For the final assignment I need to illustrate around the title Seven days. The interpretation of the title and what to create is up to me.
I figured it would make sense to go with an area of illustration that most interests me and something I hope to specialise in as a future career path. That would involve concept art and character design.
I began the brainstorming process. I wanted to be sure to at least try to develop a few different ideas.
I came up with ideas like taking a single location and drawing it as it changes over seven days, or doing seven postcards of alien planets. I also thought that I wanted to include an element of character design and started coming up with a few different characters.
One of the ideas I was drawn to was doing seven snapshots of different parts of a hero’s journey, like a traditional video game level progression. Something like forest -> ice world -> fire world etc. I liked the idea of world building using concept art for different fantasy locations.
I spent some time coming up with outlines for seven locations.
At this point I wanted to go through my research for the assignment. Throughout the course I showed a lot of the different comics and art books that I love to use for reference, and I thought this would be a good time to go through them again. I didn’t see value in going through each one individually, but I did make a sort of digital collage of the books that I was leafing through while I was brainstorming, all of which are referenced below.
I also looked online for some of my favourite concept artists.
I’ve always loved the concept art of Ralph McQuarrie, famous for coming up with many of the designs in the original Star Wars trilogy (a gallery of his works can be found here). One of the things I like about his work is how he inserts figures to create an impressive sense of scale, and allows the viewer to insert themself into the world he’s created.
I decided that I was going to do seven paintings, sort of representing a loose narrative but more importantly developing and building a fantasy world. I went about drawing my thumbnails for each locale. I also wanted to include figures to contextualise the locations and introduce a bit of a story element.
When I usually do a drawing, I can easily spend upwards of 10 hours working on it, and it just wouldn’t be realistic to spend 70 hours on the artwork alone for this exercise. I decided I would challenge myself to try and complete each painting within an hour. Hopefully this isn’t seen as a cop-out! Because it’s still a large amount of work including prep, and I figured that the purpose of real concept art isn’t always to be highly rendered or in a very finished state, but often more of a loose visual or indication of what direction something might go. I decided to work digitally and work in a standard poster format, A3.
Being the final assignment, I wanted to introduce a new element to it that I hadn’t done in any of the other exercise. So since I was going to be experimenting with speedpainting, I thought I might as well record it so that I could demonstrate my process. I’ve never done this before, so it did take a bit of time to get the right programs and figure out what needed to be done!
Here is the timelapse video uploaded to YouTube:
I thought some of the paintings were more successful than others. I’m not very experienced with landscapes in general but I enjoyed the process. Here are all the finished pieces.
One area I found really challenging was incorporating the figures into the compositions. It was difficult to get the size right, and also to portray them without clashing with the other elements. I’m used to drawing figures in much more detail, so keeping them suitably minimal, and choosing colours that complement the overall piece was pretty tough. I think it’s something that comes with more experience. Some of the pieces were definitely better in this department than others.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the body of work I created for this exercise. I think it represents the kind of work I’d like to do as a working artist. I found this a very rewarding exercise.
References
Dark Souls: Design Works. (2012) Japan: Kadokawa.
McDonnell, C. (2014). Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo. London: Titan Books.
Mignola, M. Hellboy: The Complete Short Stories Volume 1. China: Dark Horse, 2018.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Creating a Champion. (2017) USA: Dark Horse.
Shinkawa, Y. (2018) The Art of Metal Gear Solid I-IV. China: Dark Horse.
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 