what if all the summertime crickets hung out at a jazz club where they chirp together all nite 🖤🖤
i’d been working on this on&off for 4 months and decided it was just time to be done!
perspective grid base. originally i was going to draw the piece just using a perspective grid. i realized this was going to take a lot of measuring and use of the line tool, which would be really slow. plus it made me too scared to break away from the grid itself, so the buildings were looking to rigid and uniform. so this got scrapped.
initial model in blender. getting an idea of what the scene would look like in 3D helped a lot. i changed the size and shape of the buildings a bunch.
early lineart of the scene. i traced over the basic shapes of my 3d render, adding details as i went along. also even tho there are a lot of straight lines, i did everything freehand so it didn’t look too neat.
the “dark souls 2” layer + lighting layer. this is the fully completed piece, just without the lighting layer. i always figured i would draw it with the fully bright colors, then go back over with the lighting to make it a night scene. i guess it kinda worked, but i should have put more thought into the layers and modes. some colors in the scene were popping out too much until i added the gradient on top.
i’m fine with the lighting obscuring a lot of the details i added, but i’m glad i also have this layer where you can see every little thing more easily.
references!! it’s all akron???? the Cricket Zone club itself is based bigtime on a restaurant near my old high school. the blue house is based on where i rented a room for a few years, which sadly almost burned down recently 🙁 the fenced-off area at the bottom was just going to be a construction area with some crates and shipping containers, but i thought a power substation would be more interesting than a lazy patch of dirt. i think the Any Austin videos i had on while drawing had smth to do with that.
there was a lot of stuff from streetview-ing around akron that i didn;t screenshot that i added to the drawing. mostly it was just ideas for random props to have lying around. I wanted the town to have a lot of clutter, but not litter per se, which was surprisingly hard. my in-world explanation is the crickets care about keeping their town clean, but, ah, they are forgethful sonetines and leave things in unexplected places. also, there are no cars even tho there are roads and stop signs oddly. maybe because it’s 2am?
this is Vern
it is short for Vernilliom
thenk yew for reading
cheers, ψ / colin
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