Epic City Project hand in (part 1)

Research:

I started with some research into the kind of style I wanted to go for with this project. I had some rough ideas at the start of some of the cities I could do, but I knew that jumping straight into the project would just mean tears somewhere later down the line, so I took a step back.

I made this rough moodboard to dump cool stuff into to work as reference.

This was just lots of concept art I either thought conveyed cool ideas or liked the colour palette for. I also made a pinterest board for some other real world references.

Pinterest was a good way to accidentally come accross images I would otherwise not have found. I used these as reference before and during the project, but I also like to have a browser open so I can search for more specific reference for anything that gives me trouble while I'm painting.

Process:

When I had a stronger idea of the work I wanted to produce, I started sketching the first city out. I wanted to do a kind of Undead city, using a purple/blue colour palette. I was kind of influenced by the fact it was almost halloween too.

I thought it would be fun to try and 'sum up' the cities in these kind of sketches. This also helped me set the mood for the rest of the paintings. I did these kind of sketches for almost all of the other cities.

These 3 mood paintings were just attempts to try and visualize the city from some different views. I used a really nice trick with these that I learnt at Industry workshops. I used the third image as a base for the other two, as that meant I only had to paint things once.

This was a great way to generate lots of different angles and viewpoints of the same environment.

The painting above was done using 3D as a base. I'm really used to using 3D within a 2D workflow now, so it fit in really nicely into this project. The 3D render is below, you can see I made one house and then repeated it in different sizes to give the impression of a street. The downside of working over 3D however is that it often feels restricted and awkward, as it can be tricky and rather time consuming to make the image not look like a 3D paintover.

I enjoy the looseness of mood painting, but I found that I got quite bored with doing them after a while, so I thought I would mix it up a bit and try to design some of the buildings within the city environment. This was really fun, but as I only used 2D, it was quite laborious having to paint everything from scratch.

The next city I settled on was a Dwarven/underground themed city.

THe above painting was a big failure with this city. I used a very detailed 3D model for a base for this (which is below the other paintings.) I got really bogged down in the details, without prioritizing the whole image as I usually do. This ended up with the painting looking really busy and not unified, with a bad colour palette and no focal point.

I kind of learnt a lesson with it though, which made me approach the next painting I did with a different approach. The Dwarven Forge was also a 3D paintover but I had a much clearer goal in my head of what I wanted the image to be.

The last mood painting I did I chose to leave really gestural, as I found it to be just enough to suggest flowing lava.