My Mars Society 2013 Convention poster art

This is the art I recently submitted for the Mars Society 2013 Convention poster contest.
I didn't win, but I have a special honorable mention from the Mars Society. See here for more info and a look at the smart winner poster by Cody Edwards.
I made this poster with Inkscape as it's mostly vector work (including the characters and the lights in the sky). The few textures were prepared on Gimp before use in Inkscape.
The theme of the contest was "Finding Life and Bringing Life on Mars". I chosed focused on "Bringing Life" : the descending ships like seeds falling down to the soil, the "Earthrise" habitable dome behind the horizon, and a group of pioneers standing on the Martian surface, starting life and culture on the barren planet.

Orbiting Mars

Here is a new photomanipulation I made today.
We are looking at Mars from a manned spacecraft. The 200km wide view is on Ophir Chasma, a region of Valles Marineris.
With all the Mars trips projects announced or to be annouced these days, we are just a few years away until this picture becomes real.
The photos used for this image are both from NASA :
-The ISS cupola shot during STS-130 (2010)
-Ophir Chasma shot by Viking 1 in 1976

As always, I made the photomanipulation with GIMP on Linux-Ubuntu.

Green Mars globe 01

Here is an original Christmas present !
This is my very first try to make a realistic looking terraformed Mars globe. We see the planet here in advanced Green stage.

All work done on Gimp, with a globe of Earth mixed with a globe of Mars. Click here to enjoy it in full HD on my DeviantArt page.
Comments are welcome !

Red Mars Anniversary Timeline

2012 is the year of the 20th anniversary of the legendary SF novel RED MARS which started the Mars Trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson. And this is also the year of release for 2312, the new space epic by KSR which takes us beyond the scale of the Mars Trilogy, in the future of our solar system.

KSR.info and DaVinci-MarsDesign wish to commonly celebrate this event with this new infographic timeline I just made.

The layout is made on Inkscape and the 3 photomanipulations (2027, 2061 and 2127) were made on Gimp.

To enjoy the infographic in full scale, I recommend my DeviantArt page here.

And please visit KSR.info for further exploration on these novels.

Mars Space Elevator Triptych Poster

Something like 5 hours on Inkscape in the middle of the night, and here is my poster for the space elevator as described in Red Mars !

The background is my photomanipulation triptych turned black and white and put a little darker.

Mars and the space elevator

Finally my space elevator triptych is completed, with this last sight caught between the two ends of the cable. On this point of view we are still very close to the surface and very very far to the mid-distance of the cable, still thousands kilometers away ! Anyway, enjoy the view and take a look at the full triptych.

I made this picture with GIMP on Linux-Ubuntu.

This new photo-manipulation is based on the huge photographic mosaic of the Nasa Viking 1 Orbiter shots by Daniel Machácek. This original picture looks to the east, on Argyre Planitia. For more information on this region, see here.

A special space elevator poster is coming very soon...

Clarke and the space elevator

I go on with the Space Elevator theme, with this new photomanipulation showing the "space end" of the cable. In Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson tells the setting of an asteroid in high martian orbit, as a necessary mass keeping the space elevator cable straight. This asteroid, Clarke, is named after science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who described the space elevator concept in one of his novels. (learn more here) KSR imagines that the cable is made directly from Clarke, with the asteroid's material, mined and turned in carbon nanotubes, made in space !
This photomanipulation works with the previous one, that showed Sheffield, the town where the cable rises from the surface of Mars. KSR describes the cable as being 35.000 km long and 10m thick.
More than just a useful mass for the cable's balance, Clarke is a base in itself, a spaceport full of docks, living and working areas for the people involved in space travel, space cargos as well as a spacious station for travellers of all kinds. What we don't see in the picture are the spaceships waiting for passengers leaving Mars or bringing new ones to Mars.

For the manipulation, I've used elements from a photo of the ISS by NASA, and a shot of Saturn's moon Phoebe for the asteroid (photo). The entrance of the cable is a small part of a photo of Kuala Lumpur's skyscrapers by Paul Mannix (original photo).

I made this picture with GIMP on Linux-Ubuntu.

Mars mosaic 01 - Red Green Blue Mars

This time, no photomanipulation, but  another kind of picture I've been thinking a lot : a mosaic of inspiring pictures, a kind of kaleidoscopic sight !
Then I've searched the web for hundreds of pictures that inspired me the world of the Mars trilogy as described in details by Kim Stanley Robinson. I then cropped them in square shape and built the mosaic.
My idea here is to express the world that is Mars in the book. It's a whole planet, with various landscapes, various cities evolving at the same time, various technologies at work, thousands of human beings living their life there, and the slow creation of a Martian culture. There is the idea of both space and time. This particular mosaic draws the shape of my Mars roundel, one I imagined for this blog years ago. It shows in 3 colors the 3 stages of Mars through its terraforming history : Red, Green, and Blue.

I may produce some more mosaics like that later.
I made this with the free software AndreaMosaic.

There are too many pictures used here to credit them all, and anyway I use them only partly and at a tiny scale, but I am ready to consider authors requests.

The scale of Phobos

This new picture is to be an exception here, as it is not located on Mars ! Since I've started being interested by Mars, I am fascinated by the scale of the planet and its features, and of course, there is Phobos, its largest moon (the other one being Deimos). What better way to give a scale than to compare with actual things on Earth ?
So, here is Phobos standing over my town Grenoble in the Alpes (eastern France). Phobos' dimensions are 26,8 x 18,4 km. If you carefully look at the center of the picture, you'll see 2 helicopters, still quite far from the "big rock".
Here too is a companion picture showing in satellite view how Grenoble and Phobos compare. We can see there that the entire town of Grenoble would easily fit inside Stickney crater, Phobos' largest crater (on the right).

I made this with TheGimp on Linux-Ubuntu. A 5 hours work.

In the Greek Mythology, the twins Phobos and Deimos ("fear" and "dread") were god sons of Ares ("Mars").

Ascending Pavonis Mons up to Sheffield

Imagine yourself in the warmth of a comfortable rover, automatically ascending the endless flank of Pavonis Mons, one of Mars' giant volcanos. Outside, the temperature is below -120°C. Up there on the horizon, slowly appearing is the shining tent of Sheffield, the famous liftport of the space elevator. The elevator's cable stands straight and disappears among the stars. This all makes you feel you already are in orbit...

Sheffield is 3 kilometres away. You will be there in half an hour. The intense town's activity, busy with hundreds of passengers for the cable, will be a huge contrast to the lonely and silent ascent you just accomplished in the dark and red night. Altitude 14 km, where starts the space elevator that will take you right in space in a few hours.

As said on MangalaWiki, "because of its high altitude, Sheffield is condemned to remain a tented city."

This photo-montage is a lot inspired by a sequence in Red Mars : Ann Clayborne alone in her rover, making the very very long ascent of Olympus Mons and going so high that it feels like in space. This photo-montage here is a kind of transcription of this scene on Pavonis Mons.

(Made with TheGimp on Linux-Ubuntu)

Milky Way photo from ALMA by (European Southern Observatory) ESO/José Francisco Salgado.