To start of making ideas for my imagined worlds piece i created a mind map and a moodboard.
After creating both the mind map and moodboard, I sketched some simple thumbnails while on the train and then later touched them up slightly on my PC.
Looking at a lot of concept art for games, movies, books and animations, you can see characters in the pieces. By adding characters to a piece of art you can add a sense of scale, persepctive, distance, motion and much more. Adding anything with life adds life to your art, as long as you draw them with energy life and not stiff and emotionless.
The characters i've drawn in these thumbnails are quite big in comparison to the rest of the image and may have to be edited. However, a thumbnail is a very rough sketch used to simply get an idea for contents, composition, and lighting. Getting scale perfect to how you want it in the final piece during the thumbnail is almost impossible, and even then accepting something as you first drew it and not editing it at all is not a good thing for a concept artist to do, the whole point of a concept artist is to create concepts.
More thumbnails:
These thumbnails range from town concepts, caves and cliff ideas. For most of the ideas i've tried to add a character into the composition as adding characters can add a lot of life to a piece and a sense of scale, as mentioned above. I have however, also created some concepts that don't have characters in them which can have a lot more detail put into the landscape as that is the core focus.
Choosing ones to further develop:
I want to at least develop 2 thumbnails further, one with a character and one thats just a landscape. However, i would like to develop more than 2 in order to have a range of detailed ideas to choose from, so i'm going to pick a small selection.
These two are some of the final thumbnails i made that are heavily inspired from screenshots from the game Genshin Impact.
I want to further develop these and differentiate them from my references.
As for how i will develop these, i want to make the top one be during the night with emphasis on light coming from the house and fireflies, something which will also be the case with the bottom one, but having more emphasis on the lamps.
Ways that these will be animated is the flowing of trees and water as well as the movement of the fireflies and flame in the lamp.
For sounds in these landscapes i can imagine owls making noises and the sounds of trees rustling in the wind. In the first image there will also be the sounds of water flowing and crashing against the rocks.
These are the ideas i like the most for ideas with characters in, the first having 2 characters looking towards some sort of structure on a mountain and the second with a character looking towards a structure on a cliff over a lake that is heavily inspired by genshin impact.
Much like the previous ideas, I want to further develop them and differentiate them from my references.
As for how i will devlop these i need to put thought into how the landscape will look, the characters will look and what level of detail i want.
Ways that these will be animated is similar to those in the landscape ideas, flowing of trees and water as well as potential light sources.
For sounds in these images they will be similar to those in the landscapes, wildlife sounds, leaves rustling, water faintly flowing.