It's like having the movie Dune in your drink.

So in painting today we ironically didn't touch the paints, but did landscape studies using graphite powder in preparation for our landscape paintings due in a few weeks. Combining a few reference pictures I came up with this:

I'll be making some colour studies based on this using photoshop and eventually in real paint (remember that stuff?). It's a sand desert, though as it is it wouldn't be hard to convert to an ice desert. But as the title for this post suggests, I'm headed for the hotter variant. The scene is supposed to have a man-made object in the foreground, I'm thinking either adding a wrecked plane, oil well, generic hut or just rip off a Wind Trap from the Dune series (link is NOT my work). Anyways this exercise was great fun and I'm much more confident about painting dunes now.