After week 3’s decision to revert the roles I began designing the animals.
Peacock
To get a feel for the bird I decided to sketch it realistically first before I began stylising it.
After I had a design I liked I drew and painted it.
I wanted the peacock to reflect the aesthetic of the game so I tried to add underlayers of purple and yellow into the blue. I initially struggled with this and accidentally add the yellow when the paper was too wet so it bled too much. When I paint the parts to be used in the game I will need to be extra mindful of this. The top version is the peacock when the player first encounters it and the second is after they have played the minigame. The hope is that the white spots will act as a subconscious prompt for the player to colour it in.
Once I had the design of the peacock I got to work painting the indivudual parts for the animation of the peacock.
I began with a loose pencil sketch of the parts, I drew them close together so I could have the sizes right. I then slowly began building up layers of watercolour, introducing light washes of purple and yellow – being sure to not rpeat the mistakes I made in my earlier painting.
As the painting was coming along I got the idea to paint more pronounced feathers, I think this added more interesting visual detail and incorporates the impressionist influence from the GDD.
For the tail feathers I also worked slowly and tried to give the impression of depths with layers of strokes in different colours. For the “eyes” of the feathers I used much less water in the brush so the pigment would be very dense and opaque.
This is the finished peacock I am very pleased with how it turned out and our technical designer liked it too, I will now scan it into Photoshop so I can start animating it.
Deer
As specified in the GDD’s artbible the deer is very mystical and uses pink tones in its colour palette. I built on this by also using blue tones to complement the pink. Whilst I was painting the deer I kept the brush full of water so it would have a soft airbrush quality to add to the magicalness of the deer. To finish it I added highlights with a white gel pen.
For the parts of the deer I separated the legs into three parts that attach to a main body and there are two heads that can be swapped out as if the deer is looking around.
I reused the same techniques as in the concept art as they were successful. I made sure to be patient as I was adding the layers because the paper stayed very wet due to the blending I was doing.
These are the final pieces I will now scan them into Photoshop to cut them out and do digital retouches. Then animate them.
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