SEIntMedia: March 2014

Designing a poster in a gothic style for a survival horror game.

Before making the poster, I drew out ideas of what to use in the poster. The hat and the Mushroom's were simple to think of because it is a very iconic part of Mario. They were easy to draw, but took a while to get perfect.

My initial idea was to make Mario and Luigi zombies. All the good guys from the Mario series would be zombies and the bad guys would be the ones trying to survive.

This is the original Mario level image that I used the final poster design. As I said before, I changed the brightness, contrast and saturation to make it less entertaining and more gothic.

I added the grey clouds to make it a little more dark and gothic. Without the clouds the background would have looked a little boring or too cheerful with the blue sky.

The way I manipulated the picture in Photoshop was by taking a picture of a Mario level from the game and changing the brightness, contrast and saturation. I added a sky with grey clouds and changed the brightness, contrast and saturation to match the darkness of the clouds. I drew Mario's hat and the Mushroom's, and then photo copied them into Photoshop. I added colours to the hat and mushroom's and placed them into the scene. I downloaded a Super Mario Brothers font from DaFont and used it for the title above the whole picture. I added the actual colours to it, but a little bit darker. The clouds of the Mario level were still white, so I went over them with a brush and painted them grey.

I tried making a similar look to the Amnesia The Dark Descent poster. It gave me an idea of changing the flowing water below the rose to red to show it's blood, and changing the rose to Mario's hat giving the intention of Mario's death. Obviously it didn't go the same way as I wanted it to and used two different images to make one instead of just using the background of the Amnesia poster.

Redesign a popular game character as an artwork

German Expressionism

In this task I had to redesign a popular game character in a famous artwork. I chose Lara Croft and German Expressionism. I tried to get the same type of art style.
(Not a lot of experience with Photoshop back then)

Research

Isaac Hannaford

http://www.geek-art.net/isaac-hannaford-halo/

I like this concept art because it is very highly detailed and it is the type of style I would like to make my concepts. It also has a very strong atmosphere and is very detailed. The use of colour is very well done, it makes the character at the front stand out from the rest of the scene.

This concept has a more sketchy look to it, but the colours make it look a lot less sketchy from a distance. This also has a lot a detail, but it is mostly shown on the main character. This concept also has a strong atmosphere.

Francois L Cannels (IgnusDei - DeviantArt)

Art for Sins Of A Solar Empire

http://ignusdei.deviantart.com/gallery/9491373

This concept is very detailed. and it looks a little more difficult than the concept below. It has quite a few little bits and pieces coming off of everything, and I like that. It shows how much the creator has put into it, making this concept a very highly detailed and very well visualised piece of art.

This concept art reminds me of H.R Giger. It has the same effect and the type of atmosphere as H.R Giger's Alien work. I like it because it is simple, with the colours making it look a lot more detailed. The grainy/grit effect gives the concept a great look, making it show that the character being shown is probably an enemy.

Task 3

Character & Environment/Level Design

What is the purpose of concept art for video games?

Concept art plays an important role in the gaming/film industry. Concept art is technically peoples ideas of what is going to be in the game, book, film or comic. Concept art helps the developers create the characters, objects or anything in the scene, even the terrain itself.

The concept art I have chosen to use are from the game developer, Bungie. A lot of people will know Bungie for making the Halo franchise only exclusive to the Xbox (Halo 1 & 2 being the only ones on PC), but with Destiny just around the corner (September 2014), they'll also be widely known on Playstation.

Bungie released concept art for Destiny, giving people a glimpse of what's to come in their game for the next generation consoles. This concept art shows one of the playable races called Exo. Bungie was inspired by Master Chief, Terminator and the undead to create Exo (You can easily see the resemblance).

Forerunner Concept Art

This was the original concept art of the Forerunner made by the artists at Bungie.

This makes a great concept art because it shows quite a bit of detail and a brief idea of what this certain character in the game would have looked like. I like how the artwork has been kept simple whilst giving it some detail. The artist kept the background one colour, instead of having a super detailed one showing a certain area of a place, like some concept arts do. I also like the design of the character. It's very creative and unique.

Aaron Limonick

Aaron Limonick is a concept artist at the game developer, Naughty Dog. Aaron created some amazing concept art for the Playstation exclusive, The Last Of Us. His work on environment designs are spectacular, and they are really detailed, even down to the grass. Each artwork has a different mood due to Aaron's epic work on the atmosphere.