Warriors of the Red Planet

 I wonder what these sketches could be for?

The final text for Warriors of the Red Planet has been delivered and the book is deep in layout. Normally it wouldn't take too long to lay a book out, but I'm also creating art for it. And the writing was so good I wanted to do a "AAA" job on the art. Well, AAA art takes time. If all goes well the book will be done by the time the John Carter movie comes out (wouldn't that be swell?!).

Here is a sneak peek of a page:

This is a typical page. The header pages have a full page illustration with a pull quote.
Layout is far from final. The way I work I set up everything into templates, so if I change the design in one place it can be updated everywhere painlessly. My goal is to have at least 1 illustration per page in the Monsters section, hopefully more time permitting. This will be a fairly heavily illustrated book when it is done.

I've reread Princess of Mars a couple of times in order to fully grasp the awesomeness that Burroughs created in his fantastic creation. The dress of the main characters is often characterized as completely nude, but when you read the narrative carefully there is a lot of discussion of armor, silks, and furs. It is true that John Carter arrives butt-naked to Mars, but he quickly gets armor. In several passages the armor and dress are mentioned, I just don't picture the characters as running around nude through most of the book.
I've done several sketches of Deja Thoris with various amounts of dress. Here is a page from my sketchbook.

Work continues on art for Warriors of the Red Planet. Fresh from my sketchbook are these concepts for Zodangan battleships. Note, these are just rough sketches - I'll take the best designs and do more polished drawings for the book.