PERSONAL PROJECT: RESEARCH

For my Personal Project I chose to do concept art. I wanted to develop my skills in this area and I enjoy working with colour, composition and lighting. I enjoy painting large landscapes with a sense of scale. I had some sort of idea in my mind of what I wanted to show with my concept art pieces. They would be broad scenes with a small figure dwarfed by the scale of the environment. I always find these sort of scenes interesting to look at when I'm browsing ArtStation etc. With this in mind, I was drawn to replicate this feeling in my own project. 

For reference I wanted to look into the art of Star Wars and other sci-fi worlds. I find the desolate nature of many Star Wars landscapes are what make them so appealing to look at. While researching stills and concept art, I found the silhouettes of many spaceship chase scenes to be visually striking. This made me want to incorporate some silhouettes into my own art. The sense of speed in TIE Fighter chase scenes also caught my attention.

I had to decide upon what the landscape itself would look like. After some deliberation, I decided upon a snowy, icy environment. It would be a lonely, desolate planet with little life. I believed that this would create a good atmosphere in my art. With muted colours (greys, blues, purples) I would be able to highlight the character in my pieces. Concept art from "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was good at depicting scenes that I was interested. They played with nice blues and cold colours which really showed off the feeling of coldness and loneliness.

Christopher Nolan's 2014 film 'Interstellar' also piqued my interest. The planet 'Mann' in the film has an interesting rocky landscape affected by a dim fog. They used inspiration from Iceland's rocky landscape and implemented it in their CGI. The planet is uninhabitable and encompassed in frozen clouds which appear to be a constant mist.

Preliminary Sketches

I began to create thumbnail sketches to draft compositions and to get some ideas flowing. I made sure to capture scale and try to get some perspective and depth into them. Once I was happy with some of the sketches I moved onto tonal pieces. These were less vague and more representational of the visual style I would go with. I attempted to tell a sort of story with them, creating a kind of narrative to help me keep consistency. The narrative was to show a spacecraft flying through space to land on an icy, desolate planet. I wanted to keep the spacecraft as a clear silhouette through the snow and mist. After I had finished these tonals I decided to work in colour. I kept a dark colour scheme with some bright purples and greens. However, it wasn't until the last sketch that I found a colour scheme that I found really appealing. This was the final colour scheme I decided on - blues and greys with a bright red.

At this point I wanted to visualise the concept in a 3D form. I created a simple plane in Maya and used the sculpting tools until I had a form I was happy with. I wanted to create a rocky trench formation with snowy hills. Then, I brought this into Substance Painter and textured it with snow and dirt until I was happy. I brought the textures back into Maya, added more depth by duplicating the model and moved onto lighting. The lighting I wanted was a dark grey sky with a hint of blue. With the help of an aiFog and depth of field the scene began to come together. I set up cameras to follow some compositions of the concept sketches and modelled a simple version of a spacecraft. This brought me to adding headlights and tail-lights. Once I had each shot rendered I brought them into Photoshop to add post-effects and editing. I was quite happy with the end result and I felt that the colour scheme that I went with worked well.