Cumuli: Concepts

Cumuli:
Concepts

This project started in September 2012 and has gone through many changes since. It was to be a story about sacrifice. An evil queen demanded a tribute of every female child so that none could challenge her...fortunately we realised in time that that was an awful story. We were even going to add in a back story narration...

I was in charge of all the environments and all environment based concept art. We were to have two corridors which the protagonist would walk down, revealing the setting of the story, and a central cathedral at the very heart of the city, in the middle of which the queen resided in a crystalline chamber. The initial story made little sense but the basic premise was that we were in a cloud city where the main source of power were crystals. Visually I wanted to explore the theme of 'steampunk' and combine it with some art deco elements. We had three environments for this - two corridors and the central chamber. Let us start from the initial concepts.

Corridors

Rough thumbnails to help me get a feel for the space

Slightly bigger rough based on the thumbnails

 

After the rough sketches were done it was time to draw something a little more detailed.

Below are the coloured versions of each tunnel. These were coloured in using actual images and combining them using blending modes instead of painting the colours straight onto the drawings. As this was something intended to be quite rough I think it definitely helped decide the colour palette we would end up using, however I would really like to go bakc to these and actually paint them in high detail.

Cathedral & Queen's Chamber

The idea was to make this look like a grand space but at the same time not too much like a cathedral. Like with the tunnels, I started sketching out some ideas for the general layout of the space. The queen's chamber would be located in the middle of the cathedral, inside a small mountain of crystal. I was trying to design a way in which the crystals power would be transfered to the rest of the city.

After sketching the space out I got a much clearer idea of exactly how I wanted the cathedral layed out. The next step was designing the machine or mechanism which would convert the crystals energy into a useable power source for the rest of the city.

I roughed out the above sketch and started liking the machine concept. I was looking into Steamboy at the time and that definitely influenced the machine's design. Below are the more detailed drawings of the machine design:

Finally, here is the textured version of the machine:

Overall I learnt how to come up with ideas quickly and be able to go into more detail when necessary and not at will. I watched a few Feng Zu videos from the Gnomon Workshop as well as a few others such as Dylan Cole in order to get a better understanding of concept art. The next stages of the project will be the 3D modelling.