Defender Sira — a take off of Commander Keen — was originally an arcade game in ‘97, then a novella, then a series of images, and now is no more. It gave me the chance to explore digital hand-drawn art. I experimented with many of Photoshop’s effects and filters to give it a sort of a 3D and futuristic tech-heavy effect. The image, flattened, fits a compressed 20 MB TIFF file, while the Photoshop files, unflattened, are almost 300 MB (so opening and saving the images took a good 5 minutes on my old Pentium III laptop, with its 256 MB of RAM). If I could improve on this image, I would make a focal point as a lot is going on in this image. I also skimped on making aesthetically-appealing spaceships since I lacked the knowledge, at the time, to make 3D models.

• Time: July 2001 and finished December 2001. Took about half a year to make, off and on (I’m guessing a week’s solid worth of work?).
• Used: Photoshop 6, Wacom Graphire tablet, Sakura Micron ink pens, Sanford Titanium 0.5mm mechanical pencil