HOME | DD

Description
Done in Gimp, about 10 hours from start to something I liked.
My entry for s "Vibrant Skyscape" contest.
LOVE how this one turned out.
Getting the lighting right on this one was a pain- four seperate light sources make for tricky shading.
(light blue from a moon behind the clouds, white from the "lighthouse", the neon/sodium lamps in the undercity, and the filtered and reflected purple/pink ambient light, (which does NOT play well with green...)
It was all worth the trouble when I finally got them all to play nice together though!

The idea I was shooting for in this one was "cyberpunk city" meets "floating island fantasy realm".
The islands are a natural phenomenon of this world:
it would be more accurate to describe them as tens of thousands of small moons orbiting a super-dense iron-and-lead core, and prevented from collapsing into the core both by intense electromagnetic fields generated by the core itself,
and the actions of several large 'shepherd islands', similar to the way that Saturn's rings are maintained.
The inhabitants of this world tell stories of a time when their ancestors flew to this world from an island called "Earth" more than ten thousand klicks wide.
These are merely silly stories for children, of course- not even the best planes can reach the great moons high in orbit, and even the largest of those are only a few thousand klicks wide.
And in an age when most of the islands in the known universe have been explored and charted, surely someone would have noticed an island that large.
One cannot help but wonder, though, when one hears the question that every child asks at some point- "What's beyond the clouds?"

Description
Done in Gimp, about 10 hours from start to something I liked.
My entry for s "Vibrant Skyscape" contest.
LOVE how this one turned out.
Getting the lighting right on this one was a pain- four seperate light sources make for tricky shading.
(light blue from a moon behind the clouds, white from the "lighthouse", the neon/sodium lamps in the undercity, and the filtered and reflected purple/pink ambient light, (which does NOT play well with green...)
It was all worth the trouble when I finally got them all to play nice together though!

The idea I was shooting for in this one was "cyberpunk city" meets "floating island fantasy realm".
The islands are a natural phenomenon of this world:
it would be more accurate to describe them as tens of thousands of small moons orbiting a super-dense iron-and-lead core, and prevented from collapsing into the core both by intense electromagnetic fields generated by the core itself,
and the actions of several large 'shepherd islands', similar to the way that Saturn's rings are maintained.
The inhabitants of this world tell stories of a time when their ancestors flew to this world from an island called "Earth" more than ten thousand klicks wide.
These are merely silly stories for children, of course- not even the best planes can reach the great moons high in orbit, and even the largest of those are only a few thousand klicks wide.
And in an age when most of the islands in the known universe have been explored and charted, surely someone would have noticed an island that large.
One cannot help but wonder, though, when one hears the question that every child asks at some point- "What's beyond the clouds?"