Images of the Tardis 


These images were quickly made for me by someone who is very good at it. His name is Solis, and his site has images that I think make many science fiction pictures look merely good. I have seen many images of the Tardis, and these are the best I have seen, so I am particularly happy with them. He has a site where you can see pictures of amazing things, many of which will be familiar, and others profoundly strange, including some that Salvador Dali might have appreciated, and even envied:


http://solis.orcon.net.nz
That link is now dead, I have tried to find Solis several times over a few years, without success.

I have done a few tiny edits in the second picture. Solis had a JPEG of the fireball, whereas I had the original bitmap. I have edited that into the bitmap he sent me, and added a bit of highlighting to the Tardis and the leaves and trunks of trees, and trimmed the edges a bit to get them as clean as the first image. That first image, and the third, I have not altered.


The Tardis, close to a strongly ionised nebula.


Tardis, nebula, and reworking of main page image.


The Tardis, doing what it likes best of all.


This last image is the one I like best, too: the Tardis making a modestly awesome arrival in a place of shocking strangeness and beauty. The image is based on Monica Froese's artwork for the cover to Tangerine Dream's 'Stratosfear'. The Tardis appearance itself is based on a 3D Studio design by Chris Gill, and was found by me, at this site: http://www.btinternet.com/~tobor/meshes.htm.

Everything up to this paragraph is exactly as it has always been, apart from one line near the start to indicate that Solis appears to have vanished into a void even deeper than this one. When he made these images it was several years after the original Doctor Who series had been terminated, and a few years before Chris Eccleston made a stunning return of the Doctor in ways no-one at the time expected. We didn't think there'd ever be a series of Doctor Who again. There were several new books, and probably many people who identified with the original idea enough to maintain something to do with it.

I'd had a web site online at 'lostgallifreyan.com' since 2002 with the same main page it has now, and very soon after that Solis made these images. That main page was a doodling with Paint Shop and HTML that took on its own abstract life purely because I liked how it looked, and I got it to look good scaled to any of the large range of screen sizes available at the time. Solis did something good with it in the second of his images here, but I have often wondered how far that went. The image was there for long enough to be seen by many hundreds of people, not least because I wrote and hosted a login generator for Napster clients working with the Napigator program to let people use them on Open-nap servers without needing Napster's service. That thing got a LOT of traffic, so it's reasonable to assume my main page, and Solis's pictures, got some of that.

If you look carefully at the title sequence of the Doctor Who shows starting with Chris Eccleston, and have the ability to freeze playback at 14 seconds, in the pause before the rising sweep sound that begins the main theme tune after the introduction, compare the image of the Tardis at its closest approach with Solis's second image. I will likely never know for sure, but I think that Solis may well have impressed someone because the appearance and orientation of the Tardis, and much of the background (minus fireball and trees) seems to have strongly influenced the opening sequence of the new shows, made a few years after this image was put online. That pause looks to me like a reminder to anyone who also saw these images, and the way colours are used, especially the way orange dominates and replaces blue in that opening sequence, just as it does for the main point of focus in the first two of the Solis images, seems to reinforce the impression that these things may be connected. This is only speculation, but it works for me...

Solis's images aren't the only thing here Doctor Who related. Most of the site is not, so most that is will be on this page. I made something of my own... Not entirely my own, because Delia Derbyshire and the Stranglers had a lot to do with making me want it to sound the way it does. It's here. Consider it your dubious reward for having read this far. :)