Unit 01 Visual Recording

 in this exercise we had to re-imagine a "nice" game character in a more horror type setting, i decided to add the element of horror by making the image more dark and gloomy, making it more deep and adding to the horror theme. i also decided to have princess peach hanging by her arms from the front of bowsers ship to allow for a more tortured look. if you study Mario, you can see he is holding a bloody wrench- the wrench being the tool of Mario's trade but the blood signifies that he has killed to get to where he is and with the intensity of his run showing he is ready for another bloody battle to the death with his arch enemy.

to create the full image i decided to draw each part separately and then piece them together by using layers and slight blending to make the image seem more natural.

original sketches

these were the original sketches pre-photoshop, in order to create the final poster i scanned them into photoshop and traced the lines then to adding colour.

task 2- redesign a popular game character as a popular art work

to begin with i looked at art styles and had really good idea of what i wanted to do with the character i had chosen- sonic the hedgehog.

ive always wanted to try my hand a pointillism but was always decided against it because i knew how large the task was.

i looked at Seurat the famous pointillist who created the famous "an afternoon at la grande jatte"

i realised the depth and attention to detail  that was needed to create a brilliant piece of pointillist art 

this is the final design without any black outline which is true to many pointillist art works- instead of painting the image with an outline you allow the image to form free of lines.

this piece took me around 13-14 hours to complete which is why ive never attempted this type of artwork before but i am very happy with the outcome.

task 3 - develop an original character

i first began with basic thumbnail images to show body types, stance and heights.

then i went on to doing a character mind map, jotting down ideas on what kind of attributes i would want my character to have. looks, backstory, good or evil and possibly why he is the protagonist.

i decided upon the idea of a Neanderthal, battling the elements of ice age Britain to save his family from a fate worse then death.  

we later began a few drawing exercises based on making inanimate things human

this was a fun idea so i began making wacky designs like a fork and a knife fighting

this drawing here shows a progression from bottle with arms to o giraffe lamp post. this got my creative juices going so i began to further this design- so i asked myself a simple question "what is associated with street lights?" my answer, cctv cameras. so i doodled a humanoid cctv camera which i liked the look of so began to expand on it.

i came up with this image, inspired by popular game characters such as the "geth" from popular game franchise "mass effect

and after studying the images of the geth i began to understand how to get the stance and form to look mechanical whilst still keeping to a bi-pedal human look.

i scanned my concept drawing into photoshop and began to trace the image whilst making little tweaks to my design to update and incorporate the designs from the mass effect universe, smoothing out the torso and removing the large talon like blades from his arms and replacing them with a mechanical looking exoskeleton 

i then prcede to add a background to give  it more life

 

in order to make it seem like a robot, i gave it metal cabling for its muscle fibres by simply finding a picture of industrial cable and warping it to fit- 

i then cropped an image of a camera lens for the "face" and added a screen captured image from an alien from the movie aliens to create the ribcage filled with wires and cables

DEVELOP AND ORIGINAL GAME LEVEL INSPIRED BY

 ARTWORKS AND ARTISTS

so first of all for this project i started off by thinking of games that really made an impact on me and instantly i thought of the reboot for devil may cry called imaginatively DMC. i may joke about this but even if the name was nothing "out of the box", the level design was certainly inspiring.

 i had loved playing the original devil may cry games as a kid but i didn't play it for the scenery, in fact i thought it was quite lacking and some levels were deigned poorly (devil may cry 2) but in this reboot they had made the environment beautiful and almost alive when you entered the world of "limbo" and i wanted to recreate this in my game because it captured my imagination, the world being torn apart, walls collapsing on you and hallways becoming longer and longer, it was like the environment was alive, and the grungy/ punky art style made it even better, it was something out of a psychotic circus!

so i started to look at references from the real world for this concept, and i remember from a few years back i saw these street artists in paris that were literally drawing on the pavement to create 3D looking objects on the flat surface of the street.

i searched this on in google images and came back with these two images because they captured what i wanted most, a hellish landscape falling into the earth and the bottom one depicting tormented human forms climbing up from the floor. this is what i wanted, the balance or even change from the normal world we look at to an almost parallel universe that exists with ours but unseen, showing a deformed hellish version of the world we live in.

and then i looked at building design and i thought skyrims medieval towns would be the best as i was thinking that this in-game idea of revealing a hidden dark work could actually be a "rip in space time" revealing the modern world in place of the old medieval world you inhabit. the idea of this being the future of our world would look to be a demonic frightening place to the people of the past. i could use the ghostly effect that DMC used to show humans in the world of limbo

here are a few nordic concept designs by the man who visually created fallout 3 and the nordic game skyrim.

this is a 900 year old nordic building just for a visual aid of the real thing

 the man who created and helped create this stunning concept artwork was called adam adamowicz, he sadly died after a battle with cancer but the visual legacy of these vibrant and jaw dropping landscapes will inspire and live on.

 these are two street view concepts from DMC and skyrim, in creating my level i have to take elements from both and meld them together, or i can use the "street art/ ground illusion art" to create the idea of moving from one plane of time to the other

this is an initial design in photoshop

coloured 

after adding colour i decided to give it a little more life by giving it a sense of depth using the cave like entrance as a foreground and the sky as a background.