This week, I have started doing concept art for the game. There are three of us on the team who are down to do 2D art, including myself. Two of us are down to do the concept art for the project. In Sunday’s stand-up meeting, I roughly agreed with the other concept artist that she would work on the backgrounds and scenery, whereas I would work on everything within the scene (Perry, L., Quinn, L., Tenney, M., Tsaklev, G. and Waters, J., 2021.).
I have decided to start with the Tree of Life, which serves as the hub in this game and contains the portals to each level. To come up with ideas for the Tree of Life, I searched for pictures for large and interesting looking trees.
Once I found some trees, I started doing some concept art. So far, I have done one rough drawing for the tree concept.
I drew this using my Galaxy Tab and the drawing app Autodesk Sketchbook (Autodesk Sketchbook for Android, 2021). While I am a reasonably good illustrator, I have limited experience using a drawing tablet to draw and paint, so I have decided to use this as an opportunity to experiement and develop my proficiency using a drawing tablet to do digital painting. I also relied on one tutorial in order to guide me in using the various tools within Sketchbook (BP Creatives, 2020).
There was some discussion in our Discord about a fairly short but wide tree with a lot of branches, which will ensure that they player character can climb around the tree to enter portals. I have also experiemented with the positioning of the portals and how they will look on the tree. In the drawing above, I have presented them in purple.
This is the first drawing I have done so it does not resemble the final product but I will do more drawings, both digital and traditional to work out how this tree will look. As we also start to finalise the look of the temple that the tree sits in, I will incorporate that into my designs. The look of the tree will also change throughout the game as the environment deteriorates so I will need to take this into consideration too.
References
2021. Autodesk Sketchbook for Android. San Rafael, California, US: Autodesk, Inc.
BP Creatives, 2020. Drawing the “Weird Tree” | Autodesk Sketchbook | Samsung Tab S6 Lite. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpGt6W4AxNA> [Accessed 22 June 2021].
Perry, L., Quinn, L., Tenney, M., Tsaklev, G. and Waters, J., 2021. Stand-up meeting – Sunday 20th June.