Visual Development was another module I undertook during my third year at university. The point behind the module was to refine your research and design skills in terms of characters, environments and vehicles. The concept behind the project was to complete tasks as they were assigned to us. We were to take the story of The Wizard of Oz and produce work that would recreate the image of the character, vehicle or environment in one of four settings; Cyberpunk, Post Apocalypse, Pirate or Medieval Fantasy. My first choice was Medieval Fantasy of course.
I started out the project by doing some visual research, I looked into the original work that went into the childrens story when it was first published as well as more modern interpretations of the IP.
Having established more of an idea of the general style of the characters and the environments I began to look into the thematic style and character aesthetic I wanted to portray through my work.
I proceeded to find more images to inspire and inform my designs in a fantasy theme. I looked at both fairytale fantasy for friendly places and characters to grim fantasy for potential villains.
The next stage was to begin initial character designs. I was tasked with creating designs for Dorothy, The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion, The Wicked Witch of The West, The Wizard of Oz and some Henchmen.
Given that this project was supposed to be designing these assets for game production I decided to design the protagonists around fantasy RPG classes. The first was Dorothy. I started work on her character with the intent of making her a Ranger. Typically seen in light armor and hunting with an animal companion I felt that this benefited the original character design.
For the Scarecrow I wanted to play off of the idea that he considers himself to be brainless despite having consistently good ideas so I wanted to design the character with the idea of him being a Wizard.
For the Tin Man I wanted to work in the idea of him being the heart of their party. I decided to base his design around a party buffing class like a bard. This lead me to the idea of creating a living one man band.
The Cowardly Lion was an interesting challenge. I wanted to create a character that would serve as a hard hitting tank in order to demonstrate his bravery. I was unsure if I wanted to create a basic fighter style character or something more. In the end I went for a character somewhat similar to a classic Paladin.
I created a few slightly cleaner drawings of each design and began working on some basic colour and textures.
I went through similar processes with the Witch, the Wizard and the henchmen. Basing off of their respective classes I created a Hag design for the witch, An illusionist trickster for the wizard and a variety of monstrous and human henchmen.
After I had settled on my design ideas I went through a similar clean up process to the protagonists.
The next section of the project was based more in Environment Design. We needed to create a villain lair for one of our villains so I chose to create one for the Witch. I started with some visual research, gathering inspiration for swamps and overgrown castles in order to try and capture the creepy atmosphere I wanted out of a villians lair.
Following this I did some basic sketches of potential environment ideas before moving on to creating a greyscale painting of one of them.
Having completed this I decided that the swamp idea wasn’t quite working the way I had hoped and I returned to a more castle themed design.
The next environment we were tasked to design was the Emerald City. I repeated a similar process to the lair and ended with a design with some more evidence of colour.
The final tasks were to design a vehicle and construct a storyboard for a cutscene in the emerald city featuring that vehicle. I decided to create a large wagon-like vehicle with mounted crossbows that would serve as transport for troops. In my final moodboard it serves as a point of focus and high ground for a guard captain threatening the party.
The final project task was to choose one of the previous tasks to refine to presentation standard. I chose to take the character designs I did for The Scarecrow, The Tin Man and The Wicked Witch and render them in full colour. I produced character turnarounds for each of them to give myself something to base my final paintings on.
In discussion with my lecturer he recommended I make some material and drapery studies as they could really enhance the final paintings I might be able to produce.
For the final versions of each painting I incorporated elements that I had learned from each of my studies
Overall I really enjoyed this entire project. I felt like I learned a lot about the design process as well as the process of visual research and iteration. I feel like everything I learned contributed to a much better final product and character designs the I am very happy with.