Lost in a Dream: Concept Art
Program: Photoshop
Time Spent: 3 weeks
Date Completed: April 30, 2022
After creating the previsualization sketches and a preliminary 3D model, it was time to begin making the concept art for Lost in a Dream, my speculative game for my Digital Design Aesthetics course.
In Lost in Dream, the player has strange, prophetic dreams that lead the player to explore an ancient ruin where the waking world blends with the dream world. My goal for this concept art was to portray the stark, towering architecture that dominates the environment. I wanted the environment to feel ominous, lonely, yet magical. I also wanted to design the environment in such a way that it would encourage the player to explore the strange world around them. My last design goal was to render the image in a monochromatic color scheme to contribute to the starkness and unity of the architecture.
First, I needed to refine my initial sketches from my previsualization work. In these sketches, I have added more depth through using lights and shadows and by using multiple kinds of perspectives. I experimented with atmospheric perspective and with one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective. Each digital sketch depicts a different area of the ancient ruin that the player will explore.
During my class's feedback session, my professor and classmates encouraged me to try to combine the rows of columns from the first sketch with the three-point perspective from the third sketch. Doing that would allow me to emphasize the huge scale difference between the player-character and the ominous environment around them.
This series of images show how I went from the line art and perspective lines to a full-color image. My initial idea was to show only two columns and place the figure in the narrow space between them. I mapped out the shadows and then began adding the texture to the columns, floor tiles, and foggy atmosphere.
Lastly, I added in color. I chose to use blue to symbolize the magic in this ancient place, and I chose to color the figure in a yellow-orange to contrast with the environment and make the figure easier to see.
However, this was not my final image. After another feedback session with my class, I looked back at my work with fresh eyes and realized how much more it could be improved.
First, according to the feedback I received, my image is extremely dark. If this were truly how the final game appeared, the player would have a very difficult time in navigating and exploring the environment. If the game were a horror game, then the darkness and difficulty in navigating would actually contribute to the player's experience. So, while the darkness contributed to my design goal of making an ominous world, it detracted from my other design goal, to encourage player exploration.
My first major change was to increase the visibility of the image by adding more columns in the distance. I then decreased my use of dark grays and blacks and used more mid-tone and light grays to block out the lights and shadows in this image.
The final change that I made was to my strategy for coloring. Originally, I had digitally painted each object in my artwork, but my professor introduced me to a simpler and more effective way of coloring the image in a monochromatic color scheme: opacity modes. I created a new layer of opaque color and then changed the opacity mode which applied the color to each object while maintaining the value differences and textures of the lower layers.
I experimented with different kinds of blue and violet, as well as different opacity modes, such as Color and Multiply. Each of these images is shown below.
Each of these images has a different emotional quality, and each of these images could be used as the final concept art for this area of the game except for the final violet image, since it is too dark. In order to make my choice of my final image to submit for class, I imagined myself as the player, surrounded by this environment, and how much I would or would not enjoy playing in it.
Ultimately, I chose the blue-violet image, shown to the left. The color symbolizes the magic within the ancient ruins while the darkness inherent in the color lends the environment a strange and ominous mood. The brightness of the light also encourages the player to explore more of the ruins.
To continue this project, I would create more concept art showcasing the vastness of the ancient ruin and the diversity of the rooms and architectural elements. I would also experiment with different colors and with different color schemes aside from monochromatic.