Saturday 29 November 2014

08 // Back on the Wagon - part 1

After a period of self analysis and relentless study, I've attacked this project with renewed vigour and have made major progress in the digital painting side of things.

For the first part of the project - to produce a piece of artwork that will portray an outdoor environment from the Death Dealer novel - I chose to focus on the area referred to as "The land of Smoking Skies". Cheesy.

So this place is described as being a land of active volcanoes from which black smoke arises, to hang in the air. James Silke scarcely describes the environment, but does make mention of black lava staircases leading into the largest of the volcanoes (the home of Cobra, the Queen of Serpents).

With this information, I set to sketching out some black and white thumbnails to get some kind of an idea for which direction I should steer this first illustration. 

My initial intent is to make good use of the widescreen format of feature films to present a grand-scale establishing shot, which will include barren landscapes interspersed with mountainous terrain. Due to the nature of the black and white imagery, I discovered that it can be quite difficult to portray lava oozing from the mountains without them looking like snow-covered crags, therefore the magma side of things will be left until the colouring stage.

My first greyscales are thus:





In order to produce these 6 images, I'd pretty much been studying environment art from scratch. I was still getting used to digital painting, finding myself becoming confused by the variety of techniques to improve workflow and efficiency. At first, I thought these 6 were decent enough to be taken further, though something bothered me about them and I couldn't quite put my finger on what the problem was.

After taking a day's break from the thumbs, I returned with fresh eyes. This time, I figured that two things were wrong with most of them: a) my technique sucked, and b) none of them really captured the sense of scale and depth which I was aiming for. Back to the drawing board.

After a longer break from Uni work than I would've liked, I focused on getting my technique established before returning to thumbnailing. I'm not especially great at digital painting, so in between lots of study of environment artwork and trying to get a grasp of the fundamentals, I set about getting more experience with the Wacom, and really streamlined my workflow. Increasing the efficiency of my process allowed me to learn faster than before.

Here are a few of the sketches I produced during that time. These show studies of rock formation, lighting, and general painting styles that I hope to utilise for the foreseeable future.



With my improved technique, I was now happy that I'd levelled up enough to go another round with the greyscale thumbnails.

No comments:

Post a Comment