Gospel According To Sci-Fi: Exodus
In the beginning opening of the animation work Laputa: Castle of The Sky, there was a sequence showing that the mighty Laputa came crashing down on earth due to a mysterious reason, and the population of this once powerful kingdom begins to make a mass exodus from their beloved home, trying to find a new life. That sequence, for some reason, really inspired me.
Somehow, that also really resonated with my personal faith as a Bible-believing guy.
So I begin painting this scene, inspired to reflect a sense of "deep yearning for a lost home" which Hayao Miyazaki so powerfully planted in my heart as I watched his interpretation of the story of Laputa.
Perhaps, in a parallel universe, sons of Avram, Itzak and Yakov have crash landed in a "Sinai Desert" of their own world, and are making a mass Exodus towards their Promised Land...
This is the "finalized" painting. The main things I worked on in the final stages was the foreground guy with backpack, the rock for which he stands on, and a bit of the atmospheric blue sky. Very subtle details, minimally done, makes a huge difference.
At first, I blocked out a basic feel of the scene. I wanted to simply convey an idea that a massive ship has crash-landed, and that it has been there for a long while.
In this next step, I simply added a guy in the foreground - to give the painting a proper sense of scale. I've also added some details to the land formations. It's amazing how much of a rocky terrain one can suggest with only two or three colors!
In this next step, I begun focusing on the exact design of the ship. I wanted to suggest that the ship was slender and sleek, so I referenced, and somewhat incorporated, designs from the turrets of Israeli IDF Merkava III.
Here, much more detail was added to the ship, as well as the land formations.