My Fmp project consists of a concept art book for a hypothetical project based on the book ‘the wonderful wizard of oz’ though with a sci-fi twist. It will be for a hypothetical Fighting game Game , the closest example I am aiming for in terms of tone and visuals is the street fighter series.
For the project I felt that the out come waqs relatively successful.
I feel that I have learned a lot during the duration of it espiecialy in the way of design . The mentorship programme was of particular help as my mentor , Max Davenport, was a working concept artist . He was able to prduce a number of paintovers of my work and offer sound advice concerning my designs. One of the most key pieces of advice I was told was to simplify my designs and not to overcomplicate them , establishing a good value/colour read and separation and try and see how simple I could make the design making use of larger shapes and sparingly using fiddly details. After looking at artists such as Calum Alexander Watt I put this advice into practiceYou can see a prime example of this with my scarecrow character . The character originally had a lot of cut lines and various details going on within its torso as well as its color scheme and general silhouhette not really being that eye catching I solved this my making the design a much more simple yet interesting one.
I also learned a lot about creating environments, This was certainly a weak point in my portfolio and skill set and I feel that I’ve developed that area of my skills a lot more , maybe not as much as I feel would be sufficient for portfolio work but still more than they were before the project.
On that note however I would have liked to have spent more time on the environments and push them further and overall try and develop my environmental skills further. I chose the fighting game style because it would simplify the environmental requirements of the project with fighting game stages only being one view with the characters fighting on what is essentially just a two dimensional plane this let allowed me to creat superficial designs for 4 separate environments rather than one that would bog me down and take away time I could allot for creating characters ,the true soul of the project.this didn’t allow me to explore the environments visually and give them more interesting designs. Conversly however. One or two of these environments though I felt that I spent much too long on , specifically the yellow brick road one , I feel I should have just left it as it was and moved on , I feel that this was partly down to my lack of experience with environments and also my gradual lack of interest in these specific designs.
I also feel that in hindsight I don’t really like the design of Dot (the character analogous to Dorothy) .I feel that she is a bit too busy in some areas and would benefit a more simplified design, I also think that some of the previous ideas I had for her featured much more interesting shapes and would have contributed to better overall piece of work, the same applies to a few of the other designs like the tinman where as characters like the scarecrow and the Monkey are my favourite as they feature the most interesting and straightforward designs ,something the other characters lacked.
I found that the process of putting the book together to be relatively straight forward and interesting. The final result was really fantastic with the images turning out as desired. It is definitely a good feeling having digital work being turned into something physical so I’d say the decision to have the final hand in format be that of a book , was a good idea.
on the subject of changes my original plan when it came to what characters I was going to do changed to some degree ,for example , instead of the wizard having his multiple forms I decided to drop them in favour of doing the wolf,bee and crow characters as I felt they had much more potential for me to create some varied and interesting designs. I also dropped a character or two like the north witch and possibly the east witch as they were stretch goals at most.
Overall I would have liked to have changed a few different things within the project however with all things considered I did the best I could with the time I had and as a result have a handful of pieces worth putting in my portfolio at this current time .For the theme of the project I feel that I could have gone for much more exploratory Ideas perhaps ones based completely out of my own head instead of being a version of an existing IP which would have given me a much more free expierince and perhaps not as restricted me , this would have sacrificed structure to the project and had me have to spend more time planning it however I feel this may be a worthy price to pay for the opportunity to create some even more interesting characters and additionally maybe spend more time on one environment , creating various props and exploring various angles and areas of it, going into various levels of detail rather than a passing idea of the area. All things considered This has turned out to be quite a successful project.