Sony Masterclass Interim Hand In

The interim deadline for the Masterclass brief laid out by Sony was just before the end of term. In the flurry of work I forgot to upload the work that I'd done to this blog.

The hand-in comprised of a perspective and colour study of our proposed environment. I put the environment sketching practice to use here and was quite pleased with the result. I've stuck the entire process up on here:

The first stage was to roughly sketch out the environment to get an idea of perspective and composition

I then cleaned up the sketch, making it less cluttered and easier to read.

After adding in a few more details I blocked in the values. I recalled the Feng Zhu tutorials that I had watched previously, in which he mentions that the most important thing is for the values to read; hopefully the piece should still make sense compositionally even when zoomed right out or flipped.

Here I added some quick highlights to bring the broken metal out from the background.

More details added; the decking and fence at the far end and the Alien 'generators' with their cabling.

Here I drew in the thatched roof of the walkway to the left of the tank.

At this point I tidied up the tunnel walkway and added in the archway into the foreground. I also added in the fake rock formations outside of the tunnel and the remaining skeleton of the skylight.

The Alien tower is added in and the opacity is reduced to push it back into the distance, giving the image a sense of depth. 

Here I defined the broken glass of the tunnel. I like the idea of the broken curved glass, which used to represent protection, now being absent and revealing the ominous tower.

I added Marines into the foreground as I felt that there was too much negative space around the archway. The silhouettes of the men break the comparatively boring lines of the arch, making the image more exciting from a composition stand point. I also duplicated some elements, mirrored and distorted them to use as reflections on the ground, which I decided would still be a little flooded.

I started to add general colour using a multiply layer. I wanted the environment to feel stale and stagnant, and so I used a kind of moody green to represent moss which would have grown on the glass and the rock formations due to the moisture.

Once I'd decided on the colours to use I set about painting the rest. 

Finally I added some environmental fog, which would linger because of the constant heat from the generators fastened to the walls. I also dabbed on some bright white dots to represent blinking lights both on the generators and on the tower, subtly linking them together.

I'm pretty pleased as I learned a lot about composition and perspective while working, although I'm not sure as it serves its process as a colour study. I feel as though I could use this piece to show the general mood and tone of the environment to a client but I really need more specific colour information.