Personal Work: Planetary Colonies 1 of 3

    Over the summer I have been taking interest in the video game EVE Online. Prior to the course I had explored the game's planetary interaction system, setting up production chains in order to make products that are to be exported off-world. At some point I decided it could be an interesting painting challenge to represent three planets I had colonised in my time playing, as the game's representation is from a view in orbit .

The first I have painted is the central hub of the network, Akonoinen II. Ingame the planet has a high-tech industrial foundation, producing supercomputers from coolant and consumer electronics imported from the other two planets and locally-produced water-cooled electronics. So I imagined the city that surrounds the spaceport would be fairly wealthy. Part of my inspiration was from the BASF chemical plant located on the river Rhine which is easily the size of a city. Since the setting of EVE online is of a medium-sized star cluster with hundreds of populated planets, I easily imagined each of the construct-able industrial complexes matching the BASF plant in scale.

    Being the most hospitable of the three planets (the other two being a Mustafar-like lava world and a planet that experiences frequent continent-scale thunderstorms) and where the most advanced products in the chain are made, I wanted to give the impression of the settlement being fairly wealthy compared to its counterparts. Offices and shops would have developed to provide services to the workforce and visiting off-world tourists and immigrants.

    This is the initial city design but I felt it was too like my old style to feel like an improvement, hence why I reworked it in the picture above. It was also missing the central spaceport and the architecture itself felt too plain to demonstrate the colony's purpose.