Invisible Cities: Diomira Exploration

This is one of the ideas I had for the establishing shot (although I'm not sure it could be classified as such because of the foreground). Even though it would still need a lot of tweaking in term of lighting, I feel like something has been lost in translation between the thumbnail and the bigger painting. Scaling the latter down has made some flaws more visible to me as well: the lamps look distracting, the tree doesn't really pop up, the rock/canyon doesn't look very smartly placed and is too bright. Because many things don't feel right, I think I should move onto a new composition. Maybe having the sun setting down behind the city would create a more interesting mood? I'm all about developping new possibilities. In the meantime, I'm still trying to catch the feeling of nostalgia Calvino talked about in the extract, but its personal nature makes it a real challenge. Hope I'll get closer to it with every new concept sketch!