I decided I had to brush off my matte painting skills, so the first thing I thought I could do is your classic post apocalyptic city.
Only, in this case, instead of being a city depicted after a nuclear event, or a big ginormous tsunami caused by asteroid impact, or a zombie invasion, or an earthquake, or an eruption, this city is just frozen solid.

Considering it has been winter for like 8 months now, it’s not difficult to imagine why I came up with this original idea.

Also, I remember once I came across the picture of a block (in Siberia maybe?) which remained without heating because of a power failure or something, in the dead of winter, at around -50 degrees. The buildings were literally filled with ice. Imagine your freezer (well, my freezer actually, as I never clean off the ice build-ups. Maybe you do. In mine you can hardly fit a sausage now). It was like that. Like my freezer.
Damn I can’t find the link, or the images. Oh Well, just trust me.

Anyway, I figure a major natural event cutting the power during the winter could cause some serious trouble. People without heating, all huddled together in their houses to get some warmth from each other’s bodies. Engineers, as well as rescuers, would be impaired by the extreme elements. Eventually no one would go outside to take care of things, stray dogs would roam the streets fighting for their food with looters, all would be made fragile by the cold, glass would shatter, building would crumble, OMG it would be chaos!
Or maybe we have a plan B in such an apocalyptic occurrence, who knows.

In the meantime, that’s how I see it.

I took a lot of shortcuts with this one. First, it’s a shallow perspective. All the major planes are facing the camera, so I didn’t have to distort the textures too much.

Then, well, a frozen post apocalyptic city is easier to paint than, say, the carnival of Rio. Definitely less colours to deal with and no people around to be drawn.

I actually almost considered adding some characters to support the story, but the scale of the composition made it quite difficult to introduce other elements (like, as I said, dogs and people) without them being completely unreadable.

In the end I think the lack of characters actually adds to the sense of desolation a post apocalyptic city would give.

by Paolo Puggioni

One Response

1. Aevylmar says:

   January 15, 2018 at 00:18

   Wow. Amazing.

   Reply