Sinister Sewers - Style Development Thread (CA207)
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
Hi guys :)
I've been asked to do a 'small sewer style' for next year's Cartographer's Annual. I already have an image of pipes and grungy dirty fills that I can do. Have you got any favourite sewer maps you want to show me for inspiration? If the map isn't yours please provide a link to the original on the artists page rather than post a 'borrowed' copy here.
Thanks! :D
Comments
Not certain of who the artist is on this one but I have borrowed the images for personal gaming use several times. I would love to have similar fills and symbols to be able to create something similar myself.
Thanks, Shessar :)
Not a map as such, but the cast terrain company Dwarven Forge do a range of sewer pieces for their "Cities" models, which might provide some pseudo-medieval style inspiration. This link is to their main, fully hand-painted, set, and this is the main image for it:
For ideas on what sewers can sometimes look like, you might care to watch the latter stages of the 1949 movie "The Third Man", or dig through the nearly 100 images relating to it on the IMDb site here, if unfamiliar. Many of the sewer shots were from actual locations under post-war Vienna, although some (notably those with Orson Welles - where you can actually see it's him, as many of his shots were done by a double) were mocked-up/recreated in the studios later.
Notwithstanding the subject matter those are beautiful models.
And a movie recommendation too!
Thanks Wyvern :)
I'm thinking about the colour scheme here. What do you think of dirty oranges and browns with green liquid?
(The fills and symbols are placeholders)
Yummy.
That is a good selection. Debris could be increased some. Hard to tell on my cellphone, but wood like sticks and small branches would be good as well.
Maybe glowing water, a few colors, to denote evil, magic, odd, etc.
Thanks :)
I haven't started the symbols yet, Jim, but there will hopefully be a nice collection of various bits of debris to dump in the channel. And there are a range of 6 flavours of fluid to pick from - at the moment. I will add more if necessary.
These are all 'proto-fills' and will hopefully end up looking a lot more interesting on the day.
The green and brown color palette is beautiful. The stones "look very clean" to me.
Maybe also add a very glow/radioactive green option on water (as well as smoke effect) to indicate severe poison/contaminated area.
Pipes Png ejecting water and without ejecting water (in diferent colors also) will be amazing <3
Cheers
Thanks Ricko :)
The stone fills are next. The current ones are just some old stone fill I made and never used with the colours adjusted to give the overall shade and tone of things like paving and lining block work.
Maybe keep something similar to that stone, and have the dirty, mossy or broken effect on the default terrain that can be used on top of the "floors".
Do you intend to place only "smooth" stones or use brick floors, stone blocks, etc. on the "floors"?
It's very early days yet, Ricko. I'm experimenting. Yes, bricks had occurred to me, and so had rounded 'corners' at the edges. These things will come soon.
And here is that same boring background stone being used as a background texture for possible rounded floor edges.
I would suggest that the walls/floors need to be suitable for fantasy, modern, and futuristic sewers. So smooth metallic walls, bricks, stone, concrete, etc. along with pipes/conduits.
And let us not forget, sewers need alligators . . .
I like the roughness of the stones in this larger image
Oh, and this would be very useful for a "steampunk" style as well. You add in brass pipes, guard rails, valves, steam, etc.
Here is a sewage treatment plant from London built in the Victorian era. Not very sinister, but it is pretty:
https://crossness.org.uk/visit/
Well, today's progress is quite un-pretty compared to that, but this is a sewer after all.
Much more work to do to make things look solid and real, and I'm not really sure about the paving slabs either side of the channel.
Green does seem to have become the "default" for sewer water in maps and models over the years, so it's nice to have some alternatives. Or maybe not "nice" in the conventional sense, but you know what I mean!
And with CC3's sheet effects you can have effluent of any colour you like.
Delightful! 🌈💩
If you looking to make it even more of a challenge, you could add in oil slicks for the water.
Interestingly, in the real world, sewer water is almost never even remotely green. Brown, mostly, for obvious reasons. I blame Hollywood.
Green indoor water in art seems to be used to depict poisonous or noxious water. Green water in the real world seems to indicate mostly stagnant water that the sun shines on brightly so that it's teeming with life. The worst water to encounter is black water, which is usually a bit below the surface of that green stuff. Ah, the joys of my misspent youth.
About equal with coming across that black water is coming across clear still water.
I want sickly vomit yellow!!!
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone :)
Actually, Quenten... They might have been adjusted a little since this composite screen shot was made just after the last image in this thread, but....
On the progress front, I'm still working on the outer walls of the sewer. I think a nice rugged stone fill would be better on the outside of everything fading into the black, but that's for later.
These wall segments (when I've got them right) can be used at any width and will probably be a connecting symbol in the imperial style.
And this is without the Blend Mode effect for those who want their water murky.
And for those who want it like slime just turn off the EFIs at the end of the list.
@Loopysue YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY
I got distracted and did the background rock instead of getting on with the walls. The only trouble is that there's now a general mismatch in the greys, but we can fix that.
Rebalanced greys. I used the same curved wall symbol to line the channel as well as the outer walls.
@thehawk makes a good point about ancient sewer systems. I think the earliest definite sewer pipes date to around 4000 BCE in what's now southern Iraq, at the ancient cities of Eshnunna and Uruk, although more sophisticated sewer systems survive archaeologically from the Indus Valley civilization around a millennium later (c. 2300-1800 BCE). Most were of brick or clay construction in various forms.