A Princess of Mars Art Order Challenge

I've been waiting for the opportunity to join an Art Order Challenge, so I was excited to find out there was a new one announced just last week.  The "Princess of Mars" Challenge task artists to create a "homage" artwork to celebrate the original work of fiction as well as pre-empt the visual designs of the upcoming John Carter movie.  I put "homage" in quotation marks since it felt a bit nebulous, and indeed it seems people aren't sure whether they're supposed to remake the cover or recreate a scene in the book.  I chose the latter, and decided to recreate this scene:

Sola and I had entered a building upon the front of the city, in fact, the same one in which I had had my encounter with the apes, and, wishing to see what had caused the sudden retreat, I mounted to an upper floor and peered from the window out over the valley and the hills beyond; and there I saw the cause of their sudden scurrying to cover. A huge craft, long, low, and gray-painted, swung slowly over the crest of the nearest hill. Following it came another, and another, and another, until twenty of them, swinging low above the ground, sailed slowly and majestically toward us.

Each carried a strange banner swung from stem to stern above the upper works, and upon the prow of each was painted some odd device that gleamed in the sunlight and showed plainly even at the distance at which we were from the vessels. I could see figures crowding the forward decks and upper works of the air craft.

After going through a couple dozen thumbnails I picked two that I liked the best and essentially altered each one's viewpoint slightly to end up with 4 slightly more polished thumbnails .  I have to thank my friend Chester Ocampo for pushing me in the more challenging direction (in terms of perspective) of thumbnail 3 (3rd from the top) by sketching that out for me.  I've gotten just one vote each for both thumbnail 3 and 4, so I'm waiting a bit to see which composition I'll go with for the final piece.  I'm not entirely in a rush since I'll have to conceptualize what the ships and the Martians looks like before I proceed any further with this.  Next up, ship concepts!