The art I created had to be promotional concept art for the card game I created with my group, thus I tried out some different styles with sketching characters, environments, and the objects. I looked at Zelda: Windwaker, at how those characters were designed, they were rather round and curvy, leading to very friendly appearing characters. They also have large eyes and facial features to make clear and emphasise what their emotions are at that point of time. The other sketch being based on art from a Pokemon game with a character that is intended to appear more confrontational, to see if I could emphasize the more competitive nature of our game, I opted not to explore this route further because of our target base. We wanted to make the game cheerful and happy, making it suitable for all ages. I still wanted to try it out to see how it would look, and perhaps make something for an older age group.
With the environment sketches I tried making a viewpoint of looking downward, and one from standing on a floating island. Similarly for the characters I tried out 2 different things for the object making one a more traditional hot air balloon, and one more fantasy. I decided to include both into my final piece to add more depth and make it more interesting. For the digital composition sketch I added my digital sketches of the other three together, and played around with the composition with a layer showing the rule of thirds on top, making sure that I aligned the things I wanted to be the focus points with the positions stated in the theory, namely the 4 points around the middle. Using this theory I ended up placing gold coins, the character, a rock to promote viewing lines, and the airship on these focal points. The airship being off-center of its focal point but in such a way that the rope connecting the balloon to the ship is. Which gives the viewer the choice of following the rope up to the balloon or following the rope down to the ship itself. Placing the airship in the middle of the focal point offset the piece’s balance, and was very distracting. I iterated upon making clouds in my environment sketches, settling on a low opacity brush setting that made the brush very soft, and playing around with advanced brush setting till it created something similar to clouds. These were needed because I needed to create a sense of depth created not only thought contrast of colors but also because of what was visible.
