I had trouble figuring out what it was because I didn’t expect the scale discrepancies. I saw a very small model building with rows and rows of very small cylindrical balloons on it. As someone not accustomed to seeing balconies which look like that, I didn’t recognize them as even miniature balconies.
The ladders looked unusually wide, and then I saw the small tree on a plain with “normal” grass, and thought the building and tree must be miniatures, due to the size of the grass.
Thereby explaining the size of the ladders as being access for little… uhh critters or something that were small, but too large to actually get into the building (and the miniature building might not have an actual interior).
I suspect the ladder size was subconsciously my biggest indicator in terms of determining size at first, and then the grass. I recognized that the ladders must be for “larger” beings than what would be appropriately scaled to the building, and the odd width for them might be needed to accommodate them.
I saw that one story height (ground floor) is equal to two or three balcony layers…
oh…
scratch that… I see now that two of the buildings are laying on their sides. It looked like a multi-level little science fiction building, lifted into the air and I didn’t realize the gravity scenario, partially because of the similarities between the buildings, and the way the main extruded square building was projecting beyond the vertical square one. Also, the ladders are all based to work with the standard rules of normal gravity, as are the larger birds, and the signage, and the tree and the road, along with all the cables sagging under a downward gravitational pull… so I really didn’t have a reason to question the gravity issue. In fact, the only apparent gravity issue is that there’s two buildings laying down, one with signage that’s horizontal to the normal ground direction.
I mistook the building rooftop structures as being sci-fi antennas or something on the long building, and the white balconies as being odd-looking skylights on the market building.
The road was throwing me off too… the tree and base looks uprooted from the ground, and yet the road has a thin, pristine cut-off squared edge, and the other end abruptly ends at the wall of the building. It has what I THOUGHT was the sidewalk in-front of the first story of the building, which turns out to be the barrier edge of the road. The market sign there, suggested a sidewalk, but the blue light voids indicated otherwise.
The birds are odd… in relationship to the building, and the other, much smaller birds resting on the wire right next to them, they’d be about 4 to 6 feet tall.
Scale is important to me. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise your right to scale things differently to make the message clearer, but it means some folks like me, are going to take cues from those scales to try and interpret your drawing with it. I might be in the minority though, because at my job I regularly do fabrication blueprints from photographs and to me, scales and ratio is everything. As I identify things in the picture that I feel comfortable with knowing the size of, and the ratio looks about right to me, I’m often required to use that to estimate the size of everything else in the picture.
The story, as told by these buildings is that, one day, gravity suddenly changed to where large objects gained their own gravity field. There is no architecture to support this condition (other than laying the buildings down), and so ladders have to be used to access the buildings.
If you wanted to, you could add transition points, like a handrails that cross between gravity planes. (Ie- from along the top edge of the building, down the side, to a supported walkway that does an arch to align with the nearest gravity pull). This would indicate that the people building this were aware of the what the gravity was doing, and built to accommodate it, rather than hobble together ladders which wouldn’t be useable by the elderly or infirm, and would encourage people to peek into nearby windows.
Anyone standing in one of those horizontal buildings, would see the signs as being hung sideways to them.
As for using 3d modelling as a basis for the drawings, that’s the fundamental basis of rotoscoping for animation. Animators draw directly over a series of actual photographs or 3d models to get a more realistic feeling. I think it’s a great idea! You could draw over the structures on a different layer, and then fade it in or out to achieve a balance you like.
There’s great imagination here, and I recognize your skill is much better than mine. I especially like the lighting and shadow effects. I’ve said a lot here, and that’s not because I don’t like this image, but because I can feel it, despite my confusion, and want to help you realize what you’re going for. Best of luck!
