Amethyst - Allen Road Depot

Sunday, January 3rd 2996, 01.33am.

Kooqu and August move carefully and quietly between the empty carriages at the Allen Road Metrotrak depot in West Jax, bathed in the orange glow of artificial light. The hopeful writer and her slightly nervous lookout inspect each carriage quickly before moving on, trying to find a suitable surface to paint on in the short time they have while they remain undetected.

Since late 2993 the Allen Road Depot has been a prime target for graffiti artists and wannabes hoping to get their names and 'pieces' up on the trains that operate on the Richside/Nomastoe East Line. The Richside district local council have mentioned that "Long-term plans are being drawn up to combat the mindless and persistent vandalism to Europan public transport in the area", which basically means that they're not doing anything at all.

* * * * *

'Allen Road Depot' started out as a simple picture of a Metrotrak train carriage (from my ongoing story project 'Amethyst'), to use as a backdrop for my graffiti - similar to and inspired by the setup used on the www.vandalsquad.com graffiti site. After I finished making the carriage I added the railway lines, then a wall... then a city backdrop, a second carriage, details, and finally some characters. It was a relatively straightforward piece that just kept growing!

In fact, the development of the picture also brought back an old character i'd cut from the story plan - five years later, Kooqu has returned to Amethyst, this time as a graffiti artist/writer.

'Allen Road Depot' is a combination of pencil and inked lineart, digital colouring, graphics tablet and Photoshop pen tool. The colouring, as always, was done with a basic optical mouse. :) Apologies for the need to scroll to see the whole thing, but making the image smaller would result in a loss of most of the details that i'd worked on for hours. It's a large image partly because of the length of the train carriage, but more to do with the plan of mine to do a large picture that I could print out on A2 or A1 sized paper.

This image pushed he PC to it's very limits... the original uncompressed 300dpi version is 7000 pixels long, and takes up 130MB of disk space!

'Allen Road Depot' and 'Amethyst' (plus all characters and related information) © Rich Morgan 2005.