Stylisation

Initial forays into stylisation because the realism just isn't working. It didn't start out that way - I had been looking at photos of old, gnarled trees and was trying to pull those shapes into the petrified forest. Courtesy of working in solid black the spirals and twists looked very evocative, so I rolled with it.

After speaking to Phil and discussing Art Nouveau which, while not strictly at the time of Verne's writing, evokes the late nineteenth century perfectly, I started asking 'what would Alfons Mucha do?'. I tried implementing the typical Art Nouveau hair method with a tree - not a bad look, it's simultaneously 'ooh, pretty' and 'wait, what?'. I worry about how it would translate into a 3D space, so I may look at the art of Okami, a game visually based on Japanese sumi-e art and that translates the 2D brushstrokes into 3D masterfully.