CIARAN SHARP FILMAKING
Creating Concept Art Digitally
Concept Art Analysis
Analysing two professional concept artists was a great way to develop my own ideas for my upcoming concept art as well as see how a successful concept artist uses composition and lighting to emphasise character and environment design. When choosing concept artists to research it gave me a good idea of the variety of mediums concept artists can use, this inspired me to try some different styles when creating my concept art.
Design Synopsis
Water Harvesting is a dangerous industry, the smoke produced to gather the very last of the world's water devastates the environment, leaving the population having to wear masks and protective equipment to avoid skin combusting in the highly acid air. The higher class still exist, living among large glass greenhouses, full of alien plants and clones of themselves. This is where the plot for my film begins, a young astronaut who crashes unto the planet, will he survive amongst the hundreds of cloned elite upper class.
Development Sketches
I was given the brief to design an interior, exterior, character and two props that fit in a sci-fi setting. These are my development sketches, they are used to show my original sketches for my designs. I drew inspiration from artists like Ralph McQuarrie and sci-fi media, such as Love Death and Robots on Netflix. These are rough sketches with pencil, they are used to show the basic information such as composition, however, they don't show detail such as colour or texture. I used annotations on some to further explain specific working parts of props and such.
Final Designs
This is my exterior concept art, with this I am trying to portray a line of water extractors. These giant black towers gather the very last of the world's diminished water supply, polluting the atmosphere whilst doing so. Here I tried to show a parallel between a large industrialised area, and a rocky, natural area, occupied by the filthy rich in glass greenhouses. I used photoshop, software which I never used for digital graphics before. I tried to create a painterly style, while also photo bashing elements such as the rocky cliffs on the right.
This is my exterior, a sci-fi greenhouse for the filthy rich to live and clone themselves. I used photoshop for this and experimented with using a painted style, much like McQuarrie. I am not too comfortable with the paint like medium so I value the practice time, however, I feel that the style I went for isn't consistent with other pieces and doesn't give the dark gritty tone I was looking for .
This is one of my props, this is a boot for water factory workers, I strayed from my original design as I felt it was too flashy for boots and chose a plain design to help me practice the painterly style on photoshop. Unfortunately, I think this is my weakest piece and could do with more development on the texture and adding more details to make it more visually interesting to look at.
This is the weapon for my character, it is designed to harvest water from the ground and convert it into high pressured steam to shoot, as well as a blade for fighting. I used procreate to draw this, and I think it shows how much more comfortable I am with this software over photoshop. It benefits from a variety of textures and there isn't much I would change about this piece.
This is my character design and it's my proudest piece of work. It is one of the first pieces I did, so it benefits from me having more enthusiasm as well as good use of texture and colour. I think it fits believably into the fictional world I envisioned and wouldn't want to change anything about it, as I am proud of it just the way it is.
Evaluation
Overall this unit was a fun experience, I felt confident going into it that I would excel at this task, however after finishing it I have come out looking at it with regret. I started this unit by completing research about professional concept artists. This was a great help to expand my perspective when approaching the unit, it gave me the confidence to try new ideas, however, I feel like I should have compared my original research to a more diverse variety of ideas and mediums from other artists. This would have served to completely widen the scope of my ideas and allowed me to come up with some more unique ones. Next, I have my design synopsis, this is a brief summary of the story I created, in this fictional world my concept art is based. When thinking of my sci-fi story, I should have developed some ideas and themes further, this would have allowed me to design my concept art to be more realistic to the world in which it is set. Following this are my original development sketches, I am proud of my effort to effectively show important detail, composition and texture through the medium of pencil and pen. I think they accurately communicate my vision for the direction I want to take them. Finally, I have my final designs which conjure a mixed bag of emotions for me. I am proud of the detail and realism I achieved with my character design, the gun prop and exterior design. However, my concept for the interior and the boot prop seem to me to be less consistently designed. Although this was due to my wanting to try new styles, and I am happy I did try, I think they look less realistic and therefore less effective. Overall I feel like excelled in creating realistic sci-fi concept art, however, this isn't the case for all my work with some of my concept art looking less realistic and less consistent with the other work. I am happy with all my work before the designing and my initial sketches but feel I should have spent more time keeping my drawings consistent, but I struggled with keeping my enthusiasm the same for each piece.