developing the Bonobo settlements

Using the reference I posted previously I created a rough sketch

I wanted it to look primitive but not tribal, as I felt that it would be generic and I wanted give a sense that this world is developing, not some perpetual state of primitive tribal culture. I really liked the image with all of the different shaped and size buildings in this tower:

It has sort of the look of a ramshackle tower where many people could live, I am sort of sticking to the idea that the bonobos have this sex culture so they would all be very close and having them all live in a tower with close open rooms would enforce that, and I also wanted to preserve some of the 'monkey' qualities of the apes and so an open access tower where the bonobos would climb around outside to the desired rooms would work with that, there are bars below each door for climbing access.

So I used this tower as a the main reference for the architecture and then added an aesthetic more similar to that of the Monster Hunter games that I wanted to use for inspiration, it's that kind of lively and colourful aesthetic.

Based on this drawing I tried to make a painting:

I'm not happy with it at all, I think I lost the aesthetic completely and in the way I painted it I lost a lot of the details and architecture that I liked. 

I returned to the photo sampling method that I had been successful with in the past, and I took the tower image above and another that I thought would ground it into the environment and worked from there.

This is just an early stage where I placed the two objects on the canvas and began to integrate them and add lighting. At this point the lighting was arbitrary and inconsistent. that was a problem I was having and was probably holding me back in my value studies before; I wasn't putting enough emphasis on shading and lighting.

I saved some progress shots but this time around I will just skip right to the end, I think I fixed the lighting and the image is better for it, I also had a much easier time painting using the lighting as a guide, there are a few things I am unhappy with actually such as the lightly coloured roofs which look unfinished that I will probably work into later.

One of the things I was pleased about was how I managed to use photo samples in this image but not leave too much evidence of them in the end, the shapes are sill entirely there but I did modify them and I sampled colours in such a way that things are actually coloured a lot more differently and vibrantly than they looked when the photos were positioned initially. I used a separate image of clouds but I had to actually cut that up and distort it in order to work with the perspective, I also added some atmospheric perspective toward the top of the tower to give a sense of scale. 

One of the other things I found was that the composition wasn't great from just placing the objects so I had to actually make an active effort to creating a pleasing and functional composition while painting, such as the clouds, the positioning of the buildings and the 'pathway' at the bottom of the images which balances the composition.