Work: Charn- Window of the gods

I’ve been working the design for the Great Hall of Charn up in CAD...its proving most difficult! This has defiantly been the most stressful bit of design so far. Trying to get all the arches, pillars, windows, Hammer beams, Doorways etc to line up and look good almost defeated me but its nearly finished now so the end is in sight.

Along the outer walls of the Great Hall are 13 colossal windows, 21meters high by 4 meters wide. Here is a visualisation of the stained glass within the windows. They represent god-like women of Charn (possibly Jadis herself). Again I have kept with the colour scheme of Charn and have over stylised the gods into twisted representations of people. Scary but beautiful is the tagline for Charn.

Work: Plant Adaptation- Clockwork Tree

I’ve been designing some fantasy plants again but this time I’ve been trying to stick with the Style Guide that we produced for the Magicians Nephew. I decided to design a Clockwork tree combining a Willow-style tree and some clockwork mechanisms.

Clockwork Tree sketch

I sketched out some Ideas and decided on the following design. I Scanned in my sketch and put it through Illustrator (which I’m still getting to grips with). I tried rendering it in Illustrator but I still can’t quite get the look I want using Illustrator so I put the illustrator outline into Photoshop to Digitally Paint.

Illustrator render

In the style guide we said we wanted the look to be quite dark and a little bit sinister so I rendered the tree using dark colours making it look creepier. I also decided to add a eerie glow as if a light source was hidden within the Willows branches- this added a bit of mystery to the design. My colour pallet comprised of mainly dark greys and cool blues.

Original Painting which printed too dark

Photoshop Render

On my screen the final image looked fine but when I printed it, it was very dark and hard to define so I had to go back and play with the levels. The dark nature of this tree would fit well in my project as part of Charn’s environment or even the outskirts of the Wood between the Worlds.

Second Render

I did a rendering variation of the tree but this time increasing the lightness and adding some blue glowing fireflies around the trees. This makes the tree look less sinister and more magical...I’m not sure this is quite suitable for Charn but maybe appropriate for Narnia.

Work: Rendering Techniques

I’ve been experiment some more with Illustrator by attending some Illustrator workshops organised for Fashion and Textile students. They have been very useful and by doing some of my own experimenting I think I have now got to grips with some basic Illustrator techniques.

I started doing some sketches of some fantasy plants as a response to the research I did earlier on “Weird looking plants”. I will talk about this in more detail later on. I experimented with rendering techniques using some newly gained Illustrator skills and some recently developed Digital painting techniques in Photoshop. I like both results but for the purposes of showing a concept and texture I think the Photoshop one work better.

Work: Magicians Nephew logo

For my final MA project I am going to produce some concept visuals and set designs for the first Narnia story The Magicians Nephew.

I will be collaborating with Hannah Purdy on this project using Professional Practise techniques so that we both get used to the way the film industry work in the Art department.

We created this logo to use on our work and images to bring all our work together into a coherent working project; providing it with a visual identity as they would do in industry.