Go Forth...
So, I rushed this out today.
I don't know if there is any truth to the news (Edit: There isn't.), but I wanted to draw something on the theme. The (digital) painting is a bit wonky here and there, so I might have to clean it up later. The original is 2x WUXGA or so, but I'll upload that later.
5 comments:
I just found a new desktop background! :D
Love it :) I really like it when you do planets like you did here and for Cortex Command, if you ever did a DeviantArt style tutorial on your process flow it would be great.
Thanks as always for the inspiration.
Which news are you referring to?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php
I'm afraid I don't have any trick to painting planets. They're round and I make up terrain, curving it towards the edges. I usually cheat a bit with the shadowing and exposure levels. There's not a lot of ambient light in space, so you get this crisp light/dark situation, and nebulae and stars are so faint they won't even show up when photographing a planet.
Drawing maps is always fun. I guess after a while you develop a feel for what looks natural and not, with craters, continental plates, island group placement. A lot of fantasy maps are kind of artificial looking unfortunately. I think that happens when your mind starts thinking in clearly defined structures, a bit like a writer. "The plains of J'waar and desert of Hadzuum are separated by tall mountains" - so you draw a block of plains and a block of sand and a line of cloned mountains between, which will probably end up looking way too literal.
While my maps never turn out nearly as detailed as yours, years of being a Dungeon Master (yeah, make your snarky remarks, I'm used to it), has made map making more fun.
Before, a map would just be "here's a forest, here's a castle, here's a cave;" but over the years its developed into "here's a cave, which an empire has used as a fortress, their people evolved/developed from their food source and chose this spot because of how close it is to a river bed, and blah blah."
I find when I'm writing stories, or at least planning them, I find that the map itself is some what of a guide in development of the story and the characters in it. (It also helps if you develop languages, certain people located in mountainous areas would have a rougher, more Nordic tongue, while people by the sea would have a soft, whispy like language.
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