I've spent quite a bit of a time over the past week coming up with some visual ideas to help kick-start my creative process for the visuals of this project. I got a couple of sketchbooks out and grabbed the tech pens and brush-pen to get some inked ideas down quickly.
As usual when I go through this process, I begin by looking at all the things that have previously inspired me - games, movies, books, music etc - and use them as aids to generate some reference sketches that help to get me straight into the mood for drawing. I began with looking at shapes and designs from existing Sci-Fi related subjects and artwork, replicating a couple of the things I've seen there, before embarking on my own ventures and ideas.
The majority of these sketches are designs of my own, I omitted most of the early studies that were made (they soon became irrelevant) other than a few from the Alien franchise, which are shown alongside my own sketchy ideas on that same page.
The studies are useful as they get me into the mood for drawing quickly and also allow me to see some shapes and ideas that I might not have been aware of before. Sometimes I include certain forms or details in my own work, sometimes I don't. It often depends on my interest at that point, or where I intend my own work to head.
So in these cases I was feeling like going a bit darker with the Sci-Fi genre, wanting to present a chaotic, post-apocalyptic world of some sort, featuring creatures that are like technological demons (a bit like the AI-gone-wild of Terminator, but more evil and demonic). I'm still gradually figuring out the narrative for my animation as I go, so this phase was a stepping stone whereby I hoped the visual research would help me to come up with some alternative ideas.
I'm pretty happy with some of these results, the exercise has definitely been beneficial in getting some of my preliminary ideas out of my head, and has helped me to develop some more ideas for the story, fleshing out the world as I go and coming up with lots of new ideas. Looking ahead, I think I could be on the right track with this one.
After spending a bit of time working on the early environment ideas, I thought about the type of demonic creature I wanted to portray, so I set to some character design. I'm all about the idea of an AI that has gone crazy and started to develop it's own methods of making itself into terrifying-looking monsters, so I went with the flesh/metal combo for this guy's look (I'm thinking this type of character might be more like the main villain/overseer, hence his enormity).
Starting with sketching out 8 different character types, I narrowed it down and selected the pose I felt was most dynamic before playing around with that one a little and refining it into the slightly more detailed version on the last page. This isn't a finished design by any means; there are still a lot of problems to figure out, but that'll come with time.
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