The sun rose above the city, and glittered through a gap in the thick acidic clouds, basking the world in its usual greenish glow. A jet trail had already pierced its path.
Once, I saw a photograph in a library of the yellow sun and blue sky. How odd.
Something about too much ash and micro filaments in the air, had shifted the colors of the heavens, over the centuries of persistent air pollution.
Plumes of overheated air rose from the Nuclear stations, on the sides of the city's central core, vibrating and shimmering in sunlight.
An ever-present, mushroom cloud of thick, juicy smog reminiscent of the nuclear wars, overshadowed the Core and engulfed it in constant darkness. Workers of the Core had often complained that they never see sunlight, but who really cares about sunlight these days anyway, when we got the brilliant, undying glow of electricity to chase away the nights.
Roads flashed with constant fuzz of green and red lights, always moving, always going. On every road trip I always wonder why there's constantly so much traffic, looking out at passing cars and think about where each person is going and why.


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Creation time: 3 weeks
Software: Photoshop CS
Hardware used: Wacom Intuos 6x8 tablet
Real size: 27x33 Inches or 10'000x8'000 pixels

Illustration assignment to create a poster/brand on the theme of "Depletion".
This painting is inspired by the city I was born in- Novokuznetsk, Siberia.

This is how I often saw it as a child- engulfed in smog and dust from the coal mining and aluminum/steel production factories, the air so thick with metal that hail turned brown, and in cold winter smog covering the city in a gray veil from which you could only see 2 meters ahead.

Here's Novokuznetsk from several thousand meters in the air, shot from a plane: [link]