Stealth Sci-Fi Fighter

This is a Hi Tech Sci-Fi sort of Stealth Fighter Plane Ship thingy. It was done through following one of the tutorials from Doug Chiang's Book Mechanika which I have touched upon before. 

 The first and largest obstacle I had with this was getting the initial design right. As with all this sort of work, if the design is no good, then no amount of rendering or presentation will turn it into a good design so getting that right was key. The sketches above are a testament to that with what I thought were not quite good enough designs. Another aspect I had a problem with was getting the perspective right with the wings and multiple layers.

Eventually I settled on this sketch because, although I knew the perspective was slightly off at the front, I knew I could edit it in photoshop, which I did in the image to the left.

Once In photoshop I replaced the sketch with black lines to complete the design and create a clean and easy to work with outline. I then used red lines to identify the areas that would be in shadow.

Using the fill bucket I added in the preliminary shadows. I then used gradients to add the lighting effects to the rest of the ship.

Next the original lines were duplicated and inverted adding detail to the darkest sections. Then I used an overlay layer to add the colour.

Finally I added some more highlights and shadows with the gradient and brush tools, before creating a shadow and backdrop to ground the design and a mechanic/pilot for scale.