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John Carter of Mars – Red City
16th Jan 2018 0

Following my last post, Red City is the second illustration I made for Modiphius Entertainment’s John Carter of Mars RPG.

Now, saying that my memory is bad is, in general, a gross understatement.
I’m talking about long term and short term here.
If you add to that the fact that I read John Carter of Mars about 35 years ago, it’s like I actually never read it. I still have blurred memories of white apes and John carter jumping around a lot, but sadly nothing about red cities.

I’m not saying that this is intrinsecally bad. I mean, you wake up and everything is kind of new, yay. And you can play the Witcher 3 for the third time and still find it full of pleasant surprises.

Having a crap memory doesn’t help, however, when it comes to illustrating a five books series you haven’t had the time to finish re-reading yet.
So, all the information I was working on here was from the brief I got for the illustration; if anyone finds some awful inconsistency please let me know, although I’m pretty sure the art directors would have spotted it.

John Carter of Mars - Red City

Since drawing a city of this complexity from scratch is pretty time consuming, especially when you make changes to lighting or point of view further down the line, I made a quick 3D model of the layout on Sketchup and then painted over it.

I saved about a dozen views of the whole scene and submitted about half of them.
Of the sketches below, the first one is the one that was picked.

Red City Sketch 1

 

Red City Sketch 2

 

Red City Sketch 3

 

Red City Sketches 4

That’s it for John Carter of Mars I think. I have a bunch of concepts sitting in my hard drive but I’m not sure I can post them.

by Paolo Puggioni

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