Back on Track! Back with a knack!

And we’re back-first week of uni, with a plethora of briefs to choose from! The year has begun with A bang and we we’re given that specialise in areas that everyone is happy with. For me this is a perfect time to play around with all areas of environment art, especially stylised art.

One of the first briefs that caught my eye was the semi-stylised environment. The brief was to basically create a small environment on the other side of a gate. The gate was given to us as basis to construct the environment; however we where then informed that it could be a portal to somewhere else and does not need to correlate with the initial gate.

This got me thinking about how on the course I have only come across environments that are realistic and re-hashed year after year. So I have decided that for my final year and for my portfolio that I would like to create environments that are stylised and creative.

Back to the brief!

My initial idea was to create a moodboard with various ideas that would look visually interesting styles, maybe a Disneyesque styled environment. However I decided to look at black and white environments that have a hand drawn style to them.

The off perspective, semi-realistic style was inspiring and one of the most influential ideas I had. The images I collected had a strong composition and portray a narrative. Most of the images see quite busy, however the heavy, chaotic mood is what I want to achieve. Nevertheless, these images seem to have a very subtle mood t them, something I too wish to portray.

The mood is shown throughout the images, tone and contrast. Almost all of them use complementary colours that are harmonious and expressive. I would like to express the style WITHOUT colour. Therefore using tone shading to my advantage.

So from here I decided to look at art that only uses tone and contrast, a hand-rendered style.

I studied the works of Ian Mcque and various other artists and found the following; most of them have a busier tone have a busier tone compared to the last moodboard yet has a sense of harmony due to the contrast between black and white as well as the fact that it’s almost cell shaded; However the chaotic pen strokes hide or mask this, therefore the best way seems to be creating contrast between shadows.

Moving forward I decided to look at games that are cell shaded yet are also black and white.

The first game I looked at was White Night. The neo-noir, gritty crime perfectly fits the black and white style. However the black is overpowering nevertheless it fits the game and has a fluid look.

Madworld is a smash“em” which too has an overpowering black, yet due to amount of assets used, it is too chaotic and busy. I believe the lack of tone seems to be the main issue here.

Escape plan is a puzzle platformer that uses tone to create a subtle contrast between black and white. This gives it a calm mood to the game, however due to the overpowering black it still seems like a horror game. Finally the cat lady, now this game falls into the same pitfalls... and more. The lighting is amazing and creates mood perfect for the genre, however it’s still too dark.

(Add moodboard)

I then proceeded to create a mind-map of what assets I could have in the scene. From here I looked at places that I could reference. One that always stood out to me was Balat, Istanbul

The city itself is on a hill and due to the structure of the buildings it’s compact and small, thus giving it a busy look. As well as the fact that it’s quite a colourful city it stands out drastically when put next to most modern cities. The buildings also are quite comical in style, giving them the semi-realistic look.