I've selected three illustrations which I intend to analyse in order to better understand some of the thought processes and techniques that, when understood and applied, should allow me to produce better environment designs of my own. Some of these I already know, but from this recent study I've been made aware of several techniques that can help to steer the viewer from one part of an image to another, while providing a narrative that supports and enhances the illustration as a whole.
For the most part - at this stage - I've chosen to focus on videogame-related artwork. This shouldn't be detrimental to my choice of film design as a project category though, as the artwork generated for both fields are so similar in style, execution and grandeur as to be one and the same (especially for the Fantasy genre). If anything, I would say that focusing my attention towards game artwork would actually yield greater rewards, with the game industry definitely taking charge of the genre at this point in time.
In a later post I will turn my attention to artwork created specifically for the movie industry, but in the meantime, here are my studies of a few of my favourite pieces of environment artwork of late.
First up is an image by Juhani Jokinen, a concept artist working for RedLynx. This piece is a photo-bash environment that utilises several important fundamental skills for arranging the composition and leading the viewer through the design.
Next is a piece of concept artwork for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Similar to the last piece, the artist who created this image has a superb grasp of the fundamentals, yet pushes the piece even further, creating a narrative that flows throughout the scene. The image as a whole is rich in details, with a sense of grandeur that compels the viewer to spend a long time studying it.
Finally for this post, I have a piece of Sci-Fi concept artwork by the artist Stefan Morell. Despite being of a different genre than my intended focus, I've included this piece as it uses techniques that will benefit me in my creation of Fantasy environments; using 3-point perspective, he creates huge architectural designs whose scale are further emphasised by the use of atmospheric perspective. This in itself is a valuable lesson to learn. By applying this to my own scenes, I should be able to produce larger-than-life, epic structures within my own illustrations.
It took a while, but I've finally decided upon the brief that I will tackle for this part of the course. After being stuck between choosing from so many exciting briefs, I eventually settled with "Concept Design 1; Scene Design for Film", my focus directed toward the Death Dealer series of books by James Silke.
The reason that this brief stood out to me is that as a kid, I was brought up on the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan movies, so the fantasy genre has always been quite dear to my heart. In some ways, while the genre has blossomed in many different directions of late, I kinda miss the old ways - movies like Krull, Clash of the Titans, Sinbad, etc all had a real nice grasp of fantasy as being simply fantasy. Nowadays however, there's a need for fantasy storytelling to be grounded in some kind of reality - alternate or not. Things have to make sense and be explainable/believable for the audience to like it and/or agree with it. I get it, but I don't like that approach. I miss the old ways, where stuff just happened, regardless of it making much sense or being physically possible.
And so, upon hearing of the Death Dealer series, I knew this would be the right choice for me. Combined with environment design, I figure this brief will supply me with plenty of opportunity to enhance my skills in set design and digital painting, based around a subject that is sure to inspire me immensely.
My first task was to pick up a copy of the book. Through Amazon I managed to source out the first two novels; Prisoner of the Horned Helmet and Lords of Destruction. On my daily commute to Abertay, I'll read through both of these and pick out some key scenes that I think will be worth portraying.
As well as these books, my preliminary research will also include looking at shots from the Game of Thrones show and the more recent Conan movie.
Recommended by another tutor, I picked up a copy of Setting the Scene, a book that goes into great detail about the techniques and thought processes behind scene-building for animation, film and games. This could prove to be an invaluable resource when combined with all the other resources I have amassed of late. Oh, and not forgetting the art book for Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2 game, which has a heap of incredible concept and production images of environments that will provide serious inspiration for my own project.
Finally - for this segment - I will shortly be placing my order for some of Gnomon Workshop's educational videos. Most notable are a series of videos by Feng Zhu, which focus on his techniques for producing environment drawings and paintings for film and game production. I selected his videos over all the others as lately my style of artwork has tended towards linework driven, high detail, dynamic compositions, which is also a favored approach by Feng. It is an industry-recognised style that I intend to pursue for the foreseeable future, therefore it made sense for me to apply it to this project too.
