Originally this was going to be “I’m standing on Africa!” The day I thought of it I couldn’t get it out of my head and really wanted to stand up and proclaim it. Which isn’t a good thing when you’re sketching layouts in the pub.

For various reasons it has become standing on India. At first I was going to use NASA’s Blue Marble images as reference, and the copies I could find didn’t give me a good view of Africa. (Of course, when I went looking for images to demonstrate this dilemma, I found a view of Africa.) Then I realised that, based upon the timeline of the story, most of the continent would still be in the dark, even if it were midsummer. So I moved East a bit.

In the end I found a model of Earth for Bryce, which can now provide reference for all future shots looking down from space. Shading and the cloud layer were added in Photoshop Elements 8.

If you’d like to follow just the Point of Contact comic you can subscribe to its RSS feed.