Day/Night Painting 1

Made a needlessly detailed rough for the Day/Night painting assignement. Planning to make two small paintings rather than one big one that's divided in half like some sort of chimeric-doppleganger, as cool as that is, and sounds. Simple idea, a 'sunny' nebula with a REALLY honkin big starship set in front of it for the day painting. For the night painting the nebula will retain the basic shape but the color scheme will be much more, well, night-like. There will be stronger contrasting colours, lots more darks, and the spaceship will be a wreck.

like how the nebula turned out here, and the spaceship is okay, I just don't feel that it looks quite big enough still, I had in mind a ship that would be larger than a planet (but not shaped like a planet cause that would be to close to Death-Star-wannabees). If you ever played Homeworld 2, and took a look at the massive wrecks in the background, wrecks that dwarf your mothership by several orders of magnitude, you'd know what I'm after. At the same time I can't just copy Homeworld's methods exactly for convincing us that something is really ridiculously big, so there's quite some challenge here. Anyways, here's what I put together in Photoshop:

Yep, it's a communist starship. Just because. Maybe it's got something to do with getting Red Alert 3 over the holidays. No the night scene is not some allegory for the fall of the Soviet Union, I just felt it would be lame for the starship to be exactly the same (aside from lighting) in both scenes. Yes, I have no idea how I'm going to paint this with gouache, should be interesting to say the least!