READERSVOICE.COM: For pictures like Wormos, from Dune, have you ever thought in dabbling in 3d animation using Maya or some other 3d animation program?

ALEX JAY BRADY: For Wormos, who is of course meant to be Leto II, I sculpted his sandworm body in 3d coat but I’m very much a beginner.

RV: Those Quaestor pictures are amazing. What went into the inspiration for those designs and scenes?

AJB: I was asked to imagine a giant airship over a flooded city. The rest fell out of that. I wanted something that would turn in the wind like a kite, and so needed to design the base station as a pivot. For the flooded city, I imagined the London of The Drowned World [by J.G. Ballard, 1962], where the city has been subsumed into the Thames estuary. With the tide far out, the partially toppled buildings and braided streams are sombre but also quite a beautiful place. Like an abandoned graveyeard that nature has reclaimed.

RV: I like the effect of speed you created with the self driving gyrocars in Entering Chicago at Speed, and Runners with the blurred horses and carriage, the Smelost sketches, and Fast Attack Robots. Do you always try to get movement in your pictures and what are some ways to do this even with apparently static scenes?

AJB: This was partly from comics, and partly from a painting of the Thrust SSC landspeed car I bought and had signed by Andy Green and Richard Noble as a kid. It still sits on my desk and shows the black SSC streaking across the desert right past the viewer. I was fascinated by the sense of contained speed in that image and so often riffed on it. Its signed Pittaway so shout out to them and thankyou!

RV: The concept art pictures of the caravans next to the diner in the desert remind me a bit of Edward Hopper paintings. Do you see other artists influence in your work sometimes?

AJB: That was for a company building what are called man camps in the fracking country of North America. Extraction derricks and pumps are set up and the company provides basic housing for the crews. The image was meant to be purely descriptive but I got carried away and ended up with what you see. I love Hopper, and Blade Runner which was directly inspired by Hopper.

RV: Are there any biographies or other novels or books you could recommend?

AJB: In addition to the ones listed above, I’m enjoying Jerusalem by Alan Moore at the moment. It’s set in decrepit post-industrial sub-urban towns in middle England, a place I know well, but also explores how even the most mundane seeming place has tonnes of history. He’s a brilliant writer whose stuff I always enjoy.

-see boac.artstation.com.
-copyright Simon Sandall.