Design process

PROCESS

From the content of the book, I can learn that although we are in a desert area, the more we go inside, there will be a thick forest like a swimming pool. The original text of the book says:

“No sooner had we moved than it became cloudy again, as if it were going to rain. I feel in my heart, the mystery of nature is really endless, in the depths of the arid Qaidam Gobi, there is such a wet and rainy oasis, it is a natural creation, eclectic.
This canyon is not like the kind of Yadan canyon seen in the Devil's City, not carved by the wind, as if it is a rift valley generated by geological movement, the valley floor is not flat, grotesque rocks, layers, rock walls as if carved by a sharp knife. However, if you ask me, I agree with Fat Man that the terrain here is really like a meteor crater, a rift is like a crack in the earth's crust when a meteorite fell, which was probably much deeper when it was created, and gradually weathered and filled in. Such canyons are not the only ones around this crater valley.
The canyon was very wide, and as we entered the dense forest, it became very hot and sweaty. There was moss everywhere on the stones and trees, and we could not stand on our feet, which were already full of wet mud and tangled roots, walking in a web of roots like the tentacles of monsters, one foot at a time, and the canopy over our heads was so dense that we could not see the sun. All of a sudden I had a very serious illusion: was I really on the Tibetan Plateau and not in the jungle of the Amazon?”

Since this area is a fiction of the author, I could not find a similar element in reality, after all, deserts and waterholes covered by dense forests do not coexist in reality. So I extracted some keywords from my imagination to make ai paintings to find some inspiration for myself.

The following are ai drawings:

ai, key words: pool, forest, dark

ai, key words: pool, forest, dark

ai, key words: pool, forest, dark

According to the work case given by ai and the fact that the protagonists of the article are going to the palace of the West Queen Mother, I designed to add buildings such as ancestral halls for sacrifice beside the dense forest and swimming pool：

Drawing here, I found that I did not know enough about the shape of the trunk, so I went to practice painting the individual shape of the tree:

The final rich screen:

This is the position where the protagonists advance from the Gobi Valley to the dense forest (which is the entrance to the West Queen Mother Palace).