Tickets Please

Our final project of the year could be one of many differnt subjects within the spectrum of Illustration. I chose Facinating Facts which was the perfect opertunity to sit and watch hours upon hours of David Attenborough programs. I was practicly raised on David Attenborough and rather missed the opertunity to do zoology, my exam skills being to poor to get good enough grads. None the less I am looking forword to the time when I can combine my love of Illustration and animals into one form.
Rather than creating a straightforword information book I decided to combine fact with fiction. I imagined a great ARK that was sent out fom Earth to preserve the lives of all the animals from our planet.

 

Tickets Please

     Never have the people of Earth created such a ship, nor will they again. A great lumbering hulk that ambles through space without destination or purpose, other than to exist.

     Constructed in haste, this leviathan has none of the beautiful curves or elegant forms that people imagined that great ships of the future would possess. It is instead a hodgepodge of different metals and pipes, back heavy and quite undignified, missing only a wide load sticker upon its rear. The only concession to aesthetics the relative symmetry of its hull.

     This solitary beast was not meant to lumber through space on its own. A convoy, an entire fleet was to follow in its wake, living off and surviving with their larger cousin. But no more ships were built, or none that could follow, so it continues on unaided; its great heart beating alone beneath its metal skin.

     From time to time ships varying in number, of strange and beautiful design, will appear from the void to bustle about it, only to later return from whence they came.

     Why did they come? How did they come to know the location of the ship? The Ticket.

     Those who have a Ticket could not tell you how they came to have one. They just find their way into your possession like an old photo in a drawer you can’t remember putting there. Or like a wrapper from a sweet you don’t remember eating but frequents your coat pocket nonetheless.

     The tickets are myth and legend, not even all those who have one believe that they are real, until the ship is spotted far in the distance of space. The Tickets are an omen of its coming.  Not all can read their Tickets but all who have heard of them know what they mean; they get to go aboard the ship, and see the wonders within.

     There are many names for this ship of legend that has been drifting through space long enough for whole civilizations to come and go. It has names given to it in languages without number. Some who receive the Ticket and translate it think that the ship is called just that, Ticket. It is even as if the builders of the ship could not agree on what to call it. Written upon its hull are hundreds of different scripts. Thousands of languages all saying the same thing, its name. The ARK.