As far as I can remember, not counting billboards and launcher graphics, the new line of "War For New Eden" skins is the first time a piece of my art appears in-game. Which is pretty damn cool. I once had a piece of art appear in Eve Valkyrie from a contest I won years and years ago. But this is Eve Online and that is a magnitude of difference.
Now, to be fair, the skins themselves were created by my good friend Paul (T'amber or Caldari Prime Pony Club) with art direction from yours truly. We worked together on these but most of the work was done by Paul. I just tried to help guide the process along and make suggestions based on the work we were doing on the game.
One of our original ideas was to create faction based holographic systems for these skins. The video above is a test animation I created to give Paul to try it out. We did several of these in various styles and various subjects to try and get them to work the way we wanted.
Eventually we settled on the design but we still needed a graphic for the skins. I created a bunch of concepts that contained words - but words on the sides of ships look weird. And while I think there is a way to do it and make it work, eventually I decided to create a graphic that hid the words as much as possible. Which is where the final design came from.
All of which is a very brief way of encapsulating a much longer process. But it was great to finally get the chance to work with Paul on a real project for once. And I'm really pleased with how the skins turned out. And I hope others enjoy them as well.
Onward and upward.