Here’s the new artwork for Sinister Topography.
The old one was three layers of genAI, all very abstract… but one of those layers was in the style of a pencil sketch and I couldn’t help but think it was somebody’s style. Or an amalgamation of the styles of a few artists perhaps.
This one was from a royalty-free photo by Artem Zhukov on pexels.com. Color manipulation and that handy Glitch Effect Maker again.
My first thought was to use a topographic map… but those aren’t very sinister. After some suggestions from my spouse, I felt like the mood (sinister) was more important than the literal words. She thought of a particular drive through a state park at dusk that was especially spooky. I looked at some options, and then thought of Gold Camp Road in Colorado. It’s said to be haunted, and has some creepy tunnels, some of which just seem to swallow light. At least one of those is blocked off with a hefty iron fence that itself would feel right at home in Mordor. I drove that road on a family trip before it was closed off, and it was scary even then. (Poorly maintained, winding gravel road winding through mountains in the middle of nowhere, dark narrow tunnels (originally made for freight trains, not a road) that curve and have signs about not chopping the wooden beams for firewood; locals in pickup trucks drifting around corners at rally racing speeds while we limped along in a basic van pulling a camper, the sun threatening to set before we got back to civilization…)
Ultimately I chose not to use the photos I found of those tunnels because they looked too unreal. But I thought a mysterious “X” on a post on a trail leading to denser woods would work. I had a couple of different compositions ready but I preferred the one that was zoomed in more and reddened. You Shall Not Pass.
The URL for the big image is https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1169507207_10.jpg
