Initially, I felt anxious about this assignment when I first read the excerpt from Italo Calvino's book "Invisible Cities", however, after researching the book beyond the given text, the extract seemed less obscure and abstract.
"The book is framed as a conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as commentary on culture, language, time, memory, death, or human experience generally."
Once having a general idea of what the book was about, It gave a perspective that was far greater than the extract alone.
To begin, I took a screenshot of the text and started highlighting the key information that describe the visuals of the city.
There was a lot of visual information in this extract, which at first is quite overwhelming. I wanted to try and simplify it and found that highlighting the visuals would help with breaking it down. I had a visual in mind at this stage but didn't have the confidence to go ahead and start drawing. I felt I needed some kind of visual reference to help get me started.
Whilst there are many real objects listed in the description, the whole concept feels like fantasy that would be almost hard for the Khan to believe. The biggest point that absolutely needed to be considered was that this city hung below. There is no "floor" to this city, just an endless void beneath their hanging houses made of sacks. I love this, it just sounds amazing with a utopian fantasy. I allowed myself a few artistic liberties on the other points, adding some elements listed but not all.
So with that, I wanted to find fantasy worlds in the sky, floating cities that would be useful in thinking of perspective and scale.
the images above are all quite similar in there contents and style. They are conceptual, as if world building for a fantasy game and used as reference. I was specific in my searching for these images as I knew what I wanted to create, but just needed a little help in knowing what perspective I wanted to take on. I was debating composition in respect to the perspective as I thought about viewing this city from a levelled distance, so appearing quite straight on, or from a lower viewpoint looking up at the city whilst it is hanging upside down.
I began sketching a couple of thumbnails to explore where I wanted the view to be.
Sketch 1:
Explores the view of being from a high viewpoint looking down at the city, putting the view on the mountain peek and seeing the infrastructure from above. This view allows to give focus on how the city is supported by mere ropes stretched between mountains.
Sketch 2:
Sketch two explores the view point of being below the city and you are looking up. this view does allow to show more detail on the city, but I struggled with trying to imagine the scale of the City and almost made it too big on the page but lacked scale in the city. I wasn't sure how far to take the city, and how many things should be included.
Sketch 3:
Sketch three was a distant viewpoint which I would perhaps consider a level position as you are neither looking up nor down at the city. With the city being pushed further back, I was able to exaggerate the height in the mountains, giving the illusion of an incredibly deep drop.
In each sketch you can see how much information you will be able to include, with sketch 2 lending itself to containing more details that are in the list, whilst sketch 3 is limited in detail as the distance makes things a blur.
I liked the balance in sketch 3 and decided to proceed with this one.
Happy with this drawing I went on to add some grey tones to it in hope to add some depth.
Once I had a version that I felt did reasonably well at depicting the text, I wondered if there was another direction I could take in response. As I had felt a real connection to the sci fi realm of fantasy for this piece, I had in mind works of the 60's and 70s with the vivid colours and incredible surrealist style. I thought it might be a fun way to experiment with colour and exploring atmosphere in concept art. I always think of the album art cover for Bat out of Hell by Meat Loaf when thinking of the hand painted fantasy art, or even the concept art for Star Wars by Ralph McQuarrie. Whilst these don't exactly fit the text given its futuristic design, the conceptual art brings so much depth into a vision. I've always wanted to try it, but have never known where to begin.
After some time searching, I came across a few artists I thought brought the kind of surrealistic atmosphere I could imagine fitting the vision for this text.
Paul Lehr's work is exactly what I had in mind when thinking of the 70s oil paintings that covered books and albums. The colours are gorgeous, the atmosphere is captivating, and the details are mind blowing. It would be incredible to see these paintings in person, curious of their scale.
I decided to jump straight in with trying to be a bit more painterly in the style. I was drawn to Paul's painting on the far right with the blues, purple, pink and orange, red colours. I'm not very experienced in working like this, but with Procreate at the finger tips it was worth experimenting
I used the original drawing as the base to this piece. I cropped it in a little so that the upside down city would be slightly closer. I explored different paint brushes that were standard in the Procreate collection. I also used the blending tool a few times to help add depth by softening edges so that it would look further away. I then built up the piece with different textures. Overall I enjoyed the process of building the colours through different brushes. I particularly like the dark tones in the mountains at the forefront, I feel the textures were most successful here with the splash of electric blue breaking through.
I'm not very happy with the overall composition, and feel the colours could have been applied in a more tactile way. It seems a bit amateur, but not absolutely terrible. I still have room for improvement and I am ok with that!
The second artist is the iconic Moebius. Moebius style seems more illustrative. It goes back to using an outline for the most part, but what I find to be really nice is again the colours. The way he uses colour is so clean and incredibly satisfying. You get the sense that these are made by screenprinting with layers as he often uses gradients in large voids, such as skies or mountains. In fact it even feels reminiscent to the old Asian Woodblock printed artwork. This feels to help create atmosphere in his art, as well as the narrative aspect to the works.
For this version I went ahead and redrew the same concept but with a few changes that I thought might strengthen the composition. I wanted to pay more attention to the scene, improving the mountains and perhaps the overall atmosphere. The city became less full as I approached the ropes between the mountains in a more spiderweb format, this made it less realistic to balance some kind of solid structure underneath like the other versions. Although I could have added more elements hanging underneath, I started to worry that I was going to ruin the piece.
To finish the piece off I added a noise filter to give the image some texture.
I think the spiderweb lost way to the perspective. A few tweak to the ropes would have resolved this issue quickly and may also have made it easier to hang the elements from. The point of view is lower down, so as the viewer you are looking up to the city hanging on ropes. However, the perspective in which I have drawn them is as if standing straight on. This mixed in the mountains that are clearly a different perspective makes the image feel "wrong" or conflicting. Despite this, I love the image. I really wanted to try and capture some of the finer details in the landscape like Moebius, using a fine line brush to etch in lines and dots for rocks etc. I love the gradient effect, which I had used the airbrushing tool to create.
If doing this again I think I would experiment more with the colour of the background mountains. I think I made a small mistake making the top of the mountains darker and fading it into a lighter colour. It's not so much the dark to light that I am not happy with, it's perhaps in the contrast of those two colours as they blend. Moebius blends with a larger mix in the middle of each whereas in those background mountains on mine, the amount of blend between the colours is too harsh. I also think I could have chosen tones that are closer together to prevent such a contrast.
When looking back on all 3 versions, a combination of my first attempt and the version inspired by Moebius would be great. I'm in love with the composition, colours and fine details from Moebius version, yet also love the composition in the first attempt. I like how I captured the city in the first version, and if combining this with the final illustration I think would make for a strong representation of the text.
I discovered that the version influenced by Paul made it easier to create depth in a painterly style compared to the solid colours of Moebius. I was able to work more freely and let the textured brushes suggest elements. By using various colours and tones, I could create the illusion of a 3D city with minimal details. In the initial version, I applied a similar technique but with a restricted range of tones. Could this be achieved when working in the style of Moebius?
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LINKS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities - 21.09.24 - 19:30
https://www.paul-lehr.com/gallery - 21.09.24 - 20:08
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