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With the bulk of the Ulon Dosi village designed, I spent a little time figuring out some of the last remaining bits, like the yak stables and the hut interior where the crew would be held captive. The interior actually came to me pretty quickly as I had it already in my head to have a sunken pit with a central hearth and lofted sleeping areas around the perimeter.

I also settled on Keyla’s lab exterior and interior pretty quickly, in part because I had a pretty clear picture in my head and in part because, to be honest, I didn’t really care all that much about overworking the design since I knew it was only going to be in the story for a few pages and wasn’t a major setting.

Finally, on this page you’ll see a few sketches I did for the bricks of Crush. I kinda like the look of the banded loaf, since it has that little bit of visual flair. But in the end, I just decided that the plainer it looked, the better, so I went back to it being just a regular blocky nondescript brick.

Here I finally settled on the Ulon Dosi hut design, as well as some hut details (which I apparently abandoned once I got to the actual drawing of the pages!). For me, the breakthrough was in adding the long curving wood beam “ribs” all around the huts that emerge from the rock base and curve up around the edges of the roof. I think those gave the huts a very distinctive look they’d been missing.

For variety, I came up with several different window frame patterns, so that all the huts didn’t look the same. I also realized that in a snowy environment, you wouldn’t want the windows open to the elements all the time, so I designed different kinds of shutters that could be lowered to close the window openings. In the end, I pretty much just cheesed out and drew the same hut over and over again with the open windows. It was just easier that way, and as background buildings, I figured drawing those kinds of shutter details weren’t really necessary.

The next several Sketchbook entries will focus on the Ulon Dosi village, expanding a little on the Commentary I did back on The Big Snow Job #3, Page 21. This page shows the very first sketches I did to kick around some ideas for the look of the huts. I knew from the start that I wanted the huts to be low-tech, round in shape, and made up of some combination of stone, wood, and leather hides. Fairly early on, I settled on the mushroom-shaped overhanging roof, which got me around 80% there for the design. But it was missing that little bit of visual “oomf” so I kept playing with it here and there…