Semester 2 Project: An Introduction

For Semester 2 I will be using ‘Idea 2’ from the set of idea drafts I developed at the beginning of Semester 1. 

Idea 2

Look at how concept art depicts both known and unknown folk tales / fairy tales and use this as influence for creating concept art for a video game based on a known or unknown folk tale / fairy tale - possibly interpret it in a way that would suit a video game.

By searching for media that depicts known and unknown folk tales / fairy tales; i will research the history behind these tales so I can analyse how they have been depicted and why they have been depicted in this particular way - is the depiction influenced by imagery we are familiar with?, where has this imagery come from? Has the creator made something new and their own unique take on it and if so why? Is the creator trying to contextualise a different aspect of folk tale / fairy tale? 

I have reflected on what sort of concept artist I want to be and I wish to take the direction of my concept art into defining myself as a concept artist who produces charming 2D art and I will be using this idea to show that. 

During this project I intend to develop a methodology for myself and my style of concept art. I want to identify what makes my concept art the way it is and look at how this could be a pipeline that others who wish to create the same sort of ideas and style of art can follow.

I will need to put myself in the mindset of both a concept artist and game designer; as i will be creating concept art for a video game based on a folk tale or fairy tale i will first need to determine what tale i will be choosing - this will affect what type of genre/platform the game will be along with what concept art i will be creating such as characters, creatures, location, environments, interiors, exteriors and in-game items.

One example of a fairy tale’s visual depiction being changed with concept art is one of my favourite and the first film adaption of the fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or in this context ‘La Belle et la Bête’ by French artist Jean Cocteau. 

La Belle et la Bête film screenshots, Jean Cocteau, 1946

The story of beauty and the beast exists in a variation of ways- collected by folklorists across the world, each country having in some way it’s own version of the fairy tale. The version we know was written and published in 1756 by french author Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont  which in itself was adapted from an earlier version of the story published in 1740 by french author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Beaumont kept many aspects of the original story the same but with some alterations by cutting out subplots and characters she rewrote the lengthy story to be more suitable for children. 

In many early illustrative renditions of the fairy tale the beast is often designed as an elegantly  dressed boar-like creature, the earliest iteration of this design I could find was by the prolific  illustrator Walter Crane; I found this interesting as it differs so greatly from the design we are familiar with. 

Beauty and the Beast, Walter Crane, 1874

Beauty and the Beast, Peter G. Thomson, 1885 

Beauty and the Beast, Warwick Goble, 1913

In both Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale there is no distinct description of what the beast looks like besides ‘frightening’ ‘hideous’ and ‘monstrous’- with a particular emphasis on the beast's stupidity and boorish behaviour, this is due to the french definition of ‘beast’ meaning both a large creature/animal and someone who is foolish/stupid. 

“So I am,” said the monster, “but then, besides my ugliness, I have no sense; I know very well, that I am a poor, silly, stupid creature.”

La Belle et la Bête, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, 1756 

Walter Crane’s art popularised and redefined the idea of visual literacy for children by improving the standard of ‘Toy Books’ - children's picture books that were produced during the victorian era; they featured nursery rhymes, fairy tales and other stories. With so much freedom of creativity for an illustrator to design the beast as they please it is uncertain why Walter Crane designed the beast as a boar; it could be that a the image of a boar contrasted so heavily with his beautifully detailed and decorative art style or it is believed when planning and creating his illustrations that he would spend his time considering the perspective of a child so perhaps a large, hairy, tusked boar would be considered a scary and ugly monster to a child. 

Unlike these earlier renditions of the beast Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film took the design in a different direction by making the beast more lion like as Cocteau wanted to evoke both fear and sympathy; one of the earliest ideas was for the beast to have a stag head however this was scrapped as it was too similar to the Cernunnos, the Celtic stag-headed god of the woods. 

 

Film poster for Jean Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et la Bête’, illustrated by Jean-Denis Malcles, 1946

‘La Belle et la Bête’ film poster and ilm poster initial sketch, illustrated by Jean-Denis Malcles, 1945

"My aim was to make the Beast so human, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and future; it would expose the naivete of the old fairy tale that conventional good looks are ideal".

Jean Cocteau, Press book for US premier of ‘La Belle et la Bête’, 1947

As a surrealist artist Jean Cocteau re-invented ‘La Belle et la Bête’ by changing aspects of the story; adding magic mirrors and living statues he created a fanciful black and white film that turned the beast's castle into a realm outside of reality with the use of long dark halls lit by candle light and diamond tears to create haunting, dream-esque scenes - we can see these sort of visuals being conveyed in Christian Bérard’s concept art. 

   

Concept art of costumes and sets for Jean Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et la Bête’, Christian Bérard, 1946

Cocteau In a similar fashion to Walter Crane wanted to convey the perspective of children - so much so that when opening the film he asks his audience to suspend disbelief in the same way a child would when listening to a fairy tale.

“Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. 

They believe a thousand other simple things. I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood’s “Open Sesame”: 

Once upon a time…”

Jean Cocteau, opening credits of ‘La Belle et la Bête’, 1946

Jean Cocteau’s iteration of the fairy tale still remains the most visually influential and we can even see this influence in the concept art and visual direction of Disney’s 1991 animated film.

Beauty and the Beast concept art, Andreas Deja, Disney, 1991

Research Reference: 

https://www.pookpress.co.uk/7-variants-of-beauty-and-the-beast/

https://www.pookpress.co.uk/project/beauty-and-the-beast-history/ 

https://www.pookpress.co.uk/beaumont-beauty-beast/ 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/bete 

https://www.illustrationhistory.org/illustrations/beauty-and-the-beast 

https://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-beast.html 

http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/issue/185/childrens-books/articles/other-articles/walter-crane-a-revolution-in-nursery-picture-books 

https://filmschoolrejects.com/jean-cocteau-la-belle-et-la-bete-retrospective-f08cbd27a96f/

https://www.gwarlingo.com/2012/jean-cocteau-beauty-and-the-beast/ 

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/250-once-upon-a-time-french-poet-explains-his-filming-of-fairy-tale

Semester 1: Reflection

What did I take from Semester 1?

• How different departments of a video game studio can play a role in concept art

• How to develop concept art for a character around a particular mechanic, idea or theme; for Moss this was creating a character for a VR video game that required the player to develop a bond with the character in a story book-esque world

• The functionality of concept art - every aspect of the concept art must be questioned in relation to games design - does this work? more so than - does this look nice?

• Concept art is about 

• Following a series of stages or methods for the fundamentals of concept art; this is to establish the pipeline of the concept art process. Although they may differ between artists these methods usually involve some form of brief or direction from an art director, research, reference collecting, sketching, thumbnailing, colour exploration and a finalised concept 

• Having an idea and being able to use communication through visuals or annotations to explain that idea

• Using stages of the concept art to refine an idea, re-visit an idea or scrap an idea altogether depending on the feedback of the art director 

What do I want to bring from Semester 1 into Semester 2?

• A functioning concept art pipeline that is driven by research 

• Working from a brief - as my starting point for what to do with my concept art research

• Transcribing ideas inspired by folkish culture into concepts

• Looking into how other concept artists have interpreted a character, story etc. so i can review and reflect on their methods to understand how and why they came to the decisions they made with their concept art and if this affected the development of the project e.g tv,film,animation,video game

To improve my work for Semester 2 I will need to work faster and more efficiently on the concept art I create to keep up with industry standard timescales. 

What I wanted to use Semester 1 for was to understand what concept art is and what concept art is for - going beyond its definition I wanted to learn about how concept art is made. I feel I have expanded my knowledge of concept art by delving into the early history of concept art, deconstructing different concept artists methods and questioning the perception of concept art between the industry vs the public and how this can affect concept artists. What I intend to do is work more on showing my research and new found knowledge through my art. 

Semester 1 Project: Quill Concept Art, Final Concept

Quill Final Concept

Semester 1 Project: Quill Concept Art, Colour Blocking Exploration

Colour Blocking Exploration 1

To start I used different shades of red, these were sampled from palettes inspired by photos of mushrooms. With this idea of mushroom inspired colours I attempted to apply this to the colour scheme of the outfit in another way by having the hat and cloak different colours.

Image References:

Colour Blocking Exploration 3

I took the idea of the hat and cloak colour being different from each other and explored that more, first with cool colours and then with warm colours.

Colour Blocking Exploration 4

My final part of this colour exploration I wanted to look further into the colour of fur I wanted Quill to have as i was not particularly satisfied with the colour she currently had at this stage and i knew i needed to explore this further, this involved researching and collecting colour samples from different types of rats and mice. 

Semester 1 Project: Quill Concept Art, Hat Concepts

Hat Set 1:

Hat Set 2:

Hat Set 3:

Semester 1 Project: Quill Concept Art, Initial Concepts 2

Sketch 1:

Sketch 2:

Sketch 3: 

Quill Initial Concept 2

Research: 

Image References:

Semester 1 Project: Quill Concept Art, Initial Concepts 1

Sketch 1: This sketch follows more closely to the prompt with the sewing kit concept, the world I envisioned for Quill in this concept was one that focused on the leftover items from humans and the mice using them with large pieces of fabric fashioned into clothes and scissors made into swords. If i had explored this further i would have created concepts of swords and armour made from pocket watches and tea sets. 

Sketch 2: This sketch is the more folkish and fairy tale-esque of the concepts, my idea was that as Quill lives in a woodland village i could apply that to her design with mushrooms by having them as part of her home and her clothing/weapon with gold prints of mushrooms decorating her dress and even having real mushrooms tied to her sleeves. While developing this idea with mushrooms I decided to look at different images of mushrooms, I came across an image of mushrooms growing on a branch and this gave the idea to have Quill’s sword made of wood so that mushrooms could grow from and be used as a function to blind, stun or poison the enemy. I based the design of the wooden sword off viking swords because when looking up sword designs i came across a fact about how vikings believed eating hallucinogenic mushrooms gave them strength to battle so they would design the handles of their swords to resemble these mushrooms.  

Sketch 3: My idea for sketch 3 was to look at how Quill and the members of her village would utilise the woodland around them by collecting, weaving and carving branches into tools.

Quill Initial Concept 1

Research: I first started my research for this initial concept by looking more into hand-crafted mice figurines and ornaments to give me ideas on how to approach the design, what i found useful about this research was how to look at making such a small character as I found numerous types of mice that were unique and full of personality in their use of materials like wool, fabric and buttons for clothing and poses that would lead you to think they were alive. 

Image References:

Project: Quill Concept Art, A Concept Prompt

To start this concept art in a similar way to Claire Hummel I looked for a prompt to give me inspiration; as I regularly collect images to use for later reference I went into looking through my file of images and came across this image of hand sewn felt mouse ornaments - from this image i created a quick sketch. What came to mind when making this sketch was the idea of smallness of the character compared to human sized items like sewing kits (as we know humans possibly existed in the world of ‘Moss’). I incorporated how the mice would use these leftover items to build things, make their clothes or even as weapons.

Concept Art prompt sketch

One of the things that interested me the most about the ornaments was their hats, i researched into the style of hat to find they are called ‘Pixie Caps’, usually made from felt these hats are often worn by young children - the design inspires a fairy tale look and feel to the character’s design, which is something the developers wanted to show in their game and that i wanted to explore more as i moved onto the initial concepts.

Felt Mouse Ornaments