Enviromental Work Thumbnails to Final Images

I was very keen for this project, having never really bothered with backgrounds, at first I was a bit scared despite wanting to learn, the first challenge was understanding distances and colouring in the back of the image colouring my way forward. Also coming up with original landscapes, I didn't want to get all cliche with Bath and Georgian buildings. I wanted mine to look rough and almost scrubby, I tried to have a look for images of buildings like this but only found a few that weren't what I wanted so I tuned in to a little more Pirates of the Caribbean for inspiration. Suitably inspired I drew the thumbnails, value shaded them and coloured them in.

I thought the coloured pieces came out wonderfully, obviously I have a little more to understand about distances and perspective, but that will come with practice. I felt more attached to the dock and house scenes because they involved my character. So I chose to do those two. In the house scene my character sits, with the flintlock mechanism, looking as if she slightly regrets killing the voodoo ex slave and is pondering what to do with her new found bag of gold. The dock scene I can imagine this is where the soldier returns from the war.

 

 The first one I feel like I could have done the lighting better, maybe studied some candle lit faces as I feel the orange blurs out the face slightly, the second image could possibly have been sharper and a bit more defined, I was experimenting a bit learning photoshop a bit more, I do like the look of it though, I like some of the more vibrant colourings and the water looks nicely murky.