... Knows Both Peace and Pain

This was fun to make, and I really got into a groove with this one. Typically, I try to spread out my work over the week and then have a big crunch on the weekend, when I normally post stuff. Yesterday, however, I got really restless and stressed (ended up driving out for fast food at about ten at night, after cleaning out my car... don't ask). Today was a bit similar, but instead of getting worked up over stuff, I decided to finish the panels I'd been pondering since I posted the first two parts of That Which Never Lived.
Originally, this was going to be two pieces, two separate landscape panels, meant to bookend the transition to ruin. That didn't quite work out, and so they ended up as a more-or-less self-contained piece that can essentially be bookends as well as a book unto itself. The cityscape worked out a lot better than I thought it would. I'd made a few sketches, even thought of just having lights, using a mountainous horizon to create the black space. I wasn't sure how I was going to go about doing the lights, and they would really clash with the tower, so I settled on buildings. At one point, I had a foreground object, a tall skyscaper complete with figures in a window overlooking the place. However, scale is a tough thing to maintain when you're working with silhouettes, so that got scrapped as well. The buildings were made on a single page of my pocket-sized watercolor book, one running up and down each long side. The rest is all post. I wanted to convey that this was a fairly advanced civilization, despite the more organic shapes of the structures, so I added hanging wires between some of the rooftops (those were done with a path tool, because my usual "matting" process for silhouettes doesn't handle small details all that well).
What I like best about making these is that, because of the parallelism and graphic matches of the panels, I can save the matching panels as one file. When I want to make one panel, I just run down the layers list, ticking off visibilities as I go, completely transforming the cityscape. After that, it's just a matter of merging those layers, copy+pasting into the "layout" file (which has the panels and text), going back to the original, undoing the merge, and repeating the process for the next panel. Making the "destroyed" layer was just a matter of duplicating the two city layers, setting the originals to not be visible, and then using a brush and eraser to wreck some roofs.