As I'm currently working on locating my stylus, I figured this week was a perfect opportunity to explore the wonders of working on the tablet o naturale, as it were. And nothing, to me, says fun like fingerpainting, so while I was at it I wanted to draw something fun.
I must have drawn between two hundred and a thousand secret bases when I was a kid, especially after the advent of Super Nintendo in my family home and the copy of Super Mario World that came with it. Here was a fully-realized world in two dimensional images, you could jump on platforms, swing on ropes, climb vines, swim under obstacles, the possibilities seemed endless. It was in the spirit of these expansive forests and fields and dungeons, especially the dungeons, that I first started drawing the ficticious super-hideouts where, if I were an evil dragon overlord, I would keep my gold and lava and secret submarines. (Dang! I forgot the lava!)
And here we have a fairly representative of that aesthetic tradition. Would you like a tour? Of course you would.
Below the unsuspicous tableau of the American countryside, rolling fields and a quiet little house all on its own, two massive steel doors set on hinges with working gears and engines, albeit crudely drawn ones. Immediately below this is the missile silo. The usual deal, reenforced concrete panels with catwalks all around, and a pool of water and steam escape tunnels at the bottom. But the important thing to remember is that rocket isn't for destroying anything, it's purely a vehicle. It just happens to also be preposterously cartoonishly awesome-sized.
Around the silo we have the control stations; top left is the main command floor, below that is the video game arcade accessible by fireman's pole, above the command floor is the emergency helicopter pad, and below all is the emergency alligator pit for anyone who's insolent. Across the floor is the disco lounge over the spiral staircase slash poster room which leads down to a second video game arcade and the main feature of the sub-basement, the round theater room, complete with easy chairs, a staffed kitchen with order counter in the wall, fireplace, and surround sound (not pictured).
Finally descending from the theater room is the grand ramp to the smaller chambers; first a safe place to keep my pogs, then the library ("bib" is short for "biblio," I think), and finally a second bedroom featuring a bed roughly the size of the quiet little house above. All this is of course leading up to the grand finale, the submarine tunnel dock.
Some rough shading went in to give a bigger sense of space and a more definite sense of light, though more variety of shades and of course precision would have been preferable to give an exact idea. But I feel like with fun sketches like this one the imprecision is part of what makes it a little bit alive.
The great thing thing about this sort of sketch-up is that it almost tells its own story as you go along, in sort of a Batcave, tree fort, Dexter's Lab way. The setting is almost enough to get along with, as long as each new thing on the tour is more awesome than the last. (I would draw a parallel here to mallorn trees preceded by balrogs, but I feel like we already covered the lava thing.)
What's different from when I was a kid? Did I learn anything from this? Well I inadvertantly included more perspective and sort of three-dimensionality than in those old SNES-inspired doodles I used to do; the whole thing is sort of on a three-quarters drop angle rather than straight on, and all the floors are ovals instead of flat lines because of that. Of course it's really wonky perspective and all the rooms have their own vanishing points and horizons, but what can you do. There were some parts that came out better than I'd expected, and for everything else I gave the descriptions above so you could see what I meant it to be.
I think touchscreen drawing without a stylus is perfectly feasible so long as you're willing to zoom way in and take your time with everything, while also zooming out again frequently to make sure you're keeping the big picture in mind. I didn't really do all these things here,
I would love to do a version with labels and explanations, maybe dimensions, materials, and estimated costs; you could go infinitely deep with a daydream like this, to me it's just hilarious. And of course I have to do at least one do-over at some point; I have to remember to include the lava.
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