Thumbnails: Inspiration from Virtual Worlds

After almost exhausting all I could from the theme of ancient Greek architecture, I turned to other sources of inspiration. One of my first few thoughts was remembering that a couple of games that I played, Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, had an abundance of themes regarding stone buildings integrated and intertwining with nature in harmony, so I went in-game to both worlds and took a variety of screen shots.

The 'Kurzicks' are a faction of forest-dwellers in Guild Wars whom come with the 'Factions' campaign pack. Heavily influenced by Gothic architecture and culture, the vast forest they live in had been turned to stone, so they carve their buildings out of the very trees they're surrounded with. Nature seems to live happily alongside the Kurzick architecture with long, sinewy roots and rough tree bark almost being part of the stonework.

The atmosphere in which they live in is dark, gloomy and de-saturated with a color palette of blues, grays and purples. Their building designs got me thinking outside the box of Greek architecture and added more 'tools' to my drawing inspiration at my disposal.

On the other end of the scale, however, we have World of Warcraft's city of Darnassus--a place based around mostly Greek and some Japanese architecture with a lot of emphasis on tall columns and domes. The color scheme here is very saturated and colorful with purples, blues, whites and greens as their main color scheme. 

Graphically, the buildings also seem somewhat stylized as if to be caricatures of themselves. This is due to World of Warcraft's cartoony art style.

Despite being coated in a mossy cover and being near trees while the whole city itself being located on-top of an enormous tree, these buildings seem somewhat out of place in appearance. Not much is happening to them to be truly considered 'integrated' with nature like the Kurzick buildings in Guild Wars.

This was the end result for my thumbnails.

Overall, the stylized, cartoony look didn't work out, but combining the two styles of Greek and Gothic (and even  a little Japanese) certainly made an impact, I feel. 

I also sought to integrate my buildings more into nature with the structures even being a part of the trees themselves.