The Making of Waterfall City

Plus: "The Pedestal Problem" and "Filling the Bucket"

Jason asked: “How do you approach creating a panoramic scene like Waterfall City? Does it take a lot of planning or preliminary work?

Jason, in a word, yes! In this case I spent years trying to figure out the idea in the form of rough sketches.

Actually there were two versions of Waterfall City. The first appeared in Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time (1992). The second was called "Waterfall City: Afternoon Light, published in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (2007).

The Pedestal Problem

It took me a long time and a lot of sketches before I knew which idea was best. This is typical for anyone trying to commit to a dream project. I call it the “Pedestal Problem.”

As long as you keep your idea on the marble pedestal of your imagination, it can remain perfect. Once you commit to a form, a shell for the concept, the perfection is tainted and you have to start living with compromises.

When I do sketches, I vary the technique, using everything from pencils to fountain pens to oil paint. For each sketch I’m trying to answer a different question, such as the point of view, the 2D design, or the perspective.

In this case, I was exploring the light and shade and the atmospherics of mist.

Filling the Bucket

But imagination only takes me so far. To go beyond that, I have to "fill the bucket," which is what I call the process of gathering reference. One key step was painting at Niagara Falls.

I set up my painting gear on Goat Island with a bunch of kids watching. The studies helped me understand how the water should look, something that's hard to get from photos.

Here’s a clip from a longer YouTube documentary about the making of Dinotopia.

Maquettes

I also built maquettes. Below is a schematic maquette made out of styrofoam, cardboard, and a wood ball spray painted with gray primer. It helped me as a designer to keep Waterfall City visually consistent when it appears in various angles.

In a schematic maquette, you don’t have to sculpt every single building, just a few characteristic geometric forms. By looking at photos of those representative forms as you do your drawing, you can add details and multiply them into the full city.

The real benefit of such a schematic maquette is that you can swing it around at any angle and see how the light plays on it. This kind of model is a great help for entertainment designers or sequential artists who need to imagine a complex form consistently from a variety of angles.

I needed a more detailed maquette for the corner of the city with the “One-Earth Globe. This maquette is made from cardboard, styrofoam, and epoxy putty.  It helped me imagine perspective and lighting on this near corner of Waterfall City, which appeared from many angles in The World Beneath and Journey to Chandara.

After studying the maquettes, I draw a tone paper study and do a small oil sketch to solidify my vision of how the city will look veiled in mist.

Now with all that preliminary work behind me, I’m ready to go into full production. That means an elaborate perspective drawing on canvas mounted to a 24 x 52” panel, and an oil painting that took me about a month to produce.

The painting “Waterfall City: Afternoon Light” appeared in my book Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (2007), which you can get signed in my store.

As a bonus, for the remainder of 2024, every customer in my store gets a FREE set of stickers from The Artist’s Guide to Sketching.

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