Giant Cranes wreak havoc on Higashifuji-goko Road, Yamanashi, Japan, 

in my final for Joe McKendry's Merging Worlds Wintersession course.

​​​​​​​The whole point of the Merging Worlds course was to create elaborate new illustrations, entirely from real pre existing imagery. In the case of the final, besides having make sure everything was referenced, it was completely open ended. Because of this, it seemed only natural I mixed together my favorite subjects to draw, birds, cars, Japan, and giant monsters causing destruction. 

To help ensure the final output would be as good as possible, we were tasked with doing two "photobashes" of the same piece. I scouted around on Google Earth and found this cute little toll way outside of the city of Fujiyoshida that just seemed perfect for the setting of my piece. Using about a dozen screenshots of google earth, I created a panorama that provided the stage to set my scene. After spending hours upon hours looking for figures, cars, and so on, that not only fit the perspective, but would be found in Japan, I figured out the basic composition. However since we had to make an alternate, I decided to transfer the highway its contents over to another panorama I made of Tokyo's Inner Circular Route.

The two Panorama mattes I made, plus the heavily alter final version for Tokyo. Note that I increased the scale of Mt. Fuji in the final photobash, and made chn Tokyo's matte, removing the white building in the foreground to allow for the (relatively) iconic Shiba-Koen First Building to be in view. 

The Next Step was to make three possible lighting studies, to create three unique moods. I chose to make a nigh-time, evening, and midday version for both compositions. Personally, I was partial to the Tokyo Nigh-time piece, but I think all of them worked in their own right, to an extent 

The final step was to make three (though I did four), possible color variants for the final. I didn't really have a set color pallet in mind, so I really just played around with options till I found something that looked appealing to me. 

I then presented all of this to the class, and got their feedback. To my slight surprise, their opinion were unanimous, the one with Mt. Fuji during a sunset, with a greenish hue, was the way to go. In retrospect, it makes sense as to why that was the obvious choice. The setting is so serene, and echoes Ukiyo-e prints, such as Lake Suwa, by Hokusai. With their feedback, I had six days to churn out the final. 

Six days later I showed up to class with this, and got some amazing feedback. Overall, the response was immensely positive, but that doesn't mean it was perfect. The clouds, something I debated extensively on, were too flat, the trees seemed a bit too saturated, and the left side felt incredibly flat. One of the things I loved about Merging Worlds is that the final, wasn't actually the final. With all the advice given, we had two days to fix up our piece and address the class's issues. 

So as shown above, the final piece, Higashifuji-goko gore. 

Thanks for making it this far, and I hope this process proved insightful.