Ideas for Final Project

For our final project our group discussed having sets of gear trains that would be made out of clear gears and visible from the side. These gears would have an image on them which, when they aligned would become viewable as that image. otherwise when the gears aren't aligned the viewer will simply see shapes and designs. For the images to use one of our group member suggested images of the Milwaukee skyline.

I really liked this idea, especially with the water in front of the buildings that gives such great colors and shapes.

 

I was experimenting with how we might layer the gears. I posted a few comments in the picture. 

I felt like we could push this idea further though, and so I tried to think of how we could do this.
I thought it would be cool to have more layers of things going on besides just the buildings and the water. I thought maybe we could add a background image.
I toyed with ideas of what to use for this and I settled on trees or jungle.
I like the idea of the city of Milwaukee eroding away and becoming overgrown by nature. It speaks to time and our relationship with the earth and possibly how civilizations eventually move on and the cities are taken back by nature:

 So I did a few quick sketches in Photoshop to get an idea:

With this one I had in mind just the idea of layering civilizations that are separated by so much time and space. 
Obviously these are very low resolution and I think that we would do some sort of sketch or vectorization of this, but I wanted to see how it might look.

I like the idea of drawing the city as a normal city on one side and as it progresses across it slowly erodes and trees grow over it.