Arrrchipelago
The topic of the weekend was palm trees. And guess what? They reminded me that I am still learning. How hard can it be to draw a bunch of palm trees, right?
I made a prototype a couple weeks ago and was happy with it. It started with a single tree, which I just copied over and over.
That was okay, so I made some variations--
--and then copied and pasted those randomly. I was less pleased with this one.
I dabbled with drawing shadows onto a base, lighter color green so that the base color had its own branches poking out into the shadows. From there, I just highlighted some fronds and ended up with this.
We were pretty happy with that, so we moved on. Then, after figuring out that I needed a tree solution before a port solution (I'm also designing ports), I came back and attempted a cleaner version.
The weekend just wasn't having it. I spent a couple days attempting to develop a reproducable process, and I wasn't able to even reproduce the original effect. One workaround I floated was to do individual trees again.
But after realizing I was just digging a big, angry hole, I peeled myself away and waited until the next day.
This was the product after that night's sleep. And though I suspect I'll be able to find a lot wrong with it after a couple years' experience, I'm pretty happy with it.
And let me say that Adam C. Younis is super helpful. Here's his vid on environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBmaz45eHFA&pp=ygUZYWRhbSBjIHlvdW5pcyBlbnZpcm9ubWVudA%3D%3D