Thanks JR. I’m glad you appreciate the contrast, because that’s really what I was going for; creating contrast between the room and the outside both in colour and tone. I was also trying to make Maria’s insanity come across by having her be dissonantly serene whilst in the middle of a battle. Burning airships, exploding rockets and thousands of men falling to their deaths are just a distraction to her; something to look at while you fix your hair.
I’m not saying I dislike the piece, it just frustrates me that I wasn’t able to finish it. My first entry (Battle Mode Activated) was complete, it looked the way I wanted it to look. The Battle of San Bartolomé doesn’t and that’s why I think it’s inferior.
[WARNING! THE PRETENTION LEVELS OF THE TEXT BELOW IS OFF THE CHARTS!]
As to why I’m not getting more votes, well, it doesn’t really scream steampunk, does it?
That kind of brings me to what’s bugging me about that entire artstyle: it’s really shallow. Most steampunk media just has the characters dress up in Victorian outfits and glues gears to places where they probably won’t do much good. Which, to me, completely misses the point of using a modified historical setting. It captures the style of the 19th century while ignoring its substance.
Steampunk to me is about rapid industrialization and capitalism run rampant, with no heeds taken to the workers and the environment; it’s about men in fancy uniforms dying horribly for grand, pointless wars; it’s about transhumanism, and whether mechanical augmentations take away ones humanity or not; it’s about decadent nobles seeing their place in the world becoming increasingly obsolete and acting desperately to hold on to the power they’ve held for thousands of years; it’s about predjudice and dictatorships gradually giving way to enlightenment, tolerance and fledgling ideas of democracy; it’s about natives fighting to reject technologically superior colonists; it’s about people using national romaticism to rationalize their oppression of other ethnicities; it’s about values and morality surrendering to the quest for wealth.
Steampunk to me is less about mustachioed men in smoking jackets and top hats firing guns with the clockwork on the outside, and more about a Portuguese queen tying her hair up with Chinese silk, watching her Italian mercenaries burn as their Ottoman airship is hit by an English rocket.
[/PRETENTIOUS RANT]
With that being said the goal of the contest was to create something steampunky, not to create something that aligns with my personal view of steampunk, my problem is with the genre in general, not with the other artists and nor with their work.
As a sidenote I voted for Nug’s Violinist, ‘cos that one was ******* rad,
Be Safe
