The Mountain City - Exploring a Rocky Environment

 As planned, this week I moved away from the mountain city itself, and onto the surrounding environment. To recap, a few weeks back I decided that it would be surrounded by a vast rock formation spanning kilometres in all directions. The idea is that this formation was created by one of the two brother kings when he was creating his mountain city, with the purpose of sealing it away from the world beyond and bringing it out of reach from outsiders. My focus this week has been looking at real-world examples of formations and landscapes that can provide inspiration for this idea, and applying this research to a series of explorative concepts.

Landmark/Formation Research

Going into my research, I had a general idea of a densely packed, rocky environment involving a potential mixture of canyons, caves, cliffs and monuments, so I set out to explore relevant examples of these sorts of locations. Above is a sheet containing some prominent examples of the reference imagery that I ended up using. I decided to split my research into texture and form references, since I found that sedimentary rock formations take on a wide range of both overall shapes and granular details. I planned to explore a variety of options in my designs, so I found this categorisation useful as it allowed me to refer quickly and easily, rather than having to sort through my collection of images. I drew from geographically relevant locations (Petra, Wadi Rum) as well as looking elsewhere for inspiration, which resulted in looking at many famous national parks and landmarks in the US. 

US Road trip, 2011

During my research of rock formation landmarks in the US, I noticed that I had been lucky enough to see many of them over the course of a family holiday in 2011, when we rented a minibus for a road trip around the Western States. Knowing that there must be hundreds of photos lying around somewhere, I asked my parents to send them over so I could have a look through for potential reference material. There were about 600 photos, of which many were useful, so here are some examples (featuring my long childhood hair, which is thankfully long gone).

Photos from my family US road trip, 2011

Over the course of our trip we visited many other amazing places aside from those shown above, such as the Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Hoover Dam. In terms of rock formations though, I would have to say that the two that stand out as being truly remarkable, were Bryce and Antelope canyons. Zion was also a spectacular place to visit. It was great to relive this holiday by looking back through the photos as I've not seen them for years, but more importantly many of them were actually a very valuable source of reference for my work, so I'm really glad I sought them out. Alongside the harsh, rocky landscapes surrounding the city of Petra in Jordan, Bryce and Antelope ended up being my main inspirations for this week's work. 

Sketching

Here are some quick sketches exploring various rock forms, making use of the wide range of contextual research. These were really fun to do, as just before starting, I found a new, toothy brush that proved very efficient for both blocking out shapes, and then hinting at 3D forms by applying a second tone indicating lighting. Limiting myself to this brush, I was able to produce this sheet after somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour. I really like how sketchy and textured the brush feels, and it seems to be especially effective for indicating the rough textures of rock with little to no effort.

I also did these loosely coloured sketches looking at a few slightly more elaborate forms and formations of rock. Many of these were exploring larger stacks of individual rocks, as I quite like how alien these can feel.

Thumbnailing Environments

My sketching proved useful for exploring the possible components of wider environments, so I decided to bring the ideas forward in a series of roughly thumb-nailed scenes. My goal was to explore a variety of potential environments and hazards that a traveller might need to navigate in attempting to reach the Mountain City at the area's core.

Again, the process here was very fun. It feels like I haven't really done much thumbnailing of scenes lately, and I noticed the progress I made just on this sheet, which feels really rewarding. As you can hopefully see from the spread, I tried to explore a variety of environment types, ranging from vast fields of sandstone monuments to tight, winding caverns. I especially like the bottom right concept, which draws on the smoothly textured, flowing forms of Antelope Canyon, as I can imagine it presenting compelling traversal scenarios. I also enjoy the scenes that offer the possibility for some environmental storytelling - we can see the corpse of a previous traveller that died trying to reach the city (bottom left), and the failure of a past attempt at bridging a deep chasm (top right)

Reflection

If I'm noticing a pattern as I'm writing this post, it's that I'm repeatedly saying how fun my practice work this week was. I think that has to do with both the relation to my real experiences on the US holiday, as well as how generally unrestrictive/loose the subjective matter is. It seems weird to say that drawing rocks is so much fun because we tend to see them as the most mundane of things, but it really is!

Andis Reinbergs, one of the professional concept artists that I spoke to last month, was keen to stress the value of drawing reference from places you've visited in person, rather than just relying on internet searches. I have to say that after this week, I really see the value this can bring, and I'll try to keep doing this in future, where possible. Even though my holiday was over ten years ago now, it proves to me that the memory of how a place actually feels to exist in is highly valuable when it comes to inspiring ideas, and is definitely something that even the best stock photos can't provide.

My approach to research this week felt beneficial to my work because I made sure to keep things more clearly structured and sorted than usual, which made my life easier. My main frustration this week came when I first started on the scene thumbnails, since I felt very inexperienced and out of practice in this area and was worried I wouldn't effectively convey my ideas. It did take quite a while before what I was putting to paper started to fall into place, and taking a break to watch a few videos on things like composition and effective sketching definitely helped. In the end, I am happy with the outcome of my thumbnail work, I guess it just took longer to get the ball rolling than I had hoped.