Manticore

When a Traveler has visited more Cities than he can name, their images begin to merge in his mind, creating new architectures, new Cities built from an amalgam of memories and conjecture; Cities receded into nebulous memory, Cities he has long forgotten, Cities he has yet to visit, Cities that do not yet exist on this Earth.

In time, these chimeric Cities, these Cities of the Mind, begin to outnumber those of the living; entire continents of ephemeral cities, only seen from a distance, to which many men have tried through all manner of arcane means to purchase a ticket of passage.

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It has been far too long since I have posted anything new; aside from being occupied with other projects, I have been far too concerned with meticulously planning what would be the Next image, made more difficult due to my long absence. It is my usual method to plan and schedule an image very meticulously and then rigorously follow the schedule until the end.
I was talking with my good friend and he suggested to try working in a more organic way with no planning, as he often does and gets good results from it. So I decided to create a sort of "chimeric building" mixing many different styles.
I maintain a large number of favorites on Flickr where I research cities and architecture styles that I like - a research library and backlog of sorts; so I picked a few images from it at random and modeled the most interesting parts of the buildings that I chose. All of the building pieces were modeled very fast; they were all done today, over the course of perhaps 6-8 hours. I had no idea of the final structure of the image until the very end where I put together all of the pieces. It is the opposite of the way I usually work and I found it very fun since there was no pressure, and I did not know what I would end up with. I think the results are unusual and interesting, sort of a combination of my older surreal images with the more faithful recreations of architecture. I am recovering from having just finished a large project yesterday (to be publicly released early January) and have a fairly light load of contracts for the rest of the year, so I am planning to do a series of collage type pieces like this over the next month.