Environment Development 1

Now that I had finished most, if not all of my character work, I had to focus on environments. This would not be too difficult for me considering I already understood perspective. It was more about capturing the style of Edo Japan buildings that I had to be concerned about.

I started by drawing out four different scenes, some of them considering how to put a character in, as one of the final environments must include the character somewhere. At this point, I liked the concept of the first, second and third the most.

Going on to introduce value, I felt that the first thumbnail did not look as well as it could have. I was still happy with number 2 and began to like number 4, whereas I thought that number 3 was a bit boring composition-wise considering most of it was face-on.

I did a few more of the fourth image from different angles as it was suggested to me in a group crit session to consider doing it at eye level. I still felt that the original image had a lot of good composition, and I also thought that the fourth image here had a lot of interesting composition.

So I went forth and picked the four images I thought would look most interesting in colour. I picked a very mute yellow-green and violet to paint under the existing line-work. It was an interesting start but I felt like it needed more.

I tried painting over this time and it was at this point that I realised that I had erred somewhat. In the group crit someone pointed out that I had primarily been focusing on winter so far and I noticed that I had completely forgotten about it. I also felt like, looking at these pieces more closely, that there was not as much in the way of composition than I had originally thought, so I considered a different direction instead.