Cross-Country Boat Race

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When I was making sketches for “Swimming Above the City of Orennon”, there were some different ideas that I’d had for what the rocks in that environment might look like that I didn’t end up using but I liked enough to where I figured I would use them in another painting. Those ideas turned into this composition of a natural setting with these big rocky boulder-like forms as the main point of attention. When I was considering the possibility that these rock forms could be made up of multiple different-coloured sections, I had the idea to instead have sections of them glow in the dark and to make these glowing sections work as the main sources of light in a nighttime setting.

This changed the direction of the painting as my original plan for the narrative portion of it was just to have a human trying to ride some sort of alien bike or hovering skateboard or something, but now with the whole glowing rock nighttime idea I felt that this narrative wasn’t going to take advantage of the atmosphere of the painting. This was when the boat racing idea came about. I was mainly thinking of boat racing here as the alien world equivalent of car racing, so I had a bit of fun designing the boats to have a roof and a tail fin spoiler part at the back to try to make them look a little sportier, although I’ll admit that I also find that the design makes the boats sort of look like glowing fish speeding along.