Read Issue 8 of Digital Art Live

Welcome to Issue 8

What is one of the most boldest human endeavours of our time? It is the exploration and settlement of Mars. What an audacious thought, but as the Mars Society mentions as part of their tagline “We’re ready”.

And we are. There are some large technical hurdles to overcome, but the likelihood of these being solved in our lifetimes are relatively high. The largest challenges as Nicole Willett, education director for the Mars Society mentioned in her interview with Digital Art Live are gravity, radiation  and the psychological aspect of getting the right crew of people together that can work as a team.

Excitingly the goal of getting humans to Mars could be closer than we think, if the will was there. “We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the Moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.”(Dr. Robert Zubrin, Mars Society President).

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In this issue:-

THE MARS SOCIETY

Want to live on Mars?  The Mars Society can (almost) arrange that, at its Mars stations in the Utah desert or the Arctic!

PHOTOGRAPHY | 3D ART | SPACE SCIENCE

“… we have the innate want and need to explore, to learn, to stretch our imaginations. And if we meet this challenge [of Mars], then we will be able to meet many other challenges.”

LUDOVIC CELLE

Digital Art LIVE interviews Ludovic about his gallery exhibitions of Mars art, Blender, and his vibrant new life in Mexico City.

BLENDER | GIMP

“I particularly love the freedom that Mexicans have in their local art. I don’t go to art galleries, I prefer the mural art on walls. I also pay a lot of attention to traditional craft arts in the markets.”

GALLERY

Digital Art LIVE picks a choice selection of digital artists who present plausible visions of life on the frontiers of space.

VARIOUS

Will your great grand children live in a ring-city in orbit? Or be hardy pioneers on the dusty new Mars Frontier? Will nano– and bio-technology help terraform new worlds, or explore for life?

A Segment from the Ludovic Celle Interview

 

DAL: Ludovic, welcome to the in-depth interview with Digital Art LIVE  magazine.  This is the ‘Our Future Frontier’ issue, and we also have an interview with the Mars Society, so we thought that your fine series of Mars pictures would be a perfect match with that.  But first, please tell us about how you came to be an artist.  How did your talents first emerge, and in what ways?  What opposition or encouragement did you encounter?

LC: Hi! First, thanks for the invitation. Well, I am 34, and I feel I have been immersed in images since early childhood. Especially through videogames, TV, cinema and comic books, and I think that was the start of this fascination for worlds, creative images and visual explorations. I also was born into a family where art and culture are praised and encouraged. That really helped me to grow — first in drawing, later as an architecture student, and now as a freelance digital artist. I’m glad that I met few obstacles, mostly encouragements, mostly from family and friends. It is funny to think back on how much ‘the most boring hours and days at school’ were when I mostly drawn and imagined other worlds in the margins. I should thank my school for having, unknowingly, given me the time and energy to develop my personal drawings!

DAL: And then how did your later interest in the Mars Society and Mars colonisation emerge?

LC: I have always been attracted by space, spaceships, etc.  But the fascination for Mars started during my reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, back in 2007-2008. It was a mind-blowing read, one that would impact my vision of space and of the potential of mankind’s future for a long time. While reading the books, I could visualise very easily what the scenes would look like in reality, and then I started to draw storyboards, and made photo-manipulations after that. I needed to make these images, ‘it called from within’!

Beside the reading and illustration of the novels, I connected with many Mars fans and space professionals, including the Mars Society, with which I shared images several times. Their experimental approach inspired me early for my Mars illustrative explorations, as they are very much in the spirit of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘the Mars underground’.

DAL: Ah yes, and Robinson’s famous Red Mars trilogy is now set to be filmed as a TV series.  We have news of that toward the back of this magazine, in our ‘Imaginarium’ section.  Let’s hope the new TV series is done well, and that they get enough of the hard science in there.  If you were called on to help with the visualisation work for the forthcoming TV series of Red Mars, what visual ideas or approaches might you suggest?

LC: I love this question, thank you! Well, first, it’s important to show Mars in its true colours, which are not deep red like in so many artistic depictions.

DAL: Whoops-a-daisy. We’ve gone with deep red to open the interview with The Mars Society.  Oh well, ‘artistic licence’, and all that…  As with the adolescent desire to design flags and uniforms and suchlike, I think all that can be left until after we get there and settle.  The point is to get there, and if the ‘red’ Mars brand catches attention for now, then I say ‘let it run’.

LC: Second, Mars also has a very rich geological diversity, and shapes and  landscapes that feel really different from any desert on Earth, so it is both fascinating and accurate to respect this originality and richness of Mars. I was disappointed by the lack of variety of landscapes in the trek sequence at the end of Ridley Scott’s film of The Martian. They lost the opportunity to show that Mars is not just covered by mesas!