OUAN05 - Creating the Environment - The Classical Elements

Whilst I was crafting the story and characters for this brief, I decided to do a kind of mock up environment design in order to give the characters a context and perhaps encourage a type of style to form that I could move forward with. Since at this point in mind since I knew the basic idea for the animation was two warriors fighting in a winter environment I was looking for inspiration online and through books I had, whether they be graphic novels, novels or more image based books. Eventually I came across an image of rural Japan and from there started looking at images of Japanese villages and mountains in the Winter, covered in snow. The feeling I got from these images was very peaceful yet I thought they would provide a good open environment for the action to take place but also as something that would be aesthetically pleasing for the audience. I liked the contrast and slight irony that the role environment could play in relation to the context of the story and decided it would be interesting to use. I also thought of a couple of other artistic purposes that it could serve such as the contrast of the white snow and red blood if I decided to add any details like that. As well as this, I personally find Japanese architecture and landscapes very attractive to look at, and wanted to see how I could include and utilise them for the purposes of the scene.

From here, I drew up a very simple sketch in my sketchbook of an environment, trying my best to add interesting details like the familiar Japanese architecture and provide technical accuracy when it came to things such as perspective and the composition of the scene. The scene depicts a road running through the middle of a village surrounded by buildings with overhanging rooftops and sign posts, with a view of a mountain in the background to give a sense of depth and scale to the scene. Once I was satisfied with the sketch, I took it into Photoshop and played around with colours in an attempt to portray a certain mood and feel to the image. This was an interesting task for me because I've never tried to paint snow digitally before so I had to experiment with brushes, pen weight and tones until I was satisfied with the way it looked. A long with this I experimented with adding noise to the image to give the impression that it was snowing, but it made the image look too grainy overall so I decided against it. The colour pallet will overall be quite cold with hints of warm oranges and reds to simulate a low sun in the sky, indicating a morning or evening.

I plan to do a much more refined scene for the actual animation, and look a little more into colour and some of the details I want to provide for the scene. Since it's a still image I feel like I have the ability to make it as detailed or as simplistic as necessary but I do want it to appear as though the characters are sitting in the scene and like they belong there so this is something I should consider when experimenting with the overall art style of the characters and the environment and how they will work together. 

Environment Mock-up