inside of the helmet if they got a good shakin’.  Unless the neck is being secured by some kind of collar, there’s still many degrees of head movement, and in the rough environments these suits are made for, one is going to end up getting a bruise from numerous smacks against that protective covering.

This design would not only keep that from happening, but leaves lots of room for screens, cushioning, windows, and communication equipment.  Since the technology involved with such suits would be able to see the surroundings better than the human eye (through thick glass), the front-facing port is above the wearers head and service a camera.  The person inside has a screen in center-view, and would be able to take advantage of a range of vision types.

I got the look I wanted for this one by drawing the suit by hand, scanning it into the digital realm, and then printing out several copies of the lifework on marker paper.  I then did the value and local color separately, with Copic markers, combined them in Photoshop, and did a little clean-up and tweaking to get the image you see here.  It was lots of fun.