Alright, so I wanted to share what I’ve been up to. The other day, this idea just popped into my head: design astronaut. No big reason, just felt like it, you know? Sometimes you just gotta scratch that creative itch.
First thing I did was just grab a piece of paper and a pencil. Old school, I guess. I could’ve used my tablet, but there’s something about pencil on paper, isn’t there? I spent a bit of time just staring at the blank page, thinking about what makes an astronaut look like an astronaut. It’s mostly the helmet and the bulky suit, right?
So, I started sketching. My first attempts were, uh, let’s just say they wouldn’t be going to space anytime soon. One looked more like a lumpy snowman. The helmet was giving me a lot of trouble. Getting that iconic round visor shape and making it look like it’s actually attached to a suit, not just floating there, was tougher than I thought. I must have erased and redrawn the helmet like, ten times.
Then I moved onto the suit. I wanted it to look a bit functional, not too sci-fi, but not too plain either. I looked up some pictures of actual space suits, just to get some ideas for the joints and the texture. You know, all those little details, the straps, the little boxy things they have on their chests. I didn’t copy anything directly, just sort of let it influence the shapes I was drawing.
I spent a good while on the pose too. I didn’t want it just standing there, stiff as a board. I tried to make it look like it was floating, maybe reaching out for something. Getting the limbs to look natural in a zero-G kind of way is tricky. Lots of erasing again. My paper started to look a bit worse for wear, ha!
Once I had the basic outline and pose down, I started adding some finer details. Little seams on the suit, maybe a hint of a reflection on the visor. I thought about adding a flag patch or something, but decided to keep it pretty generic for this first go. The backpack, or the PLSS as I think they call it, was important. Had to make that look chunky and capable, like it’s got all the important life support stuff in there.
I didn’t go for colors this time. Just stuck with pencil shading. Tried to use the shading to give it some depth, make it feel a bit more three-dimensional. It’s amazing what you can do with just different pressures of the pencil. Darker in the creases, lighter on the raised bits. I’m no expert, but I just played around with it until it felt right.
After a couple of hours, I leaned back and looked at it. It wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. But you know what? It looked like an astronaut. My astronaut. And that was the whole point, really. Just to see if I could take that idea from my head and put it down on paper. It was a fun little exercise. Kept me busy, and I actually ended up with something I didn’t totally hate, which is always a bonus.
