My Attempts at Drawing the Rice Terraces Using Affinity Designer

Terracing is a common practice, though the one that got dubbed as the eighth wonder of the world, is located in Banaue. That's the Banaue rice terraces. I was trying to draw my own version of the rice terraces, to the point that one couldn't tell if I was drawing it from which country. Now, it's time to look at my arts. 

My first attempt looks like paper diorama than anything else. I saved the AF Design format so I could still copy the coconut trees to future art. However, I had to relearn how to deal with the rice terraces. Isometric art requires tedious work. The houses are paper flat, proving that I wasn't willing to design isometric houses. Talk about a pop up book! 

Here's my second attempt, with the coconut trees lining up. This time, I'm actually happier with the rice terraces I made. Sure, it's not realistic (and never was intended to be). However, I managed to think of a better angle. 

I revisited the same art and added isometric houses. That's why I believe in saving the vector art version. I might want to modify them or copy certain grouped images for future art.

Rather than focus on Affinity Designer from a purely isometric view, I decided to try to this one point of view. I decided to build some isometric houses facing the front. It was also not easy to determine how to arrange all the objects. Renaming the objects in the layers had to be done. I figured out that it's best to add everything from the back, going to the front, to create this desired effect. Anybody who's had experience with this may agree with me. 

Unfortunately, the lack of an animation panel by Affinity Designer (and Affinity Photo) forced me to use a third-party animator. EZ Gif was used to create this sunset animation, which I used several frames to create the desired effect. The frames were still created using Affinity Designer.