Right now I'm working on a book design for a new role playing game called GALAXY PRIME. The main characters are being illustrated by another artist, so I'm mainly focusing on the supplemental artwork, which includes a variety of space ships zooming around the universe. Naturally, we have no time and no budget, so I'm making do with free models available at the Strata 3D community Website. Fortunately, there are some really nice models available (and yes, they may be used in commercial projects: I checked). As you can see, I must work in black & white because that is how it will be printed. To create this image, I rendered the two ships to layers (Strata CX5 can output the renders to Photoshop layers -- a VERY cool feature!). I then messed around with a variety of filters to achieve this particular look (I ran a Stamp filter to get the outlines, I used a Posterize adjustment to get the shading I need, and then used Ocean Ripples to make the shading look more organic and "hand painted"). Then began the arduous task of selecting the background. I chose from a wide range of NASA and public domain images and just couldn't find what I wanted. I spent WAY too long on the background, but I finally composited two images to create the effect you see here. By the way, the distortion on the larger ship is caused by me using a very dramatic focal length on the camera lens. I'm not 100% thrilled with it, but I think it does convey a sense of movement, which I further enhanced by having the two ships "burst out" of the frame of the image. Combined with the laser blasts (which will bleed off the edge of the page), I think I mostly succeeded in creating an illustration that fits in well with the original artist's work, and does a pretty good job of illustrating the material on "Space Combat."