Late last year some may remember me making the environmental-themed Dawn of Man for the first of a series of "eARTh" contests held by =K-lenx that won, but I decided to sit out the following contests until now - the fourth one based on "green life" [link]

Green life instantly made me think of drawing some beautiful forest scene, but I decided to go with something more daring and sinister, and what I reckon is one of my best concepts on several levels. You can spot the symbolism yourself if you want before reading about it below, but I'll explain here anyway since it will help people appreciate it more

Well the dollar-sign in itself is a symbol of human greed, people will do anything for money, even if it means stepping over nature itself to save some money and time, as these highways do - unlike the natural river, which takes on a smooth, natural shape that follows the contours of the landscape, the highways just cut right through it. And with a complete disregard for what had to be levelled to build it - people still bitch about paying the road toll as they cross, while tossing their litter outside the window and lets not forget that cars pollute too

You might have noticed the fact only half is "green life" and the other is quite the opposite, but the sharp eye will notice a "Yin-Yan" pattern forming in the middle, like the whole "man vs nature" concept, Luckily nature is pretty resilient and can recover from even terrible disasters, problem is that takes time, and it's much faster to destroy than to create !

Technical details:
Started out in Vue looking down on my 3D landscape, I made the river in Photoshop to drive the height of the terrain so I got the river nice and even. Roads modelled in Cinema 4D (cars actually made use of Vue's "highway" ecosystem ) and the scene was rendered twice with differnet trees used to cover the terrain (one for "green" side, the other for "dead" side) finally, it was all composed and edited to look nicer in Photoshop

Edit: - fixed the cars since some were accidently placed facing the wrong way relative to the direction of the road, moved some cars since unnatural "patterns" were formed and added dark patches to the green side for more variation.

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