Under the mentorship of Paul Chadelsson during his World Building class, I wanted to venture into the realm of narrative concept art. The experience showed it’s possible to convey the essence of a society through architecture and culture. What resulted was a mix of African architecture and forms with a bit of volcanic mysticism thrown in for good measure.
To stay in the mountain’s good graces, the villagers must worship it with all of their might. The bravest worshippers blister as they flock to their volcanic baptism.
A time-lapse of the environmental sculpting in ZBrush. The smooth organic forms of the lava couldn’t lend themselves more to that program, and thanks to Jonas Ronnegard for some great lava brushes from Artstation
I bashed together reference in Photoshop that’d I found for African architecture and volcanic forms. Once I was happy with the monotone compositions then I moved to color, and then begun translating that into the third dimension in ZBrush.