These are a few preliminary sketches of a spaceship exiting a planet’s atmosphere for the final illustration of my book Smoog and the Eye of the Trillagryyn (2005). As the final illustration in the book, it was an important one, and I wanted it to depict both a departure from one story and the beginning of a new adventure. I experimented with multiple perspectives before choosing the one I used in the book.

Here is how the illustration appears in the book: