I’ve been working on Lost Ship for the last few months, and it’s nearly complete (woohoo!). It’s a sci-fi comic about a small crew that explores the unknown parts of the universe.
All that’s left to do is print the project and release it out into the world. Before that happens, I thought it’d be cool to share a bunch of concept art from the pre-production phases of the project.
At the time I started the project, I was really into drawing different ship designs, which is what led to the initial idea for the comic.
Initial Babylon ship design 
Initial Mesa ship design
The final designs varied a little bit from those initial ships above.
Once the ship designs were set, I started to design the emblems of the organizations in the story. There are two main ones: the United Space Federation (U.S.F.), which is a governing body made up of the nations of Earth and the space colonies. The second organization is the Space Exploration Force (S.E.F.), which is a subsidiary of the U.S.F. that goes out into the unknown. But the Space Exploration Force is underfunded and on its last leg, with the scrappy crew of the Babylon being all that remains.
Final S.E.F. emblem 
Final U.S.F. emblem
Finally, the character designs. Lost Ship has a primary cast of five characters, so I wanted to make sure each person is as distinct as possible so they’d be easily recognizable.
I wanted the uniform designs to be simple and clean. While there are no spacesuits in the comic, I did explore what they might look like too.
Unused spacesuit design 
Uniform design
Harlow, the Babylon’s captain, had the most design iterations.
I introduced the cape to try to make Harlow’s uniform more visually distinct from the other crew members.
Red hair 
Pink hair
The rest of the crew didn’t get nearly as many design iterations as Harlow. Harlow is the one drawn in the most panels, so I wanted to get their look as right as possible.
Here is the character sheet I used as reference while drawing the comic. Even though the comic is grayscale, it’s fun to use color in the concept art to get a better sense of the characters and world.
There you have it! A bunch of the concept art from Lost Ship from the planning phases of the project. Even though the comic is pretty short at 26-pages, it helped me a bunch to explore and develop the characters and setting.
Thanks for checking out the concept art, and I’m looking forward to sharing more from Lost Ship as I wrap it up.
Brett Chalupa's Journal 
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