art

Thanks! I hope to make more - most of my photobashes lately have been making line art for a comic I haven't put online yet, so it's been a fun challenge to go back to full color, textures, and all. I really love photobashes for a style I'm trying to get better at, the sketchy, jammed-together sort of scene that looks best from a distance, full of loose brushstrokes, made more for the impressions and overall shape. The stuff I make is too solid for what I'm aiming for, but I'll try to get there over time. One of the things I really like about photobashes is that they’re this mix of deliberate and coincidental, like certain kinds of painting where you let the medium make some of the decisions. On the comic, I've often had some background chunk of an image I brought in and converted to lines turn out to add the right depth or texture to some part of the image, so I keep it even when I get rid of the bit I originally grabbed it for. Good photobashes jam together hundreds of bits and pieces of images, and a lot of stuff comes along for the ride, but in the end, and especially compared to AI art, they’re very deliberate. Items in the scene are there for a reason. That's one thing this has going for it - I can justify why there's tin cups hanging on the water rickshaw, or a gas mask and rope and first aid kit on the restoration one. I'm hoping we'll get more of that kind of intentionality in solarpunk art.

I'll probably do more so I'm happy to take suggestions, for both locations and scenes in general.

I picked an office building because around here, they tend to be located in suburbs or their own remote locations zoned just for that, which would likely be impractical for where people have resettled/rebuilt. Maybe useful to local farmers as storage, but too far out to justify doing office work in a world where the internet still mostly enables connectivity and the suburbs have faded and the grid might not support running power to these sites. They're also likely to have more abandoned technology, and not much worth stealing when things were a little more postapocalyptic, so the tech might be more intact. Plus I'd like there to be more punk in solarpunk; ruined and abandoned office buildings fit that a bit, I think, like leaving behind that whole cultural structure.

Looking back on it, I could definitely have made it look more decrepit, beyond the broken windows. I could have shifted the frame, sagged the overall shape so it was clear the foundation and structure were bad. I might rework this one or just do others in the future. I'd also made the site look more crowded than most office complexes with their endless parking lots and lawns, which probably makes it look more city-like. That makes sense, I wanted the shot to look interesting, and I find cities way more visually compelling than suburban sprawl and office parks (though that wasn't a very practical decision given my goals). Let's compromise and say it's some tech campus, just remote and cheaply-built enough to be impractical for a rebuilding society, but kind of crowded compared to most office parks.

Let me know if you have any scenes you'd like to see. I can use the photobash and scene-composition practice, and I'd like there to be more solarpunk art that sets out to showcase possibilities/options rather than just a nice cityscape. Optimistic moments in a less-optimistic setting, people helping each other in or after climate disasters and societal crumbles, or rebuilding a more deliberate, colorful, and inclusive world. I'll probably prioritize rewilding and reuse. I want the conception of solarpunk to include salvaging what's there, using the resources we have in the moment, regardless of their provenience, while reconsidering how/if we make things new.

I partially agree, but ransacking broken technology does not need to make the building unsuitable for other community functions, quite the contrary, it could even help. For example, a decayed server room can be dangerous due to heavy metals or other components and would serve no real purpose to a community-oriented building (as well as so many satellite dishes). So the raiding could both make use of the materials and make the building safe for other uses.