FMP: World Building, Tree's & House Research

After listening to Dom Kesterton's talk, it really inspired me to start world building. In his talk he spoke about how he created a world for all of the work he did, even if it was for someone else he tried to fit it into a context in his head. That really chimed in with me, so I've started drawing some potential things for my FMP.

I know I want to set the comic in a dream world, a world that doesn't exist but could take stuff from reality. I've started with trees, I spent such a long time studying trees for Colours May Vary embroideries, to figure out how many branches to each tree and the different leaf types that it just made sense to me that this world I create will have different trees. I was thinking maybe different trees to different areas?   Patrick also got me thinking about each area having a different style of housing, for the swamp it just seemed like a good idea to have houses high up.

I did a little research around different houses in films etc, Pirates Of The Caribbean have a character (tia dalma/calypso) who lives in the swamp. Her house is built into the tree's and is adapted to the environment by being high up and spaced within the trees. 

Other really famous pop-culture homes are of course the Ewok's Village from star wars. Adapted to keep them out of enemies reach, theres a vast network of spread out houses and wooden bridges for the inhabitants. Again the material is kept light and natural, wood moss and vine binding looks to be the construction of these homes. 

Another popular adapted home is the hobbits village from Lord Of The Rings. As these inhabitants are rarely at risk from attack their homes are built into the surrounding hills to give them quick camouflage if needed but more to preserve the natural appearance of the surroundings. 

Thinking about specialised housing is probably going to be a consideration for this project, especially if the book/comic characters have to travel to different places to achieve their goals. Different places will need protection from different monsters. 

I started thinking about protection for swamp inhabitants, about the trees that would be in the swamps, in fairytales there are always swamps or somewhere dingy where the monsters are. I liked the idea of tree's being protection for the locals that lived there? Like they explode and different colour balloon leaves mean different dangers? 

I also watched TITAN AE last night, and they have pods that skim the water. Although they aren't trees they are a protective force for the bat alien's (titan AE is such a weird film) so the idea for the cicrular balloon-esque leaves come from that.