I always enjoy the commissions I receive from the Radio Times as they’ve always been a great mix and the editors are very open to suggestions and ideas as to how to approach the illustration. This one was no different, here’s the supplied brief:

Saturday Play – Landfall
BBC RADIO 4
In this original science-fiction adventure by Mike Walker, five lost souls are recruited to travel to an abandoned planet where all they know is that they are to retrieve the only known sample of an ore left over from an old mining operation. But their task becomes considerably more complicated when one of their party has a close encounter with the indigenous plant life – plant life which seems to have some very odd, very powerful properties. Soon they are battling not only to stay alive but to hang on to the very things that make them human.

The main things to highlight for this illustration I felt was the mining operation, the sinister/odd plant life, five characters and the fact its on another planet. I instantly thought of some great sci-fi imagery like the desolate research operations in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, the mining operation in ‘Outland’ and a few other elements from ‘Aliens’ etc. I could see it being very 80s sci-fi-esque.