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FreeMarket Station by Runewuff

FreeMarket Station

Runewuff

Medium: GIMP (...with mouse! ;p )
Music: A strange blend of Holst's Saturn and Jet Set Radio Future (Because gas giants are mind-bogglingly enormous and move to their own ponderous rhythms, and FreeMarket is a hive of human life and remixed memes. They went to the Bringer of Old Age to build the city that knows no disease and no death, nothing could clash more!)
Time: 12 hrs

The concept art of the exterior of a Stanford Torus shows a glimpse of the blue water and green fields of the original design inside. No, no, NO! This will not do! FreeMarket is wall-to-wall city!

So I had to try and illustrate FreeMarket myself, and since it's a clean, future setting, digital art was appropriate...

Much thought went into this... some takeaway points: FreeMarket's original purpose is to relay data from Earth and Mars to solid-state storage on Tethys (because it's geologically stable) but it is located at the Saturn-Titan L5 point (because the Saturn-Tethys L5 point is squarely inside the rings). (I'm impressed the closer I look, the more the game designers thought this through). At that distance, Saturn would appear 5 times larger than the full moon, so there is plenty of ambient light reflected back from the planet. The city inside the station looks strange on purpose - it's built for foot traffic, competition for space is fierce, and it's in chaos of re-development as fortunes rise and fall.

Much fun was had with color! I sampled a "Saturn palette" directly from photos, covered the outside ring of FreeMarket in Tethys orange (they used slag from hollowing out the solid-state storage as shielding) and for the station interior plucked any color that caught my eye from the 3 cities FreeMarket is likened to - Manhattan, Rio, and Tokyo. e.g. Office Building Grey criss-crossed with Human Crowd Brown and dotted with Stock Ticker LED Red, Public Space Lighting Green, Signboard Yellow (among many other things!)

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Visual / Digital