Mayan Winter

This is a piece that I did for an in-class demonstration at FZD School of Design on the topic of integration of photos into your concept art workflow.
The content premise for the piece was not too complicated: I wanted to take a historic, architecture based environment and put a bit of a spin on it to make it interesting. I got inspired by images of Mayan and Aztec archaeological sites and I also by my reading in the last couple of months about catastrophic climate changes in prehistoric times caused by meteorite impact. Amidst all that speculation about how our society would handle such an event, I wondered how ancient civilisations like the Mayans would have tried to deal with that and that is basically what this piece shows.
I imagined a mid size Mayan city on the cost after a dramatic temperature drop and a couple of days of snowfall, desperately huddling together and turning to their gods, trying to placate their obvious anger with some burnt offerings.