After creating a character design the most essential part of creating a fictional world is building the environment that your characters are going to interact with. It is important to mention that the surroundings of the heroes describe their personalities in-depth: what is their daily routine like, what are their interests and hobbies, how do they get by, what are some of their memories. All of these concepts begin. with a bunch of simple sketches, developing gradually into a detailed illustration. At this point, my mentor and I have considered the key elements – composition and the storytelling, leaving lighting and colour for the future progress.
As we tried to imagine what would Kai’s and Herda’s world look like, we thought of the situation where the two of them had to take care of each other without any adult supervision. It would be a story of the two rascals living alone on some abandoned parking lot in a small town in the US. The siblings use the old forgotten camping van as their shelter, surrounding it with the objects of the necessary household objects for cooking, eating, gardening, fishing and etc.
The inside of the van has 3 divisions: common area, Herda’s bed and Kai’s bed. The common area exists to connect the two characters with mutual belongings, (one of those being a box with their parents’ memorabilia. Kai’s bed expresses his interest in the comic book culture and depicts Kai as a messy kid, who is a bit less mature than his sister. Meanwhile, Herda’s bed is full of objects that describe her as organized and aspiring to travel around the world someday.
In addition to that, we’ve come up with the villain hideout. We imagined that the Snow Queen, as an alien fell off the sky and crashed into an abandoned church basement leaving an icy trail behind her.
