Finalizing Concepts

So I've been working on finalizing my concepts for my Design for Media project. I am pretty certain at this point that I will stick with the first idea, but I have posted up my progress on both thus far.


Idea #1:

After going through and fleshing out my ideas, I've leaned more towards this idea. These characters fit together because of their relation to the Demon World. I'm definitely heading for more of a darker piece here.

Some more character concepts for these characters with their color palette beneath. Most of these are just rough sketches, but I digitialized a few. The first ones are just basic gestures and shapes of my characters; trying to figure out which poses to use.

I decided to do a bunch of concepts of different views and areas of the Demon World for this idea.

Idea #2:

I'm considering going for more of a dark and eerie feel for this idea. I have a large variety of backgrounds because I haven't finalized that yet. Besides the designs being similar, the main aspect that links them together is that they are a family.

These are just some more concepts I did of the characters with their respective color palettes.

Some ideas I had for different landscapes that would fit with these characters. There's a pretty wide variety because I was a bit uncertain at first on which way to go with this.

Inspirations:

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, my main inspirations come from Steve Rakar, Wes Talbott, and The-Ez. Some of their individual pieces inspired me directly for this project, though.

For my first idea, I got more inspiration from darker art. The-Ez did a great example of creating a darker piece, but still making the brighter colors contrast or pop out. Wes Talbott has done so many beautiful pieces that are dark, but use brighter colors to make the piece feel more alive. I definitely am planning on using a ton of contrast like he does in many of his pieces. 

Since Steve Rakar and I grew up together, we ultimately worked on the many of the same projects together. We've created many of our characters together originally, and then just re-designed or developed them on our own a bit. The characters from idea #2 were mostly made up beforehand by us both, but I re-designed and developed them more for this project. And overall, I got a whole lot of inspiration for the background from Steve's piece. I got the same kind of feel and inspiration from The-Ez's work. Since Syntax's family comes from a desert area, these pieces really inspired me.

So overall, I plan to create an illustration that has a dark feel to it, but has enough light in it to feel natural or alive.