Designing Environments

For our task in designing environments we were told to consider a lot of things which would be a huge importance for us later on. These things would include doing research into landscapes for referencing, as well as to include features such as the distribution of space, depth, lining and value & colour.

We also learned about effective compositing and how it can be used to create what was called a 'harmonious centre' which is essentially where you want the viewers eye to focus on in a scene. We were told that we should avoid placing the harmonious centre in the middle of the page and try and go for other locations instead, that way we can experiment with the scene a bit more.

We also got told how important positive and negative space can be to help focus in on the characters a little bit more. Positive space being objects and characters in the scene, whereas the negative space is the form around the objects.

For our tasks we were told to do composition studies to get used to all the features we learned. I approached this task focusing more on getting the harmonious centre correct instead of focusing on the environment itself. Here's how they looked:

As you can see in the meadow drawings, I created harmonious centres in different positions each time and try to make the landscape curve in focus for that centre. I did the same with the desert, however I removed the lines just to see how effective they were without them. I think the top 3 were somewhat effective but the bottom three kind of loses it's harmonious centre.

I also drew this background just as a small thumbnail to help me out with the key features:

I think overall it has potential however there are still a few things which might need some improvements such as balancing the colour better and trying to attempt it without lining it.