The Green Marches On
Green continues to march around the layout, now circling around the back right and over the hill behind the industrial siding. Both the process and the progress is invigorating. And yet... it still feels a little alien. It's not a type of landscape I'm used to; Sometimes it seems as if I'm overdoing it, yet in the photos the vegetation looks sparse; other times, when I think I've restrained myself enough to maintain the desired level of sparseness, I don't feel as if I'm ever done.
I look at it, and it doesn't scream "Southwest" to me—indeed, it doesn't scream anything at all. And then again this may be the right direction, since John Allen wasn't modeling a particular real area, either; the original Gorre & Daphetid was all fantasy-land. So it's really hard for me to gauge my work.
And then there's the problem of photography: colors, particularly greens, are not captured digitally the way they appear to my eye, and that's frustrating. For instance, most all of the pine trees have greens that are very similar, and yet they look starkly different in images. Plus, density doesn't translate to imagery, either; what looks dense to the eye may look sparse in an image, or vice versa. And if that's not enough, in person the placement of trees looks pleasingly random, while in the images above it looks far too uniform. Sigh.
The only thing that's keeping the ball rolling is the fact that, at the end of the day, it looks OK. Not thrillingly great, but not embarrassing, either. I may simply need to return to modeling Northeastern locales in the future, just so I can feel as if I know what I'm doing, even if I don't, really.
Incidentally, the sharp-eyed regular may have spotted a recent weight loss. What's that all about? Well, all of that wet Sculptamold is gradually drying, and the weight drops as the moisture is released.