Today was a busy day. It felt like Time tried to cram too many minutes in an hour. Or too much space in a small area. What I really need is a Tardis: Time And Relative Dimension In Space! Just to spread out all that time and space a little.

When I think about all the spaceships I’ve seen in films and series, the Tardis is probably the least impressive looking of all, although it is probably also the most iconic! A spaceship disguised as a blue police box – only the British could come up with that. 😉 Before I go on to show you some examples of my own work inspired by the Tardis, I want to briefly consider some of my other favourite spaceships.

One of the spaceships that most impressed me was the one from Alien, the Nostromo. It’s nothing like a spaceship, it’s one big ugly mining city. I like that concept. Too many sci-fi filmmakers imagine spaceships to be pretty above all else. But look at our own spacecrafts. They are built with a complete absence of aesthetic consideration. What matters is that they are practical

Another very impressive spaceship, in my opinion, is again a mining vessel. It’s captain Nero’s spidery spaceship Narada, which looks both impressive in a stingy way and extremely impractical.

A third noteworthy spacecraft is of course the Borg Cube. I’ve always loved the Borg, they are my favourite Star Trek villains, and the cubes are in no small part responsible for that! The Borg are so superior they don’t need aerodynamic shapes for their spacecraft, cubes will do. 🙂

Of course there are many other spaceships I love – the Millenium Falcon, Serenity, Enterprise – but in terms of coolness and impressiveness the Nostromo, Narada and Borg Cube are at the top of my list!

Back to that tiny little spaceship called the Tardis. Next to the above spacecraft it probably wouldn’t even be visible – the advantages of having a ship that is bigger on the inside. But it’s iconic value greatly surpasses that of most other spaceships. Try making the Nostromo into a pair of earrings, or painting a popart version of the Narada. Borg cubes are also fairly iconic, but lack the kind of details that make the Tardis so easily recognisable: the windows, the light on top and the words ‘Police – Public Call – Box’.

I have used the Tardis in various projects. The first was when I wanted to make myself some Doctor Who earrings. The original version was extremely crude, but now they are about as sophisticated as a 1 inch tall Tardis can be when it’s made out of polymer clay.

A slightly bigger Tardis, between 2 and 3 inches tall, takes the place of rooks in my two Doctor Who chess sets (check this blog post to see the complete sets).

The Tardis also does well in paint. These are my two Doctor Who Converse designs:

And finally I recently made a watercolour painting of the Tardis for a friend. For that one I specifically tried to create Eleven’s Tardis, as evidenced by the dark windows and St John’s Ambulance emblem.

In the past I’ve also made Borg Cube earrings, Serenity earrings and BSG viper and Cylon raider earrings, but none of them seem quite as iconic as the Tardis. (Let me know if you want to see them in a future blog post)

What do you consider the most iconic and the most impressive spaceships ever seen on the big or small screen? Which are your favourites?