Art: Dam.
Kindly ignore the fact real dams have depth and other infrastructure.
Another case where I could have done more, but you have to stop somewhere. The spillway looks a bit uneven, but we’ll just pretend there’s some technical reason behind it, like the reservoir being lopsided.
I mainly wanted to try to go bigger. It’s an interesting challenge to depict a space that’s very big without rendering it into one simple object. A big circle that’s the moon or the sun (including here) are examples where a big thing is just a small thing due to distance. You don’t get that feeling of size. To keep the feeling of bigness, you have to have a little person or a sailboat far away so that the viewer is able to wrap their head around the apparent scale.
I was going to use an example from Half-Life, but I guess I never posted it? Don’t know why. Last November around the 25th anniversary of Half-Life, I had planned to write something about it. I guess I dropped it. The problem with starting things and dropping a lot of them is you can tend to forget which ones you finished. Anyway, here’s a screenshot from the way in to the chapter “Blast Pit:”
It works a bit better in game. Going back 25 years, or even today, that area feels so huge. It’s still an impressive feeling.