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.

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.

 

 

 

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