Study

This was a little thing I did the other day. Basically just background practice too since I haven't done any in a bit. I tried to incorporate some of the process into the character designs too. Unlike Twitter I can go a bit more indepth into sources and the process here.

For the Desert one I really like doing these hard shadows, if you draw try it out. Just make certain elements full black rather than the usual hatching or toning. It makes things a lot more striking. "Deserts" in this context can be anything tbh, cold or hot. just super flat. The Background candy of some big highway struts, or object just helps center the character. I mentioned AC4A because there's this ethereal sense of scale with how big things get with such a flat scale.

Desert Punk is mentioned just for character design. Which are below. It has this weird mix of Kenshi's Asian designs but with some more modern flare and combat equipment. The Artwork is gorgeous which is sad because the story becomes very bad midway through reading it. But yeah doing cooling suits with piping, big helmets or head covers is a treat for settings like this. The shade cone shape has a very striking design specifically.

For The "Floating Piers" as I like to call them was a lot more tricky to draw then I thought. Getting the desirable shape and size was kinda tough with just how simple the shapes are. But after some adjusting I found that I needed to have a few lighter colors to fill in the background and make the foreground part a lot darker and dense for a sketch like this.

Here's it pulled apart below.

But designs like this are always my favorite, I think just on scale upwards or outwards it's amazing to try and get a sense of how big these structures are or made. They're very interchangeable for the context in the world too, like in armor core as a urban jungle of steel and concrete to fight through or more quiet like in GLT.

Below (GLT) Tmzk does a really great job at just density. I've spent a couple years studying this guy's work and I'm still figuring out just the simplicity of scale. Massive housing blocks turn into just small irregular circles on paper it's really nice just to look and see how he gets this dizzying effect. The Anime does more justice with these wide colored shots though. I love just how distant everything can get.

On a final note I wanna mention Arctic Eggs, I've been following the one of the artist that worked on it for awhile now. cdbunker2 and I feel like in a similar vein they really nailed in that first person interaction of density and layering. I'd highly recommend playing it, it's a great game. But walking through each tiny catwalk to the other block of amalgamated prefabbed housing sections treats you to the closest thing in the designs mentioned before. Peripeteia is another one I could've mentioned.

Alright that's enough rambling. Thank you for a good July so far! I hope to share more stuff soon.