Just a few new works I did while developing a city for the manga/game project I'm working on. I'm still pretty new to perspective so I'm trying to figure out how to do things like curved walls and objects or platforms on mulltiple levels (elipses in perspective are OMG UGG!). But, practice makes perfect I guess heh. Let me know what you think. Feedback is much needed here :) The first one is the top down map, it's kinda large so I'll just link it: Caliger City A long birds eye view: and a shot of the set where the first eps/scene takes place (still working): thanks! -~-

I would say they both look great, I like the symbolism of putting a city between two huge moutains. One thing though, (IMHO) in the top picture, the background doesn't really fade well. It kinda looks like it's the end of the world which makes the whole scene seem alot less epic. Other then that it really looks good.

Wow, that's some really good work you've got there !

If you have trouble with perspective, I would suggest you start with maybe one building and work on looking at it from various perspectives.
You could start with a street level view, with 2 vanishing point (standing at a crossroad, looking at a corner of a building).
Then shift the angle of vision by adding a third vanishing point, up or down depending on whether you are doing a ground angle shot or a high angle shot (bird's eye view)

Obviously this is hard to explain without little drawings, so you might wanna do a look up, but honestly if you start small it's pretty simple stuff.

The trick for drawing ellipses is to first draw the rectangles that can enclose them.
And always start with the horizon, key vanishing points and tracing known right angles. If you can draw cubes in 3D, you have your basics from which to start messing around :)

Here is an old example I made for a similar discussion on conceptart.org

and the actual image without the lines.

I'M NOT WORTHY! I'M NOT WORTHY!

Seriously though, that's some incredible work. I suck at scenery, hardcore, but I'm gonna use yours as an inspiration point to work on my game. We're gonna need like 6 or 7 city layouts like that, and I had no reference on how to start making them, but this is great!! I won't rip you off, though, in case I'm starting to make you nervous.

Anyways I was wondering if you've taken some kind of course in scenery drawing, or if you've had training in city planning. Or did you just learn by practicing? Are there tutorials out there for this kind of thing? Or do you know where more references like this are? I need to pick this kind of thing up soon.

Anyways, that was self serving of me, askin u all kinds of questions, so let me offer some feedback. I love the general feel of the place, especially the sort of spiral motif, which I think you should play up a lot. The cliffs around the city definitely look cool, but in all honesty, that's not a very practical place to have a city... nobody builds a city in the shadows. Of course that's here and now on our planet, not on yours, so what am I saying, anything's possible. :D

The buildings are strongly designed too, in that they are unique, but keep an appropriate look to them compared to others. They seem to fit together well, none of them are out of place. Your perspective isn't as off as you implied. Curves can easily devy perspective rules when they aren't easily defined shapes like circles/ellipses. Like the spiral shape on the top of the building (treble clef, anyone?), i doens't really need to obey converging line perspective rules, just laid out a bit flat like you've shown.

Cool name for the city too, I am NEVER able to name my cities, or planets... thank god for teammates. Anyways, still pretty impressed here, hope my critique isn't too harsh (LOL, i'm such a kiss-ass).

As ever,
** Cosmic **

Interesting drawing - if you don't mind my asking, what media do you use to do those things?

lol thanks for all the great feedback guys.

Cosmic:

Yeah, I just learned by practicing and reading a few simple books on perspective. There are also some turotials online. I also try to find lots and lots of reference art to see how certain things (like building evas) actually look.

Nuget:

I draw first with blue pencil then ink over that with a pen. I then shade a photocopy of the inked and cleaned drawing with several gray prisma color markers (!0%-70%)

hope that helps :)

-~-