there's so much love put into all the backgrounds, is the setting for astray clan based on a real city? the weather and building layouts and types are so different from where i live.
its really beautiful to see a place i've never been through the eyes of someone who loves it
Awh this ask is so nice, thank you so much for your sweet words 🥰❤️I really love that people appreciate the detail I put into the backgrounds, even when I try to minimise the backgrounds to be quicker with pages, they never feel right unless I put enough interesting shapes and detail into them. Explains why I'm so slow to update 😅But It means a lot to hear that I've made something so intriguing 🥹
So while the location of the comic is fictional so that I can make up places, move buildings, rivers, etc. as needed for the story - I live in England and that very much influences how I draw and view city life. I think I end up with a very... mundane and 'small' city vibe to my drawings, with a mix of overgrown nature and back alleys, smaller suburban areas with lots of domesticity because we're a small island with a pretty packed population
I've grown up all my life in one city that's retained a lot of nature as its within the 'Green belt', which is a large area of nature that we've purposefully preserved to avoid people building all over it to expand the city/capital. And I live very close to London (which I've explored all over, I go visit it multiple times a year to walk the river Thames, the art galleries and markets there, etc.) and the architecture and vibes are all over the place. You go from areas of green park to completely industrial roads and glass skyscrapers, depending on the age of the area and the buildings or if you're by the river or in the more grand area with the Palace/Parliament buildings. It's a jumble of imagery that I pull from, as well as from the areas I live in that are still very built over but a little more green and out of the city centre.
I'm especially inspired by London's skyline when I draw that view for the characters, with constant cranes building new buildings and strangely shaped buildings that loom above everything else, but also I add smokestacks and factories to add to that gritty hostile vibe that the cat's live through.
London (and England) has lost a lot of its factory and industry but in my mind it's always been a very industrially polluted place because of its history, we had an industrial revolution that basically blackened most of the streets and bricks with soot and smoke. London tries to paint itself as very clean now but it'll always be a grey, cloudy, sooty city to me, that's raining or overcast most of the year. But I love it, it's my home and city.
I guess it's funny to think about like, what particularly stands out to me and what doesn't, but from an outside view it must paint an interesting view of what a 'city' is, especially when added from the perspective of cats.
I do plan to have the characters explore different areas of the city in the story too, up the tallest skyscrapers, near the river and sewers, by the mouth of the river where it joins the sea/docks, and towards the city centres and perhaps even beyond the city at times. I want to make the most of a city-based cat colony, all the challenges and views and differences it'd make to a story like this.
Just need to claw some time back from my schedule so I can get more pages out 😂😅 BUT I thank you so much for being interested enough to ask, I sort've rambled but I hope that gives some insights into why my backgrounds are just so, styled in a way hehe
