Cropped Will Cardini artwork

March 22nd, 2011

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino and Tone Sheets

Filed under: Artwork,Inspiration — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 7:15 am

Man, SXSW was crazy – 25th anniversary and the biggest year yet! I only went to a couple of shows. The highlights of my South By this year were What’s Tappening, Chica Vas, and Harsh Realm II at Monofonus.

Anyway last week I mentioned how I got three volumes of 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino. Now I’m going to post the my favorite examples of tone sheet usage and show you what they inspired me to make.

I love the gas giant (is it a processed photograph?) and the circles of light from the propulsion of the ship on the right in this page:

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino
A page from the chapter “Night 6: Discovery” in 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino.

The gradient tone sheets on this spaceship blow my mind:

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino
A page from the chapter “Night 7: Lucifer Rising” in 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino.


More space ship and gas giant shots:

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino
A page from the chapter “Night 7: Lucifer Rising” in 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino.

I love the trippy background tone sheet and the strong composition in this next one. I wish the spaceshit had some tones to make it pop from the background more.

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino
A page from the chapter “Night 8: The Lights of Heaven” in 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino.

I think the tones in this one are so subtle:

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino
A page from the chapter “Night 9: Journey beyond Tomorrow” in 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino.

More awesome gradient spaceships:

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino
A page from the chapter “Night 11: A Stranger’s Footsteps” in 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino.

The next two are from my favorite one of the stories, “Chapter 18: Odyssey in Green.” A spaceship crash lands on a planet where plants have evolved to launch endless, mindless interstellar seed ships. Enormous flowers take the light from the planet’s sun and focus it into a laser that propels the ships into space. The first one shows the plant that shoots the laser:

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino

The second one shows a seed ship launching into space:

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino

All of this inspired me to make custom tone sheets in Photoshop. Here’s my first finished piece, a gas giant of my own:

Gas Giant Tone Sheet Experiment

I might make this into a screenprint.

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