Some rockets leap up majestically and plunge through the clouds to tear their way free of the Earth’s gravity and out, up and away toward the stars, where they roam in search of their destinies. Some rockets… well, they don’t.

Some other rockets shoot off the launch pad in the traditional, approved manner only to find themselves arcing back toward the planet in a way that, frankly, isn’t reassuring; and then these rockets improvise. This is one of those rockets.

As promised, I’ve put a page up at the Thrilling Tales site where backers (or anyone else) can still get a very small number of these limited edition prints, along with the paperback and hardcover books that made up some of the rewards for the project. I’ll leave that page up until I’ve finished proofing the prints. (I’m just getting ready to go to Round Two on proofing.)

While the page is live anybody at all can (and should!) place a pre-order. But I’ll close out the edition once I’m ready to order the complete run of the Voyage of the Hypatia – which is what the picture’s really called.

Here’s the order page for the prints. Orders can be placed with PayPal only.

For the complete update – including some close-ups of the sort of maybe finished picture – visit the Kickstarter project’s update page.

In the meantime you can click on the image above to embiggenate it.

There have been two rounds of "final" rendering, followed by a few small region renderings to correct problems that weren’t visible until the picture had reached its final, vast, Humongo-Vision size of 6450 by 4651 pixels; then a couple of sessions in Photoshop, and now we are at – or very, very near – the picture’s final state.

Of course we’re also still two-thirds away from funding it, so the fate of the print is in some pretty serious jeopardy. But who said all the news had to be good?

Today’s Retropolis Rocket Ship preview shows us the picture’s final lighting – though it’s still not the final picture. I need to render the two layers at their full resolution and when that’s done there will be quite a bit of retouching in Photoshop. It’s also likely that I’ll re-render some small areas (particularly the windows) in slightly different ways. All that work will get combined in Photoshop into what will be the final picture.

Those windows are a tricky prospect. Although I quite liked the way they were looking earlier I need to ensure that the rendered layers are transparent – or, really, partly transparent – so that I can paint the final space backdrop in Photoshop behind the rocket layers. Since my earlier glass materials came through as opaque (in the rendering), that wouldn’t be possible. That’s why I expect to render out a variant for the window areas.

The alternative would be to create the final backdrop ahead of time. That would work, but I’d have a lot less freedom as I did the retouching and overpainting. So we’ll try it this way and see how it goes.

The lighting phase was every bit as persnickety as I said it would be, what with minor changes and test renderings, after which: rinse and repeat. At this point everything is balanced just about the way I want it and from here on out any changes will take place in Photoshop.