When I look at concept artist Ian McQue’s marvelously impossible flying ships, I swear I can hear them—creaking and clanking as they sway on unseen currents, cables banging against their sides, hull plates protesting against the rough bolts of makeshift patches and engines turning over with muffled thudding, tended to by sweaty mates hard-pressed to keep them running.
Visual texture is what does it; McQue has rendered his imaginary flotillas with wonderfully textural details—bolts and plates, rudders and fins, stacks and masts, and apparently cobbled-together superstructures are coated with rust and grime, patchworks of repairs, and mismatched bits of paint. Their rough shapes and scored hulls look as though they have been patched and repaired with bailing wire and scrapyard parts so often they likely no longer resemble whatever form they may have originally had.
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