#fictional landscapes

[miraenart]

Dragons' Lair.

[stacydrumartist]

Oils on primed watercolor paper. Painted about 2 weeks ago.

[siryl]

"Jellyfishes" by Ghionion.

[haematinon]

Illustration created for my upcoming new book, Ergo Cosmos!

"The first of the alchemists was he who set fire to the pyre upon which the Veiled Lady burned. To atone for such a sin, all those who are privy to the Highest Secrets swear to use the hand of will exclusively to restrain evil, and the hand of intuition only to perform good deeds. From this sorrowful figure derives the name of this sacred commitment, which is commonly known as the Oath of Minos."

[tyger-land]

ғʀᴀɴᴋ ғʀᴀᴢᴇᴛᴛᴀ Wolf Moon. 1965.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Exploring your Setting

(Excerpted from the Young Novelist Workbook) ⚜ Basics: Setting

PART 1: Settings That Create Moods

Mood - the feeling of your novel; its emotional quality.

You can also think of the mood as how you want someone to feel while reading your novel. 

Examples: playful, serious, mysterious, tense, warm, dangerous, joyous

The setting of a novel - where and when the story takes place. As you know, most novels have more than one setting.

Usually, the author decides to have one large setting.

Example: Los Angeles in 1995

and then many smaller settings

Examples: The laundromat where the characters hang out on the weekends, or the classroom where they get in a fight

Settings do more than serve as a backdrop to the action in your novel. They can also create or enhance the mood of your novel. 

Example

If you wanted to create a creepy mood for a scene in your novel, you could start with something like: 

"A dead tree stood alone in a dark field. Its branches creaked in a cold wind, and in the distance, something howled.”

These images remind us of dark, disturbing things, and show the reader that the scene of the novel is “creepy” without having to tell them directly.

Describing the Setting: A Sample Exercise

Describe the settings that would help create each of the moods listed below.

Try to write 2 or 3 sentences for each mood.

Include specific details about the sights, sounds, sensations (and maybe even smells) of the settings you choose:

Creepy, Joyous, Suspenseful/tense

Now make up 2-3 of your own moods and describe a setting that would go along with each one. 

The last step is to apply your new skills to your upcoming novel.

Think of a scene from each section of your novel.

Then, write or list details to describe a setting that will help create the right mood for each scene.

Example: You might set your climax on the edge of a crumbling cliff at sunset in the middle of a thunderstorm. 

A setting from your set-up:

A setting from your inciting incident:

A setting from your rising action:

A setting from your climax:

A setting from your falling action:

A setting from your resolution:

Now you have settings to enhance the different moods that will be in your novel.

PART 2: Settings That Reinforce Characters

Another advanced writing trick is to show things about your characters just by putting them in specific settings.

Examples: If you were writing about a mysterious person, you might place them in a dark mansion on a hill outside of town; if you were writing about a musician, you might place them in a messy room filled with instruments, speakers, and microphones.

Sample Exercise

For each of the following characters, try to come up with a setting that will reflect or reinforce what you imagine about them.

As you write, try to be as detailed as possible.

Don’t forget colors, sounds, and even smells.

Focus on where the character is.

The shy new kid in town:

A secret scientist superhero:

A character from your novel:

Another character from your novel:

Source ⚜ Writing Notes & References ⚜ On Setting

[tea-knight]

[villiedoom]

Some older and newer illustrations for my world and the Koties, fantasy felines. I see their world as surreal and dream-like, otherworldly and ethereal, and I try to convey this in my art ~ ✨

[scipunk]

Love, Death & Robots - S3E3 - The Very Pulse of the Machine (2022)

[art-of-thomas-elliott]

With the atmosphere of neoplasia being toxic to life, the majority of the population of the planet lives on the colossal mobile mining platforms known as the Mitick Cities. Each city is a hermetically sealed body in which generations live, toil and die without ever knowing anything other than the hard confines of their claustrophobic artificial world. The ultimate embodiment of humankind’s contempt for its environment these leviathans rove over the surface of the planet like lice on a host, racking the surface with mining lasers and belching the excrement of industry into the sky. With natural life on the planets surface impossible the only solution to a growing population is to build more mitick cities. Each city scars the world in its ceaseless acquisition of materials with which to manufacture another city. This unsustainable mitosis on a massive scale has lead to a vicious cycle of worsening conditions to which there can only be one end.

[miraenart]

Antechamber of Mourning.

[stacydrumartist]

The Sheep Wrangler

[tanadrin]

Although human civilization on Qefre is a couple of thousand years old, it has developed along idiosyncratic lines due to the existence of a planet-wide teleporter network left behind by the long-departed terraformers. These teleporters are essentially stone rings a couple of meters across that can instantaneously exchange everything in a spherical bubble inside them with a similar bubble inside another teleporter (usually including a flat stone platform that provides a convenient surface to stand on). Although their capacity is limited--you can move a lot more people and certainly far more goods by train or ship than you can by teleporter, even if those conveyances go a lot slower--they allow far-flung cities to cheaply stay in close communication with one another.

The basic political unit of Qefre is not the state but the rashun, a kind of ritual-political association tasked with managing the eruni, the logistics management system that controls access to recovered ancient technology. The terraformers seemed to use the eruni as a kind of basic permissions system to distribute and manage responsibility for the planet-wide terraforming infrastructure and its supporting technology; the powerful nature of the eruni and the need to use them responsibly meant that the planet's human inhabitants quickly developed sophisticated social systems for protecting them against misuse, which inevitably became entangled with questions of political power and competing interests between social groups. Rashun became landholding organizations early in Qefre's history, and soon supplanted most early proto-states in regions of extensive human settlement.

In the modern era, rashun club together with local governments and private political associations into "circles" which undertake most low-level administrative functions; these small-scale circles are in turn grouped into larger planet-wide circles, of which there are about fifty; and these larger-scale circles in turn are grouped into ten loose associations, which collaborate to manage affairs of regional or global interest. Since circles can hold territory basically anywhere within the region of human settlement, there has in practice been a strong pressure toward institutionalizing various forms of collaborative and representative government at all levels in order to prevent an absolutely sclerotic degree of political deadlock strangling economic growth.

Not that this hasn't been an issue in the past; indeed, much of Qefre's history has been an endless series of petty local wars, some rising to the scale of planet-wide affrays, with the fragmented structure of territorial control only serving to increase the amount of chaos when violence did break out. Eventually the largest cities, including all the teleporter-networked ones, got so sick of this state of affairs that they ganged up to completely expel the rashun from their immediate territories, and implemented a "power-sharing" agreement that was really an early form of representative democracy, which came to have a profound influence on the internal administration of the rashun themselves.

When the Western Territories were opened up by the discovery of the teleporter at Ar-Amal, the independent cities and the rashun hammered out a set of agreements to prevent a destabilizing series of landgrabs in the surrounding region; but now that the Territories have a large native-born population, many have begun to grumble that they are simply living under a kind of shared fiefdom, quite different from the actual self-government that the cities in the east--or, indeed, the subjects of the modern, collaborative rashun--enjoy. There is a growing local home rule movement, which envisions something quite different from the governments of the east for itself: exclusive territorial sovereignty, with no role at all for the Delegations in its internal affairs. Opponents argue that this is preposterous: that not even the haughtiest of the eastern cities could get away with demanding complete political autarky. To which the Territorialist answer is that all the eastern cities are equals in political affairs, and their political affairs (and political interests) are irrevocably bound up with their neighbors, in a way that is very different from the subordinated and exploited Western Territories. It seems to be an intractable conflict, where neither side is willing to entertain any notion of compromise, nor is it clear what such a compromise would entail. How it will resolve ultimately is anyone's guess.

[exotonplanet]

The diverse landscapes of Gonzum include sprawling grasslands, dense shrub forests, and the vast canyon system dominating the southernmost region of the continent. Each environment hosts a variety of creatures and is adorned with unique plant life that shapes the scenery.

See alt text for descriptions!

[carbon-fiber-internal-organs]

[tea-knight]