Of diorama landscaping and weather

While building the landscapes of my world, I've been noticing the most influential aspects of Ilium and Ersatz lands aren't the geography or even the vegetation themselves, but rather the weather are how it changes my mood. See, fog and rain are what make me feel ersatz feelings, and spring-like sunny days are what remind me of Ilium

Clearly, Ersatz is mostly about cloud days, rain and fog, while Ilium ends up being more about sunny, windy, fresh days. Despite loving cloudy days, lately these years I’ve begun taking part of those majority of people that feels emotionally weakened by melancholic rainy days. Maybe that has to do with some wanning flame I’ve been having, as if my own essence and personality are changing. Some things don’t appeal to me as easily as they did before. I don’t know if there’s anything I could do or just let it all go and let new things come in – or risk it all disappear.

Ersatz feels like wastelands filled with smoke and mist and silent emptiness. It makes me think of an old game I used to play called Tlön: A Misty Story, which had those sad swamp villages and abandoned ruins where monsters lurked. I can also feel I am influenced by Diablo and the same feeling of forsakenness from it. As a string of my actual world, it’s those small Brazilian cities, lost in time, forgotten by the world. Farms littered with rusted pieces of useless machinery, houses made of wood and eaten by termites, fixed very poorly with wooden boards. Now, those are the inspiration, and dioramas have to come naturally and originally. This German House diorama actually could be a transition from ersatz to ilium.

Ilium, in one of the fantasy-like renderings, then sits on fields of green. Its front gate are sided by some pine trees. Long roads are also sided by cypresses leading to other small but quaintly organized villages. Colorful orchards and plantations are part of the surrounding scenario, and we see palm trees dancing with sea wind as we get closer to the shore and see the ports of Ilium.

Curiously, as I used to prefer a cold rainy day that a sunny beach, now I'm feeling the opposite. Not like I like going to beaches like a social thing, it's just that it gives me more peace of mind, gives me tranquility and recharges me. Somehow it would have to do with this allegorical interpretations that we have with storms being problems and sun being the radiance of life. The more we face sorrow, the more we long for sunny days...