Crosstown express to Market Quay
- July 11, 2023
Lucas —
Fun fact: I drew over 125 unique houses for Jea’s village! The inspiration for the vertigo-inducing community was an old tree trunk covered in bracket fungus I saw while out on a hike. The buildings tumble and cascade over themselves in a dense maze of scaffolding and Choga-inspired roofs, like some kind of treehouse favela.
The eclectic architecture of the village incorporates a mix of found technology and crafted natural elements. Many of the early sketches I did were based on both real-life cottagecore architecture and Ghibli-influenced fantasy art scrounged from around the interwebs.
Check out some of the sketches. Can you spot any of them on today’s page?
One idea was that many of the buildings would use repurposed technologies and structures as a ‘skeleton’ that would have natural elements crafted over top of them. The village is built on top of a large piece of machinery, so I thought that maybe pieces of the underlying construction could be peeled out or uprooted. It was honestly a tough challenge — trying to build a favela that had the whimsy of Hobbiton.
Just as with the Windnets featured a few pages ago, the village buildings took inspiration from everything from Viking longhouses to Tiki architecture.
