CREATING THE TOWER OF ANGELS By Marcin Radoslav Kurcewski Narrated by Shadow Guard.

Step 1 - Initial concept: One evening I just scribbled the above three drawings (Drawings 1-3) as a rough guide to Radoslav. I envisaged a monastary with circumferential defensive walls which were a feature of the Fortresses of the "Order" on Caliban. The floating Rock would have a ragged under surface where it had broken off from the planet whith massive engines buried towards the back. There would also be defensive rings of batteries and torpedo launchers as well as docking bays for the strike cruisers of the chapter. I thought it would be nice to have a planet in the back ground and some strike cruisers in the foreground to provide some idea of the massive size of this floating asteroid. No ssoner had I sent the ideas did Radoslav return the favour with a most impressive artistic sketch. (Drawing 4) I knew then we were on the right track. The ease with which Rad captured my concept and turned it in to artwork is simply amusing.

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Step 3 - Infrastructure: By now radoslav had created an incredibly detailed monastary structure based on cathedral architecture. He also made the whole layout of the structure resemble the hilt of a sword. The whole thing was embedded in to the rock piece and the ship-like superstructure then added. Obviousy the rock hadn't been given its texture but the monastary itself was taking shape very well.

Creating the Tower of Angels: Initial concepts and Thought Process I had been thinking about the concept of the Tower of Angels for some time. There had been a lot of mention about this floating space monastary of the Dark Angels chapter, in the 40K background. It was in fact a continent sized remnant of their home world Caliban. However there were no known images or artwork to depict this structure. I thought to myself that perhaps with the artistic talents of my dear friend Radoslav, we might be able to start from a concept piece and end with a digital representation. Little did I knw where this would lead. The original article depicting the creation of the "Rock" contained actual email discussions between Radoslav and myself. Sadly, as the Fortress website deteriorated some pages were lost including that article. Here I narrate the progress of the development of the Rock as best as I could. Sit back and enjoy.

Step 2 - Building the Rock: The work began to flow fast. Radoslav sent me a superb image of a rock (A) on which we tried out a couple of different concepts of fortress walls.(B, C) He initially wanted to create a monastary complex using 12,000 individual digital image components (The madman!) We also tried using a ship like superstructure which really didn't fit well (D, E, F). The large bays were the positions for landing bays and the led tube the position for engines.

DIGITAL CREATIONS

Drawing 1

Drawing 2

Drawing 3

Drawing 4

A

B

C

D

E

F