Panadawn
Cross-sections and plans of Panadawn...
Central to the Platinum Mind books is the great ark of Panadawn. It was the first 'ship' I created (a very long time ago) and gradually expanded over the years. The first sketches were similar in design and intention to the ship from the original film of The Day the Earth Stood Still, but then I made it into a self-contained world.
The first designs for the fish were just robots that looked like shoe-boxes with eyes. As they needed to become characters in their own right, I wanted something that would look both familiar and yet alien and hit on the idea of fish. There were always going to be 24 species of them, based on the Latin alphabet, each with a function that's still related to the ones I'd assigned my shoe-boxes.
The Great Palace of Panadawn - spot the giraffe!
The University of Panadawn - do visit the Ship Museum!
I do love architecture and there have been a number of different designs for the Great Palace of Panadawn. Some of the earliest were planned in A4 on a word document, which, for obvious reasons, looked rubbish. The current design was created on a page a metre across so I could get all the details in.
The Winter Palace
Though the great palace was good for some things, I needed somewhere smaller for the characters to actually live in. This became the Winter Palace - a collection of rooms and apartments where some sense of normality could be contrived. It still ended up as a bit of a sprawl in the manner of Chatsworth House but I was going for something more in the style of a villa in Tuscany - like the one in the film, Much Ado About Nothing.
The Vespillon warships began life as Lego bricks while I was still very young but, hopefully, they've progressed a little since then!