Art of Howl's Moving Castle

I have recently had my birthday and my friend got my The Art of Howl's Moving Castle which is one of my favourite movies. As I mentions before about collecting Concept books, this is something very special. It is so refreshing to see the idea looking so clean and naked on the pages and knowing that they will become such great film. I will be using this book for ideas on how to set out a concept sheet etc.

Fox and Creature Concepts

Even though I had choosen to concentrate on the environments of my game concept, I have done a few of the creature designs that would appear in the game. Also, I wanted to look more at the anatomy of the Fox and practice my drawing skills of this animal. So I will put up the images in another post that I have manage to do in my time away from environments. I will explain how the creature would act, move and why they look they way they do.

Inspiration: Dali

Dali is another Artist I wanted to research into alittle because of his extremely surreal environments. I have studied Dali alittle before for my foundation and found him to be very excentric and extreme views on art. Though his personality or views dont change my game concept in the slitest by his visions of environments melting under its own weight is very inspirational. As i have been thinking of how to show some areas of the polluted environments and Dali's images just came to mind.

Inspiration: Beksinski

Over the past few days I have been trying to come up with a visual style for the infected wildlife from the pollution. Obviously I have the mutated idea in mind as it is a natural response to a foreign body/ virus growing with living tissue. The problem with this idea is the animals/creatures would look too gruesome which is not effect I am trying to get. Showing too much would then fall into Resident Evil style of infections and mutation. These animals have to feel and look as though the pollution is apart of its own body and it isn't thirsting to kill etc, but just living as any other life form does.

One ideal style I have been using was inspired by an artist by the name of Zdzisław Beksinski, a renowned Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor. The images I came across are published in a book called 'The Fantastic Art of Beksinski' by James Cowan. His painting style expressing images in a fantasical surrealistic environments in a dream like state. I have always been a fan of surrealist artist such as H.R.Giger and Francis Bacon so to find Beksinski on a random search is extremely lucky and from his works I can say I am a fan.

In relation to my work, I can see certain aspects of certain paintings which I can relate back to my own. Even from his use to colour which the environments are chocked in a thick dirty mist of browns and dark oranges. This gives the idea of how the pollution should look in my concepts and is something to play around with. Not only that but the way he has depicted certain animal like forms, how they look to be woven into existence rather than birthed. It is fascinating to get such a creative idea from his images.





http://www.beksinski.pl/

My next blog will be my concept ideas for the wildlife/ creatures inspired by his work which I will compare the images above.

Interactive Wall Frames

When thinking about how to make my images interactive, I had this idea of a wall within the house which would have pieces of concept work in frames. The idea would be to click on the framed images to enlarge them, click to go back and click on another frame on the wall. The image below is the concept for this backdrop.

Okami Art Work book

Recently I have decided to try and find as many video game art books as possible to go with my animation art books. This because I want to understand better just how concept artist progress and show their work in a professional and coherent manner. Now there are a great many but I came across the art works for Okami which is one of my favourite games.

I can say with no hesitation just how amazing this book is. It is very in keeping with the came and from page to page it progresses just like a story. It was designed to read in the Japanese style of starting at the back and through to the front. It is all extremely well annotated and presented. Full of concept art, level design sketches, character reference models and even some mangas.
One touch I like about it in particular is the some amount of interactivity is has. Apart from turning the pages, reading and studying the images, there are little numbers on each page of the book. These number correspond to a disc number and track number which is for the OST for the game. I thought this was a fantastic touch to make the book seem more connected to the reader. Listening to the tracks that add emotions to the images on the page.

From going through the book a many of times, it give me food for thought on how to actually present and design my pages of concept art.

PDP

Today is PDP day. Decided to add my trip to Hong Kong so this should be fitting for PDP