a final composition

After feeling completely comfortable with the design of the main aspects of my environment (the landscape, the Bonobo camp & the building peaks) I wanted to take create a final painting.

I didn't rely heavily on photo references this time around although I have come to terms with the legitimacy of the method, the reason I didn't use it too much this time is that I felt that I could just paint the camp easier without looking for the best reference, I did however use a photograph as a foundation for the environment, although it was fairly heavily modified to create the tone and composition that I wanted.

Sample

I created a sketch before starting this painting or even finding the above photo so I already had an idea of the composition I was going for so I had to change a number of things: first and most noticeably I change the resolution significantly and my painting is more 'widescreen' as I wanted to capture a certain sense of a 'landscape' that I achieved in my first photo bash and had since neglected. I also ended up changing the path of the river, in the photo graph it bends to the left in the middle of the image which I felt restricted the sense of scale and also harmed the composition with the camp (being my focus) on the right. So I added in the river to run into the mountains and lead the the composition more naturally like that where it would curve around the mountains leading the eyes back to the camp. 

I used another tower building way in the foreground in order to add a sense of scale and also add context to the painting as previously everything was small and in the distance. The Bonobo perched on his doorway adds a reference for scale for the similarly perched bonobo on the doorway of the distant tower which I felt would otherwise be unidentifiable. I also used this to add further to the composition and lead attention back to the main camp and add further sense of scale and vastness to the landscape.

sketch

Despite being a culmination of my previous design work this painting still serves a purpose as concept art, I introduced an idea of smaller pyramidic buildings surrounding the main tower, as I felt that the tower alone wouldn't be a convincing camp. For the first time really I placed the bonobos in the environment. I also toyed around with that old idea of the white scrawling graffiti that I added earlier as a 'decoration' on the buildings with the same purpose of warning and defining territory. Then I added white paint around the doors too to fit aesthetically with that and since they looked like boring 'slits' before which is essentially what I wanted them to be but it lacked character.

revisit an old drawing

After feeling a bit more confident in my tonal drawing now I decided to revisit one of the older drawings this time using pencil for the initial drawing and the lines. There isn't a whole lot to say as it's just a revisitation of a drawing I've already explained, but I think I have improved the composition. 

I've also gotten more confident through the course of this project in 'placing' the main object in my environment. I used to be overwhelmed by the potential of the environment in which I place the main object but I've gotten more comfortable with keeping it simple and in this case it is a building peak on the edge of a cliff so I have been able to really just keep it simple.

Previous version for reference

A complete illustration

After my preview drawing and having established the design of the bonobo settlements I felt confident in creating a composition that included everything so far, the settlement and the human ruins. I decided against my previous decision to have the human ruins in a state of having been almost entirely decayed. I wanted some of the old details visible as I felt that it would be aesthetically more pleasing and I had in mind an idea that the passing of humans and their legacy (the robots) would almost be religious, in a way humans were a god that created life and transcended leaving only behind the monoliths of their past civilisations, so in that way the details of the cathedrals would be important.

Again I edited the image in photoshop as I didn't want to just leave it as a black and white line drawing, this time I actually move an object (the building on the left) as I felt it was too far out of the image and ruining the composition, it flows better now closer in. I went with a similar colour as the other image for consistency, even though I did experiment with another bluer colour, but it looked like an alien planet o something so I used the older version.

Sketching in Chapelfield Gardens

Today as part of life drawing I went to chapelfield to create some pencil sketch studies of the natural things in the park such as trees and plants.

First I did some quick studies of the trees around the park.


After finishing the studies I created an original composition based on something in the park, I chose a building in the center of the park that I immediately felt could be adapted to my concept.

I increased the scale in the style of the towers in my game so far and changed the aesthetic to fit.

I added tiers of living space in the style of the previous drawings, with small harder to access rooms at the 'roof' and a more luxury sheltered group of buildings underneath, the idea was that it would have been build onto an old human building but that was kind of lost, the platform is kind of just generic now.

I added some tone in photoshop but didn't shade at all this time around, I made a conscious effort to add realistic shading in the pencil sketch so I decided to let that speak for itself and simply add tone to separate the foreground and the background. I also added some very small modifications such as the support ropes* which I made more obvious and changed the positions to make them more even and aid in the composition. I also added a sepia tone using the 'colour balance' menu red gradient just for style, then added red to the banners to accentuate them (although I haven't gone over the top I felt that decoration would be important in the design of the tower..

*support ropes are there mostly for aesthetic purposes and for balance, but could be used by the bonobos as access.

I'm very happy with the development of this sketch, I felt like the overall shapes of the towers so far have been very blocky rectangular and uninspired, it actually looks interesting and unique now.

painting on the initial sketch

I felt confident that I had a slightly better idea of the general value placement from the last photo sampled painting that I did so I wanted to have another go at painting one of my sketches to test it and also develop the idea.

The first thing I did was just to block in the very general mid tones with the intention of adding shadows, and small amounts of extreme lights and darks (high lights and the darkest shadows used sparingly so as not to create a muddy or flat painting)

I started to add shadows by actually taking into account cast shadows and the direction of the lighting and I think this is an improvement from my last attempt already, it already looks more real. I also used to ignore what was happening outside of the composition, it occurred to me that there would be trees or something behind the camera and the shadows they cast would actually be visible, those shadows also serve to balance the composition.

After finishing the shading and adding highlights I was happy enough to actually try adding some colour to the drawing, I have still left the lineart for now becusae I never intended for this to be a complete painting but I may actually go ahead and blow this up to a larger canvas and polish this as a part of my finished work, I'm pretty pleased and I think I have enough of a foundation to start working on a finished painting, and it would be nice to have an actual painting to show as a culmination of all of this work, I'd like to add a bit more colour though as it's just monotone now.

developing the Bonobo settlements

Using the reference I posted previously I created a rough sketch

I wanted it to look primitive but not tribal, as I felt that it would be generic and I wanted give a sense that this world is developing, not some perpetual state of primitive tribal culture. I really liked the image with all of the different shaped and size buildings in this tower:

It has sort of the look of a ramshackle tower where many people could live, I am sort of sticking to the idea that the bonobos have this sex culture so they would all be very close and having them all live in a tower with close open rooms would enforce that, and I also wanted to preserve some of the 'monkey' qualities of the apes and so an open access tower where the bonobos would climb around outside to the desired rooms would work with that, there are bars below each door for climbing access.

So I used this tower as a the main reference for the architecture and then added an aesthetic more similar to that of the Monster Hunter games that I wanted to use for inspiration, it's that kind of lively and colourful aesthetic.

Based on this drawing I tried to make a painting:

I'm not happy with it at all, I think I lost the aesthetic completely and in the way I painted it I lost a lot of the details and architecture that I liked. 

I returned to the photo sampling method that I had been successful with in the past, and I took the tower image above and another that I thought would ground it into the environment and worked from there.

This is just an early stage where I placed the two objects on the canvas and began to integrate them and add lighting. At this point the lighting was arbitrary and inconsistent. that was a problem I was having and was probably holding me back in my value studies before; I wasn't putting enough emphasis on shading and lighting.

I saved some progress shots but this time around I will just skip right to the end, I think I fixed the lighting and the image is better for it, I also had a much easier time painting using the lighting as a guide, there are a few things I am unhappy with actually such as the lightly coloured roofs which look unfinished that I will probably work into later.

One of the things I was pleased about was how I managed to use photo samples in this image but not leave too much evidence of them in the end, the shapes are sill entirely there but I did modify them and I sampled colours in such a way that things are actually coloured a lot more differently and vibrantly than they looked when the photos were positioned initially. I used a separate image of clouds but I had to actually cut that up and distort it in order to work with the perspective, I also added some atmospheric perspective toward the top of the tower to give a sense of scale. 

One of the other things I found was that the composition wasn't great from just placing the objects so I had to actually make an active effort to creating a pleasing and functional composition while painting, such as the clouds, the positioning of the buildings and the 'pathway' at the bottom of the images which balances the composition.

Taking a turn to make the game more colourful

I started out with the intention to make the game look colourful and fresh and I kind of lost that with my inspiration of Dark Souls, while I do still want Dark Souls in influence the tone of the game I want some more lively and colourful designs.

Another game that is like Dark Souls in Monster Hunter, just by chance I recently bought an art book 'Monster Hunter Illustrations, and in a time of severe art block and lack of inspiration it sparked something.

Monster Hunter has this really great design where the villages are very colourful and lively while the wilderness areas where you fight monsters are more natural and desolate, which is an atmosphere that I would quite like to emulate, I have already established that desolate and natural wilderness with the remains of human architecture littered around the environment.

Since starting to focus in on the Bonobo camps I started to really lose inspiration and I was drawing blanks most of the time, I didn't really have any main influence but now I think I have somethign to start from. 

I was always sure that the bonobo tribes would be very colourful and flaunty; it's something I didn't intend to touch on until I start character designs later but the Bonobo (of today) have highly sexualised communities, they are very liberal with sex and use it almost as currency and conflict resolution, I intend to have this play a significant role in their evolution as they develop increasingly intricate cultures based on this economy of sex. 

I collected some reference first of some screenshots and concept art of villages in Monster Hunter to use as inspiration.

From looking at these images I feel like I have a better idea of what kind of aesthetic to shoot for now, but so that I'm not just copying the monster hunter style villages, I wanted to rather use that as a foundation to find my own references to use, for now I just had a look in my existing reference folder which is just a folder where I put images I saved for potential future reference and it comes in handy for times like this where I just need quick inspiration.

This colourful and exuberant village design also helps distance the aesthetic from the generic brown and grey post apocalypse, and enforce the idea of a new world and a fresh start.

zbrush hut

I wanted to try and incorporate zBrush concepting into this project and I thought the best way to do that would be to create some assets for the bonobo camp as sculptures.

I wasn't really happy with the freedom in creating somethign complex like a camp using sculpting tools, I used a reference of a celtic settlement hut and tried to create somethign a little more natural looking using that as a guide. I'm not particularly happy with the outcome, it looks a bit generic and I want to try and think of something a bit more creative looking, and also fit with the aesthetic I have established already.

 perhaps I will incorporate the human city remains into it more but then it is going into a more generic post apocalyptic route. I could make it more primitive, like the bonobos are using the remains as caves, perhaps they aren't quite as civilised as I originally intended and they are actually somewhat feral and living in caves, but still using weapons.

focussed painting

I have decided to take the photo sampling method a little further as I feel like it's the method that will give me the best work for now.

 In the last painting it was a bit unguided, I didn't necessarily have a vision other than placing some building ruins into a highlands setting*, and it does the job but it doesn't really tell a story.

*I have been always been looking for pictures of 'the highlands' when I look for reference for the environment, I'm not really sure why but it just feels right to me, I think the atmosphere is perfect for capturing the Dark Souls aesthetic and it's also very fresh and natural which is one of the important things for my setting.

I decided to take a more focussed attempt this time, I wanted to take a similar environment but this time zoom into a specific area and try and give a bit more of a context this time; I would be taking the idea of the bonobos using the ruins as a place to live.

Samples

I took a landscape photograph (one of the same ones I used last time) and place a roughly cropped segment from a photograph of a church, then I adjusted the colour using the colour balance tool in photoshop to ground it in the environment, I wasn't too careful with losing edges as I intended to use the photo sample purely for colour/value and texture.

I painted over the whole thing to add consistent and dramatic lighting and to make the building the decayed and incorporated into the environment.

finally I added some finishing details (albeit still rough) to the painting and adjusted the colours and levels for dramatic purposes and I still have the Dark Souls aesthetic in mind as inspiration. I added a figure into the scene which is an early idea for what the bonobo tribesmen might look like as a size reference and also context for the painting, as well as adding some territorial/warning graffiti onto the church exterior to illustrate how it is lived in by the bonobos.

I wanted to also reflect on how I feel about photo sampling now. I was initially very against the idea but I think that is my pride getting in the way, I'm annoyed with myself that I don't have the skills yet to create a painting like this without 'cheating'. However I am beginning to understand the value of photo sampling as simply a very useful technique for getting an idea from your mind to the canvas and there is actually a lot of freedom as long as I use the reference sparingly and don't try to rely on it too much, I may continue to just use this technique from this point onward.

I think I have established the overall aesthetic of the game to a satisfactory extent now: I have a setting and I'm happy with how the old human buildings fit in with the new world environment so now I would like to focus in on how the bonobo camps would look and create a final painting using photo sampling based on concepts from now, as I am basing this environment on the highlands I may look at reference from Celtic tribal settlements.

sketchbook drawing and photobashing

One of the difficulties I have in environment painting is in getting the foundation set up, I don't really like drawing digitally and I find it hard to really get a good foundation for a painting purely by painting, I feel like I need to set up a line art first. I decided to do a drawing of a simple environment in my sketchbook in the same kind of scenario as before, a buried church spire but this time with some context, I added a doorway into some lair with animal skeletons and sticks around the outside as a warning, this give some kind of an environmental in-game context.

I don't feel as though the painting stage was successful at all, I just find it too difficult to get a good value range, I started with black and white to keep it simple and even then I had trouble, I'm going to just leave it like this for now and do a bit more practice before coming back to it.

After that I also did some experimentation with a new method again, similar to one I did before this time I used a photo-bashing method:

 I took numerous photographs and sampled them over the painting and modified them enough that the composition was changed from the original photographs, I then painted over the majority of the canvas while colour picking in order to hide most of the detail, while letting some get through for texture.

I then added in the church buildings into the landscape, choosing samples that I thought would fit into the colours of this painting so far. 

As the lighting scenarios were different for each of the church buildings that I sampled I then painted over them to make the lighting match and ground them into the environment further. then I added details to finalise the composition. 

I added the sprout as a compositional device, also to add colour and to allude to the concept of the idea that while humanity has gone the world is not yet dead and life will continue to flourish, which is a core theme of my idea.

I'm not sure how I feel about the photo-bashing method, so far the outcome has been much more passable than any of my other attempts so far but I can't shake the feeling that it's really just cheating and may be a very limited tool, but perhaps this is just what I need considering my weakness for colour and value for now, perhaps if I don't rely on it too much as a crutch it may not be so bad, and my best option so far. After all it's concept art not a fine art piece.

Samples

Visit to the Bridewell Museum in norwich

As a timetabled part of the course I went to the Bridewell museum with my group. I took the opportunity to look around and try and find some inspiration for my environment, I figured I would be more likely to find inspiration for assets rather than the environments themselves so with that in mind I had a look around.

I drew a heater and an old decorative pillar, I thought I could potentially merge them to create sort of a futuristic looking building with some elements of old styles which I think was successful, of course the whole building would never be visible in any of my environments but having some idea of how they should look should help in contextualising things.

I also created a sort of church spire buried in dirt in Maya so that I could bring it into zbrush later and start creating some more detailed concepts and potentially paint over them later. In the end I discovered that the basic window shapes I added in maya were actually a nuisance and it would be better to just bring a very very basic spire shape with no details at all into zbrush so I will redo that later after I experiment with photo bashing.


One more thing that I have been putting off that I really need to consider is the level of decay in the building peaks, I have been lazy so far and just been painting them as though they were almost fresh buildings with bits broken off but in reality after tens or hundreds of thousands of years there would be much more extreme decay, maybe they would just look like rock at that point with shards of glass sticking out at points perhaps.

Painting with a reference

In the last painting I did I wasn't too true to my original concept which was to have still archaic buildings to be peaking from the ground, and the actual landscape itself was pretty boring (just green hills for miles) This time I actually took some context for the setting which was a sort of 'highlands' setting, I took a reference and then used that for a guide for the colours but this time not placing ot colour picking at all.

Again I'm not particularly happy with this, while it's better than the one before I don't like how the colours look at all, they are not convincing and the whole thing is lacking in texture so that is something I want to work on, I did make some progress in learning how to paint clouds though, I think it is the first time I ever convincingly painted them so I'm happy with that.

Unfortunately I did lose my reference but I did use one for this. As I mentioned before my understanding of value placement in a landscape is poor so that is going to be my next step in terms of technical practice, and in developing my concept and technique I will also try to create some photobash concepts. I have found some images that look like they could fit some building ruins in there nicely.

http://www.scotlinetours.co.uk/uploads/tour_picture/image/52331a561d924ed7e0000520/large_11-Scotline_Tours-Isle_of_Skye-Scotland-West_Highlands_Tour.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/2001-ScotlandHighlands-TheQuirang2.jpg