Beneath the Crust

This is the personal project I'm currently working on. A mysterious look into a world where the planetary crust has become like islands on top of what appears to be a metallic structured layer with deep turbine holes. 

What is down there? What does it do? What are those people doing? and why the heck are they so relaxed about all of this!? Question after question, I want this to make people ponder what it all means. Why is the metal surface so clean? Maybe there are scheduled floods where the oceans get pushed back up to the surface—that's my theory. 

My Inspiration

What really started this project was this unique cluster of islands about 560 miles east of the Philippines called the Palau islands.

These beautiful rock islands almost look like they're hovering over the water with the way they've been eroded by the ocean. With this concept I started imagining what it would look like if Earth's entire crust layer was eroded in this way revealing the layer beneath —and what if what was beneath caused this to happen? So I thought of some deep shafts with turbines so large that they slowly shook the crust into pieces. 

The First Sketch

The initial sketch was done for fun with no reference research. I liked the detail of levels in the foreground rocks and the way they run parallel leading toward the figure, though it all seemed a little distracting from what's happening in the background.

I liked it so much that I took it into photoshop. Reaching this point, my brother Jeremy pointed out that the trees weren't very interesting suggesting to make them more jungle-like by having them angle in. Being the perspective guy, I had them all aligned to the comp's 3-point perspective and it became obvious that they weren't helping the composition. 

Reference Research

So I took a step back to gather some reference images of anything I might need. Rocks, clouds, trees, plant life, the way water falls, and so on.

The Second Go

With its digital execution, I wanted to try out an idea for a new method. Before moving into Photoshop, I created all the shapes I needed in Illustrator because each vector shape is simply given its own layer when exported to Photoshop saving a lot of time…and because the Illustrator Pen Tool is just awesome.