The Institute - house mars

First Step - collect the words 

Once again, I begin by collecting quotes. This is, after all, one of the most important parts of this process. Here are the quotes I used:

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“Clouds drop soft showers. The canyon walls fifty kilometers west and forty kilometers east of our little valley tower six kilometers high. Between them is an ecosystem of mountains, forests, rivers, and plains. Our battlefield. Ours is a highland territory. There rise mossy hills and craggy peaks that dip into U-shaped, grassy glens. Mist blankets all, even the thick forests that lie homespun quilts over the foothills. Our castle stands on a hill just north of a river in the middle of a bowl-like glen–half grass, half woods. Greater hills cup the glen in a semicircle to the north and south.” (152)

 

“Three walls of our hill castle stand atop eighty-meter stone cliffs. The castle itself is huge. Its walls rise thirty meters. The gatehouse swells out from the walls as a fortress with turrets. Inside the walls, our square keep is part of the northwestern wall and rises fifty meters. A gentle slope leads up from the glen’s floor to the castle’s western gate, opposite the keep.” (152-153)

 

“Deerling, thinner and faster than the creatures of Earth, graze in the fir woods. Birds circle above. A single raven promises eerie things. Sheep litter the field and goats wander the high rocky hills we run up in a line of fifty and one.” (153)

 

“The sacred animals of Mars make their home in our territory. Woodpeckers hammer oak and fir. At night, wolves howl across the highlands and stalk during the day through woodlands. There are snakes near the river. Vultures in the quiet gulches.” (153)

 

“A great floating mountain hovers two kilometers up in the bluish sky. It is Olympus, Fitchner explains, a artificial mountain where the Proctors watch each year’s class. Its peak shimmers with a fairy-tale castle.” (154)

 

“Two rivers in a forested valley split our northern territory, which is at the edge of a vast wilderness. They form a V pointing southwest to the lowlands, where they eventually form one tributary to the Argos.” (154)

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This was a piece that was especially hard for me to understand. To make sure I was comprehending the words properly, I created these extremely rough sketches while I was reading, testing the placement of key landscape points. These sketches are not the same as thumbnails because I use them to aid in my understanding of the descriptions. This helped me visualize what the environment was before getting to the creative stuff. I recommend spending as much time as you need understanding what is being described before moving on to. Although the sketches are very messy and probably only comprehensible to me, I've added them below for reference on how messy this process can be. 

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