Showing posts with label Thumbnails. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thumbnails. Show all posts
Character - FABULOUS ASSASSINATION / Rough Concepts - Tomato King
The Tomato King in denial. He's quite a ways off yet in visualization. Generally he should be round; his clothes can help to push that too. - Secondly, his clothes need to be garishly over the top as if he's overcompensating for his lack of height! Personality wise he should be quite serious but becomes tripped up in his words as if he doesn't think about what he says before he says it..
What If Metropolis? - Rethinking Reasoning
Lustig is fond of design with logic, and so I've been rethinking my reasoning behind the city's existence from my previous travelogue. The city needs to show what it's doing rather than having a narrative explained before you realise. - That's what I hope to achieve!
What If Metropolis? - Building Designs
Tried to keep them simple and make sure they have a strong silhouette.
What If Metropolis? - Sketchbook Thumbnails
More thumbnails! It became a lot easier to create thumbnails after writing my travelogue, actually.
What If Metropolis? - Thumbnails (1 - 27)
I've gotten a lot of establishing ideas down rather quickly, now it's just to detail the world instead of being vague. Design logic is important as well as how I'm rendering these in order to communicate how the city is built rather than making it look pretty. (Though, that's a bonus!) I'm trying to keep form but not lose texture. A lot of Alvin Lustig's work seems very focused on form and shape; I'm assuming that's the Graphic Design elements he has!
What If Metropolis? - Colour script doodles
Whilst researching into Lustig and his life it became apparent that he went blind quite early into his life. That however, did not stop him from creating book covers and would perfectly describe to his wife what he would in-vision so that she could create them for him! I want to have a theme of eyes somewhere into this city as a lot of his book covers also have eyes on them. Although, it's hard to do so without crazed conspiracy theorists in tinfoil hats declaring; triangles + eyes = Illuminati.
What If Metropolis? - Building Doodles
I've been doing some doodles of possible mini-buildings in the city based off of some of Alvin Lustig's book covers. I'm aware that due to his architecture I cannot make things too organic; but must embrace sharp edges and sleek curves!
I also looked very closely at the textures of Alvin Lustig's covers once they'd be worn a little from age and use. It added a whole new level to his art, I think!
I also looked very closely at the textures of Alvin Lustig's covers once they'd be worn a little from age and use. It added a whole new level to his art, I think!
Perspective Exercises
These double as perspective excersizes as well as rough ideas for my final images! Unfortunately, the FOV (Yay, something games taught me!) is way too narrow/zoomed in and probably won't show enough information about Moriana that I would like. I want to be able to use perspective as a rough guide so that my drawings don't look mechanical. Focusing on lineart was not the focus, moreso getting bulky forms down. - Paint was going straight over the top of it anyway!
Invisible Cities - Moriana Inside Compositions 2
More inside shots, this time a darker take from an average home rather than one that's slightly more privileged.
Doing this on a higher saturated screen and then looking at it on another makes it look very de-saturated. That's kinda annoying!
Invisible Cities - Moriana Colour Compositions 3
Some more comps, this time with ~*civillian interaction*~
Not entirely sure that these fit the mood, the left might but the right has the wrong feeling. I wanted to try and see if the contrast of a very warm climate with sand for miles mixed with a focal point of Moriana itself could work. - Though I'm not so sure now.
Invisible Cities - Moriana - Colour Compositions 2
Experiments with using colour dodge! I think if it's overused it can make something look overly digital, which I want to stay away from. There is a very specific glare you get from the sun when it hits water, and as Moriana is in a giant fish bowl to say, I imagine it would reflect light sometimes rather strongly. But the bottom of the city would still be extremely dark and dusty with slight glimmers from the sun.
I feel like I need more specific references and inspirations to work from to add some believably in the city, at the moment.
I feel like I need more specific references and inspirations to work from to add some believably in the city, at the moment.
Invisible Cities - Moriana - Colour Compositions
Some colour comps for the second to lowest level of Moriana. Looking above the houses are supposed to look towering as they are raised massively off the ground. There are endless paths on the base level where civilians walk to get around, but a lot of these paths also lead to many of the stops for the water current tube system. (I should probably come up with a name for that..) "Dead houses" are ones that have sunken down into the depths below. The stalks that the higher houses are raised upon eventually fall down.
Invisible Cities - MORIANA | Key Thumbnails + Influence Maps
When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddently find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana’s hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam. From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repretory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be seperated nor look at each other.
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The city I chose to go into further development with! I found myself creating new narratives based off the extracts for each city. I've highlighted (bolded) the keywords that inspired me to recreate this city!
To describe the recreated narrative:
"A massive fish tank city with a tiny gate guarded by faux Samurai Fish people! - A tiny gate they truly do believe will cover up the city. Fish never did have the biggest brains."
Furthermore, the tiny gates cover up a massive fish bowl which is densely populated with civilians ruled over by a Fish Prince smack in the middle of it. He lives in the only house shaped noticeably like a fish. (Darn those protagonists!)
Even though the fish people do not need their glass helmets, they wear them anyway. I'm sure they think they're fooling everyone that they're normal. Y'know, with their gills.
Even though the fish people do not need their glass helmets, they wear them anyway. I'm sure they think they're fooling everyone that they're normal. Y'know, with their gills.
Invisible Cities - 18 - 20
Certainly getting a lot faster at all of these! Fun, fun.
Time to pick the city I shall move on with.
I will not apologize to the Pumas for purposely drawing them as strange as possible.
I will not apologize to the Pumas for purposely drawing them as strange as possible.
Invisible Cities - Thumbnails 15 - 17
I've been enjoying drawing things a little more crude and silly rather than super serious and 100% straightly drawn.
Invisible Cities - Thumbnails 12-14
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Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city's calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date: and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other.
Though it is painstakingly regimented, the city's life flows calmly like the motion of the celestial bodies and it acquires the inevitability of phenomena not subject to human caprice. In praising Andria's citizens for their productive industry and their spiritual ease, I was led to say: I can well understand how you, feeling yourselves part of an unchanging heaven, cogs in a meticulous clockwork, take care not to make the slightest change in your city and your habits. Andria is the only city I know where it is best to remain motionless in time.
They looked at one another dumbfounded. "But why? Whoever said such a thing?" And they led me to visit a suspended street recently opened over a bamboo grove, a shadow-theater under construction in the place of the municipal kennels, now moved to the pavilions of the former lazaretto, abolished when the last plague victims were cured, and--just inaugurated--a river port, a statue of Thales, a toboggan slide.
"And these innovations do not disturb your city's astral rhythm?" I asked.
"Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly, " they answered, "that any change in Andria involves some novelty among the stars." The astronomers, after each change takes place in Andria, peer into their telescopes and report a nova's explosion, or a remote point in the firmament's change of color from orange to yellow, the expansion of a nebula, the bending of a spiral of the Milky Way. Each change implies a sequence of other changes, in Andria as among the stars: the city and the sky never remain the same.
As for the character of Andria's inhabitants, two virtues are worth mentioning: self-confidence and prudence. Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky's pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.
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The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.
On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed rubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbes, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.
Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.
This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.
Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crest of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.
The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tire, an unraveled wine flask, if it rolls toward Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighboring cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, canceling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still farther out.
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When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.
From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.
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More thumbnails! I really enjoyed Moriana. Started thinking of a massive fish tank city with a tiny gate guarded by faux Samurai Fish people! - A tiny gate they truly do believe will cover up the city. Fish never did have the biggest brains.
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