Page 1 sketch

Here are a few of the sketches I drew for page 1. I looked at a bunch of images of different deserts. My story takes place in a desert region of Xiola called Sidia, which was originally inspired by Cappadoccia, Turkey due to the cool cave dwellings in the rock formations. But I used imagery from lots of different places to help me come up with the final design of the canyon and look of the land.

I want the landscape to be just a little beyond what you might see. Not alien, but amplified. And my first page here must get across the feeling of a strange place, to marry with the words of Eleya at the top.

This is the sketch I went with.

It's supposed to look like I'm standing on a cliff looking over a valley. I preferred having a bit of an arch in the foreground right, and kind of a flying buttress of stone on the foreground left. Then I've got a bit of the crackled spires connecting to a midground left cliff and in the back left a full on arch. I'm going to put a Sidian vulture in the sky and I may have a few light clouds. I'd like to have fun with my skies in this book and not just have plain blue skies. I'll decorate them with clouds, haze, atmosphere, colors and birds and what-not. I've also got what will look like the remains of a stream which runs along the valley floor. Low lying shrubs will be scattered all over the landscape collecting near the stream and along crevices.

I'll be redrawing this on watercolor paper hopefully this weekend or early next week at the latest. I've got a couple of unrelated art gigs that I need to knock out first.