Ant Monastery Again

I want to write a story about these guys and their home.

So I see the little Ant Monastery as a future toy for the super rich. It is a self contained ecosystem with engineered plants, and ants that behave 'as if' sentient. The ants will build things if you feed them materials through the quantum entangled portal. 

The Ant Monastery is held in an impervious force field. These guys are far more sentient than the designers intended, and begin to tinker with the field machinery, which is embedded in the main rock. They learn to make the field opaque as desired to block the owner's looming face. The owner has, of course complained to the manufacturer. 

The ants also broke off the section of rock containing the portal, and let it fall into the water below, because the owner's malevolent little son kept feeding spiders and scorpions into their environment. Now anything nasty must cross the water, which is filled with voracious little fish. The ants can still reach the portal by using the little boat the owner once gave them on a whim. 

They have also learned to access other Ant Monasteries through the portal.


Update: More forest on top

Ant Monastery Revised

Third update: more background, revised some plants, added an ant, added perspective to house, moved whole rock down to dip into water, revised waterfall, changed water below.

Second update: Changed the rocks.

Update: changed optics of glass egg: better I think.

I confess I preferred my pencil sketch to my final, so I tweaked the proportions of the glass egg. I also replaced the clouds and played up the rock texture (lots of dodging and burning). I like it much better that the old one.

Pencil sketch:

Details:

A Floating Island Was His Home

I've always been obsessed with terrariums, and the idea of little microcosms, self-contained worlds under glass. I would love to own one of those EcoSpheres with the brine shrimp and algae.

I decided to do a pretty ambitious but light-hearted picture of space terrariums with an attending spacecraft, as well as an artificial sun. I started Thursday, August 29, and am now pretty much finished.






Here is the rough pencil idea:

I will post more images of the many elements that went into this.

Gold fish bowl detail, with Sea Monkeys (brine shrimp)for food:

Snake and mouse with succulent plants:

Space Bird plane with chimpanzee pilot:

Some elements shown in wireframe and preview in Illustrator:

Sea monkey overkill:

I wish the chimp pilot showed better — handsome fellow (or lady, can't tell).

The terrarium/aquarium pebbles were taken from another image where I had created rock textures (see An Unfortunate Discovery), and isolated bits with a mask and a layer effect to create highlights and shadows. Those layer effects take a lot of trial and error to get then to work, but it can be worth it.

The snake was done with a custom scales brush in Illustrator, then altered with the Line Width editing tool. The rest was done in Photoshop.