There’s an idea I’ve heard about, the Mind Palace. It’s a sort of memory exercise, where you imagine a building— library, museum, palace, whatever— and sort stuff you know information you know into different rooms. You take advantage of your brain’s natural tendency to form associations by tricking it into joining certain information to these imaginary rooms, so imagining the room also calls up everything you’ve “stored” in there. I’ve never had the patience to try it out myself, but I thought of it earlier yesterday, when I decided to embark on this project, and I found myself able to begin conjuring up shots in my minds eye, just like I used to years ago, as if the ability was behind a door in my mind I just hadn’t opened up in a while. Maybe I didn’t “lose” my mojo so much as was driven away from it.

One of the first ones I came up as a group of White Stars from Babylon 5, sunlight glinting off of them, like dolphins swimming past a sunset. I thought a recent photo from the International Space Station by Jeff Williams would make a good background. I considered going for something else, a fictional planet, but it’s a really good picture, and the ISS being full of people with cameras has been a real boon to Sci-Fi art, so why not take advantage of it?

Kier Darby’s model of the White Star remains the gold standard representation of the ship. I decided to fill out the composition with a group of smaller ships, settling on the fighter-sized version of the White Star made by Amras Arfeiniel for the Foundation3D Babylon 5 model contest.