[Influences] City influences

For my new series I'm working on, I want to make the city vibrant and neon light filled. Below are a series of images I've collected from across the internet as visual reference:

MIRROR'S EDGE

Mirror's Edge is an EA videogame set in a futuristic, heavily stylized city. I particularly like the clean, colour coordinated sections of the city, as shown in the images below. The game often uses the (I feel as if I mention this a lot) blue/orange contrast well to highlight certain areas of the city. As the game is so fast paced (first person free running) this was a very clever design aspect as the player can take in the important details pretty fast as they leap from rooftop to rooftop. This environment style will be effective for me for the same reasons. In the static scenes I can have a variety of colours and details, but then in the heavily action based scenes, I can use colour effectively to draw attention to important areas.

REAL WORLD EXAMPLES

A big part of the environment I'm hoping to create is all about the lights and advertising. For examples. I've been looking at areas such as Tokyo and New York. The variety of colours can create a very high contrast background. The only trouble I think I'll face is that the backgrounds will distract people from the characters. Below are some examples I found:

ART EXAMPLES

The pictures below have given me some ideas about how to stop the bckgrounds being distracting, while still including the high contrast feel.The cities below stick to a small number of key colours for the glowy details. Once again, the blue/orange contrast is visible in some of these.