#microworlds

September 15, 2021 | “Egyptian Desert” Microworld by Benny Productions

Lately I have been watching YouTube videos by the digital artist Benny (Benny Productions), and one of his Photoshop projects is to create microworlds, which look like 3D “worlds,” like cubes taken out of the earth. In one of his YouTube videos, titled “This is NOT 3D SOFTWARE? | How I Create ‘Microworlds’,” he describes his process of creating these microworlds in Photoshop. The microworld he creates is the “Egyptian Desert.”

He takes stock images and “fits” them into a template cube image. I assume the underground portion of the microworld may not be accurate, though (I say this not knowing what kind of rock is under the Sahara Desert even, so why am I even commenting? Heh.). 

According to Geography’s “The Geology of the Sahara”:

Named for the Arabic word for desert, sahra, this vast region sits on top of the warped, deformed, and folded African Shield, composed of some of the oldest rocks on the planet, forged when life was limited to single-celled creatures living in the oceans. These older rocks underlying the present-day Sahara are mostly granite, schist, or gneiss, all mixtures of igneous and metamorphic rocks forged deep beneath the surface. The rocks that form the African Shield were laid down near the surface, buried, remelted, re-fused, and returned finally to the surface. The African Shield comprises the hard bedrock of Africa and has held the continent together during the hundreds of millions of years that it has been split, shifted, twisted, and rammed into Europe as a result of the movement of the crustal plates.

What all of that looks like from a cross-sectional perspective, I have no clue.

You can see all the microworlds he has made on his website. The Egyptian Desert is #10.