DSGN 320 | Mentorship Project | Completing Environment Art

The final stage of my mentorship project was creating the coloured versions of the environments that I composed previously. This was by far the most challenging part of the work for me. Completing the colour scheme in a way that the image wouldn’t be oversaturated was not easy. When you strive to create a powerful vibrant visual, you tend to forget that the viewer’s eye needs to rest in the places where the colour is more neutral.

This is my first attempt at picking the colours and defining the lighting for the interior scene. As you can see, there are too many hues and the colours and tones are clashing with each other. Luckily, thanks to my mentor’s revision and suggestions we were able to create a much more balanced scene with better consistency of the palette. We also made some minor adjustments to the composition.

After having a practice with the interior I gained a much better understanding of how to make the image more pleasant to the eye. It felt more comfortable working on the exterior of the van and the church locations.

As you can see this time the colours are much more restricted with only a few accents placed around the composition. it is now much easier to see the depth of space. the lights and the shadows also play an important role in building composition shapes. I had to make sure that there is enough free space to give the image a well-paced rhythm without overloading it.

The last image was built to have a more dark and ominous atmosphere to it. This was achieved by using cold neutral colours combined with the vibrant piercing blues of the ice. This location must represent the villain and it’s logical to use similar hues inspired by my Snow Queen character design.

DSGN 320 | Mentorship Project | Building the environment

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.

Van Interior Part 1
Van Interior Part 2

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.