Mother Nature - Shadow world: colour work catch up (3)

These were made in December, but placed with the November posts for continuity reasons.
I had a lot of fun trying out different styles and brushes

Mother Nature - Shadow world: colour sketches catch up (2)

In the first three sketches I used the same sky layer as background and portrayed a few different aspects of the night life of these trees. 

The first one is grooming itself with an old pitchfork.

The second sketch shows a young tree creature admiring the stars.

In the third sketch I played around with the idea of the tree creatures living in forests grouping themselves up in tribes using the symbols they'd find painted on "the ancients". The ancients would be normal non-sentient trees that existed at the same time with humans.

Mother Nature - Shadow world: colour work catch up (1)

Below - the Babe tree


In these sketches I tried to give the tree world a warm, innocent feeling. As the new creation of mother nature, the sentient trees would have a very pure existence, almost child-like. They would be explorers and develop a strong fascination with old human artifacts they'd discover, hence the chair.

Mother Nature - Shadow world: colour task

By this point, our group coordination and communication dropped drastically and I'm aware it was partly my fault (too late now).

As I was unable to physically attend meetings, the information shared in our group chat was scattered and inconsistent. In addition, we constantly had things that didn't fit added to the project, making it confusing. I felt demoralised by this and made yet another mistake - isolated myself from the group. I shall do my best to not let this happen again as it is in everyone's best interest for all to cooperate.

This post has been waiting in draft for too long now.

The reason I felt more inspired by the icy environment is because the shadow creatures remove life out of the places they come in contact with. No life = No heat

For the inter-dimensional crack in our world I looked at stuff like below:

Sketching↓

 

Below scar and mushroom tree based on Alistair's stuff

 

Above right - sketch of the hobbit houses Caitlin wanted for the new creatures. While working on it I came to realise that it would be more interesting to move away from the idea of a house. My suggestion was something more along the lines of this image I found:

And the tree creatures as well would not live in houses. At night they would gather around giant bioluminescent plants and become rooted for a while to regain energy.

Image found on the internet to use as reference↓

Each tree creature has a branch somewhere on the back of their bodies that always grows a leaf or two. A couple of times per life-cycle they grow a seed that they need to plant = how they reproduce.

I am disappointed with my performance on this task but my awareness of what went wrong should help me in the future.

Mother nature - Shadow world: inspiration/research

It seems logical that in a world in which shadows can become dangerous, all bioluminescent life forms are greatly treasured. They must learn to work together with the tree creatures in order to survive. 

Note: tree creatures are not the only ones affected by the wave of new life, but most plants and other beings too.

Inspiration for the new plant forms

Waitomo glow worm caves - New Zealand

Swee Cheng's luminous mushrooms

Glowing mushrooms 

(thee creatures could grow them on their backs/arms)

Red Sea living polyps 

Bioluminescent Jellyfish 

(modified into a land life form and kept as pets by the tree creatures)

UPDATE:

Based on Caitlin's idea of a ram shaped earth golem I looked at golems everywhere (ex below) and could not think of a new way of making it different from all the ones I've seen. The group eventually decided to drop the idea, which I agreed with even though I was very fond of having an entire civilisation live on a moving city. The golem would take 1 step a day (due to its size), thus there was going to be an entire culture developed around that time of day when the creatures Caitlin wanted to introduce would have to follow a daily routine of preparing themselves for the "step earthquake".

Mother nature - Shadow World: tonality week

Given the task to draw out our characters in the environment they inhabit got me thinking of Caravaggio's theatrical paintings and the thing they were most famous for: use of chiaroscuro, which not only seems appropriate for the project, but necessary considering the shadow creatures.

My suggested story/ explanation:

The group liked the idea of the souls coming back themselves through the rip and spreading across Earth so I started working on it. I'm thinking of it as a gradual expansion of the shadows.

(Above - using Beata's tree designs)

(Below - using mine's)

As opposed to the traditional painting techniques of making the furthest points the darkest, I personally prefer the darkest elements in the foreground. I feel that it gives the scene a certain dramatic effect because the viewer seems to be placed in the shadows as well, creating tension, a creepy feeling of something lurking, prowling.

Example of dark foreground technique found across multiple mediums

Thomas Gainsborough

John Poon

Johannes Vermeer

(here we can clearly see the dark foreground framing the point of interest and guiding the eye towards it)

Dragon Ball Z

(here we have the darkest and brightest points in the foreground)

Samurai Jack

Slawek Fedorczuk
(artist recommended by Beata)

UPDATE 22/10/2016

More tonality work - details/ environment

Mother nature - Shadow World: more character design

In the end we decided to go with Beata's dynamic designs for tree creatures (above) and I insisted we do so because they are good shapes to work with.

Developing on her "bouncing tree concept" I made a few variations, starting with

dancing tree

Working on these short, stoutly trees got me thinking of opposite, the tall and gracious Baobabs of Africa, thus:

but then I wondered how such creatures would carry themselves and

 what specific behavioural traits they would have

which got me thinking: how would they interact with the short trees?

and ended up with a musical sort of movement.