Monday, October 01, 2018
More red dirt
After the last 'showoff' of my current graphics fun......
I noticed an overly predictable feel in my landscapes. As explained before, hills and bluffs in the background are (1) accurate for Eastern Kansas and (2) practical for Poser scenes because the hills close off the horizon without lots of added backdrops.
Can't do without the hills, but do I really need bluffs? And everything is always green, except when it's snowy.
Real Kansas, and especially real Okla, aren't always green. Okla is brown and gray for much of the year.
So I'm trying to capture a more Okie feel, in the area that Alphia Hart calls 'the shortgrass country' and Steinbeck calls 'the red country and the gray country'.
In the scene below I've got a good red dirt / black dirt boundary, and I'm having a little fun with streets and plats. Often small towns had a grand plat with names for every latitude and longitude, even when most of the streets never existed or scarcely existed.
Literary footnote: I'd always remembered Steinbeck's phrase as 'the red dirt lands and the black dirt lands'. Looked it up and corrected it to 'the red country and the gray country', but my version is better.
I noticed an overly predictable feel in my landscapes. As explained before, hills and bluffs in the background are (1) accurate for Eastern Kansas and (2) practical for Poser scenes because the hills close off the horizon without lots of added backdrops.
Can't do without the hills, but do I really need bluffs? And everything is always green, except when it's snowy.
Real Kansas, and especially real Okla, aren't always green. Okla is brown and gray for much of the year.
So I'm trying to capture a more Okie feel, in the area that Alphia Hart calls 'the shortgrass country' and Steinbeck calls 'the red country and the gray country'.
In the scene below I've got a good red dirt / black dirt boundary, and I'm having a little fun with streets and plats. Often small towns had a grand plat with names for every latitude and longitude, even when most of the streets never existed or scarcely existed.
Literary footnote: I'd always remembered Steinbeck's phrase as 'the red dirt lands and the black dirt lands'. Looked it up and corrected it to 'the red country and the gray country', but my version is better.Labels: Heimatkunde, Make or break, Morsenet of Things
¶ 12:01 PM
