2.2 Designing a Mystic Jungle Scene Concept

Hi my name is Brian Lee and welcome back to designing landscape concepts for feature films and games. In this lesson I will walk you through my process of creating a wild jungle landscape as I would in a real world gaming or film production environment. So to get started here. We'll just go ahead and do the same as we did in the previous sketch. Where we will just kind of start with the background color here that's gonna represent the basic, mid tone of our sky. And then we'll just start filling in some atmosphere on top of that. And work in the composition. I'm also gonna try to use my colors here to try to get the color palette figured out early on. Just gonna stay with some very earthy tones for now and probably throughout the entire piece. We're just gonna stick to very basic tones that we can add on layer. If we get some kind of note or something from the director to give it a little bit more vibrance. So we're going to start with the lower tones and then just work in some of the brighter greens here. Again working off that that rule of thirds where we have the intersecting points being the points of interest after splitting the canvas up into into different segments. Here you go we're just going to kind of work it, work the mountain range towards us. Just trying to create a good sense of depth from foreground to background is going to really help to determine the size of this mountain range. Also started figuring out the light direction here is going to be coming from the left, or actually now the right, side of the frame. And you'll notice that I flip the cameras quite often in these concepts just because it helps me get a fresh look on the composition with a new set of eyes. And yeah. So I just thought the left side was looking a little empty there. I just kinda wanna trap the eye and make sure that it stays directed towards our focus point. So I like to use these framing tricks to kind of, just add some focus. And even kind of makes us feel like we're actually inside the paintings, which is always a nice little trick. The more you can have somebody, the viewer, feel like they're in the painting the better. See, I'm not sure what it's gonna be yet, just, again just trying to work in some some new colors some of these browns. Just to try to increase the palette as much as possible. The sky was looking a little too dark and it was making a mountain range kind of disappear into it. So I wanted to brighten up the sky a little bit more to make the mountain range pop. To think out the lot. I just kind of scalped out this foreground a little bit and have the I.V. kind of like an I.V. hanging down. Given that jungle very lush tropical feel. just full of plant life. Try to add in wherever I can, and like, I definitely want to add some of that work on this waterfall feature here, in the middle frame as well. You see I kind of move around constantly I am always jumping from one area to another just making sure that the piece is balanced. I want to make this mountain range a little bit more interesting. So I'm gonna add in some kind of teeth like features just to add a little contrast to the shapes. So far it's been very rounded shapes so by adding a little bit of some different elements, it really helps. It's always fun to experiment with new shapes, you never know what's going to happen. That's a great thing about working digitally, you can just try a new layer and play with it you can remove some of the areas you've already painted in and build on top of them. So, I want to see if I can work in this river network a little bit coming from foreground into on our screen right and have it fall off to our screen left almost like maybe a waterfall or something. Just kinda give off a feel like we're high up in the mountains and there's a lot of danger up here both below and above. So I'm working that teeth-like feature we have up in the mountains up on the right, and I'm bringing it down into the valley here. It just kinda helps to make the piece feel balanced so that the whole area is just kind of giving off the same vibe. I do wanna give it that kind of treacherous look. So the more spiky areas we can kinda work in the better. And just wanna work out this riverbank a little bit better so it's more recognizable. It's always nice to have a really bright color next to a very dark one, just helps to add interest. So keep that in mind whenever you're designing, it's just nice to have the eye jump back and forth. It really brings a lot of interest to the piece. And again we'll just add some ivy along the edges there. I'm trying to give this mountain a little bit of depth. So I push the top part a little bit deeper by adding some atmosphere to it. But I feel like overall this area is particular paintings feeling pretty well balanced just from the dark blacks in the foreground screen left as they fall off into the upper screen right. Just a lot of nice depth. And it's great to to be able to provide that much depth in a painting so quickly and you're going to get that with atmospheric effects. And, so, we'll just add some kinda sunbeams coming in here, to build on that a little bit more, and bring these browns up a little bit. Make it a little bit more golden in this area. Maybe this is our interest point. This is where all the action is gonna happen. It's just kinda like add some little highlights here and there just to bring this piece to a finish. Yeah. So, I think we're pretty good here on this piece at this point I'd be pretty ready to show it to somebody perhaps an art director and just see if I'm heading in the right direction. So it's good, I had to move on and the next lesson work through a desert landscape similar to the one you may see for films such as Star Wars or. Maybe the more recent Mad Max for example. So, again thanks for joining me and I'll see you in the next lesson.