Ep. 22, Page 75

smbhax on Sept. 2, 2014

After I painted today's page I started wondering why I'd made the dunes (this is supposed to be a sort of eagle's eye view downward, you see, kind of zoomed out from yesterday's page) jagged, and shouldn't they be nice and smooth curves? So I tried doing it over, but while I could draw the curves okay, nothing else seemed to want to go rightthe scale of the little figures, the curve of the falling debris, the balance of tones, etc. Here's one try:

After a bit more of that sort of thrashing around, I realized my heart wasn't in a revision, and I stuck with the original, jagged dunes and all. I think maybe I'd done that kind of subconsciously to break things up a bit, I dunno.
Somewhere in the middle of that I found myself on the internet, looking up photos of Martian sand dunes taken from overheadspecifically, by NASA's orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I didn't quite find the kind of dunes I wanted to be drawing here, but I did find some neat photos so here they are anyway:

image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (source)

image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (source)

image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (source)
^ Carbon dioxide ice thawing off dunes in the Martian spring.

image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (source)

image by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (source)

image by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (source)