Perceptibility - Home City, Clip Studio, November 2022
click for full size image
click for full size image
Perceptibility - Home City is a digital painting that was created from the descriptions given in one of the Dungeon & Dragons games that Vanessa Blacow-Berggren plays in. Dungeons & Dragons, whether in person or online, heavily utilizes theater of the mind. When playing in the physical world, when maps do get brought out, one is able to use mini figures and other model pieces to make detailed 3D maps and give some nice visual representation to the experience. When playing online however, utility is key since a screen itself is something 2D, so most maps are terrain maps with a top down perspective that acts like a floorplan to show players where they can move and where obstacles lay in their path. Sometimes a DM will find some imagery online for important locations, but creating a campaign is hard work and theater of the mind is the main staple of the game. The Dungeon Master in the game Vanessa plays in has given detailed descriptions of various locations within the world that inspired Vanessa to give a more detailed visual representation to those locations. She also wanted to create something physically tangible from these online games. Everything about these games, including the friends she plays with, are online and have had no physical presence in her life. So even if it is something as simple as printing out the digital paintings she created from the descriptions of the game, she wanted to bring something that has been solely experienced in the digital realm into the real world.
I started by using the program Fusion 360 to make sketch layers from the top down perspective since it was like a tilemap in D&D
Then I extruded from the sketches to create a 3D model of the city. From there I chose what angle I wanted to paint the city from and rendered out a 3D model of the city
I loaded the rendered image into Clip Studio, lowered the opacity, and got to painting my final image.