Stellar Outlaws

Stellar Outlaws -  Concept Art Project 

This is a project for one of my final year university modules that presents a series of concept art pieces that I worked on for a brief that I wrote for myself. With this project I wanted to challenge myself in multiple areas such as environment art, vehicle design as well as working within the sci fi genre.

For this project I worked on creating the design of a spaceship which would include an interior piece from an area of the ship, and 2 character designs that fit within the theme of the project.

Starting off with the first character of the project I began with drawing up some silhouettes to get some quick ideas of what I could do with this character, since the character was a fugitive I needed to make sure that this would come across visually and so I worked through a series of iterations to ensure I had ideas to work with. 

After drawing up some silhouettes I moved on to sketching out some more detailed ideas taking what I'd gathered from the previous work, to give more signs that this character is a fugitive I played around with the idea of him being either recently escaped and bearing lots of scars or a long term escapee who has become an outlaw with a few left over marks from captivity. 

I worked more comfortably in this area as sketching is a much better workflow for me when it comes to quick ideation as I am more familiar and confident with this method. 

Working with the sketches that I'd drawn up for the fugitive I took further inspiration from those that presented this character with a stocks like object restricting them from the back. Adding this in helps to make them look more like a recent inmate with the markings on the stocks giving off the impression that they've just escaped from an alien prison camp. 

Working through some colour iterations I went to take a look at existing prison jumpsuits and took inspiration from this to my character which led to me working towards a design that would lead into a final concept. 

This is what became my final concept and one of the processes I went through in this development was drawing up a turn around showing the front and back of the character. Starting off I sketched up the fugitive and applied flat colours after cleaning up the line art and showed them in flat colours as they would appear if they were in a prison and not much time had past. The next turn around shows the fugitive with some more rendering applied and the stocks appearing much more aged and damaged indicating that this character has been kept imprisoned for a long time. 

Drawing up the character in this way shows two versions of them and provides an angle of the most important areas, that you would expect to be provided for the completion of a 3D asset

After drawing up the concept turn around of the fugitive I moved on to creating a piece of this character for the key art and so I worked on sketching up some gestures showing the fugitive in motion and interacting with an asset. At this stage until the end I was unsure of what this character would be holding and so I played around with shanks, knives and poles. 

At the end I decided to present the fugitive using a broken and jagged pole that they would use as a weapon and positioned them in a defensive fighting stance, this helped make the fugitive look dangerous and makes them appear cautious due to them recently becoming a fugitive.

These are the final concept sheets for the fugitive where I have presented the turn around and a call out concept of the stocks which I can now present here in more detail.

For the next sheet I drew up another callout to go alongside the key art which shows a portrait of the fugitive as I wanted to show a close up view of the fugitives face as I wanted to show the characters facial features in a better view as well as practice my portrait sketching which led to this callout. 

The Pilot

The next concept I worked on for this project was a the pilot of the spaceship, for this character I wanted to present them in a flight suit with their helmet on. For this concept I would have to present the character without their face so presenting any areas of personality and expression will have to come from gestures. 

Starting off with the same process as for the fugitive I drew up some silhouettes to serve as quick ideas generation, with these quick concepts I played around with the pilot being partly mechanical such as additional limbs and prosthetics as well as appearing more of an ordinary pilot.

With the first stage of ideas generation done for the pilot I moved on to sketching some more ideas out with additional detail as I did for the fugitive. 

Working with armour and helmets for this character was an area that I wanted to explore as since the pilot will not have their helmet removed I wanted to work on  making this area more interesting than the rest of the character.

Working through character iterations I moved onto painting some flat colours to see which I liked the most for the pilot. 

During this stage I was also still playing around with the armour and helmet and at the end I drew up a concept that I felt confident moving on with that worked with a colour scheme I'd begun exploring.

Whilst still exploring the look of this character I began exploring with gestures, showing the pilot interacting with a firearm and a radio in different stances. 

Exploring these also gave me additional ideas I could work with callout wise though I was unsure if I would be going further with this at the time though it was still helpful when drawing up some gestures to help make this character more dynamic.

The final stage of this area of the project was drawing up these sheets showing the key art of the pilot. Doing this helped keep the fugitive and the pilot consistent with one another when it comes to presentation. 

As before I drew up a turn around for the front and back end of the character to cover the important angles and shed some more detail on the pilot.

Spaceship

The concept that I would work on next would be the spaceship. The spaceship is a concept that I had never worked with before and so approaching this concept would turn out to be the most challenging area of this project and would take up most of my time.

For this spaceship I wanted to focus on a cargo/smugglers like vessel which could haul deliveries for various organisations over a large distance.

Starting off the spaceship I worked with using silhouettes, using silhouettes for this stage of the project helped me much more than it did with characters and so with this area being successful I came up with enough quick ideas that led to a final silhouette being chosen from the sheets that I'd worked through. 

At first some these came up a bit to cartoony and arcade like so distancing myself from that direction and stuck to a more realistic one.

After the silhouette stage I took the silhouette that I found to be the most successful and created some more variants using the same overall shape to see if I could exaggerate it at all. 

As well as playing around with colours and shapes I also drew up more concepts of the cockpit seeing whether it would be covered in sensors or be more akin to those that you'd see on an existing aircraft.

After working through initial concepts once I'd passed the silhouette phase I took a quick session into Blender and mocked up a quick blockout so that it would make sketching the concept in detail easier.

Once I'd drawn over the model I went through some more ideation exploring what the colour scheme might be and whether or not the ship is worn down. Since the ship belongs to only 1 person and is a smuggling spacecraft it made sense to me to sketch on some wear and tear indicating that this ship has been put through many dangerous journeys. 

After enough iteration with colour schemes this is the concept that I settled on after the development process, to go alongside with the side view I sketched up a rear view to show what the other end of this craft looks like.

This is the concept that I was most happy with at the end of this project as it was the area that I was challenged the most by.

The next area of concepts I had to work on was the interior of a chosen area of the spaceship. For this area I chose to go with the cockpit as I had ideas of how to explore this and so starting off I worked through some iterations to see what direction it could take.

I worked through 2 concepts for this area with the bottom and titled post being the most successful of concepts. I returned to working on the second interior concept after I began feeling more confident in this area which helped me to come up with a concept piece that I feel was more successful than the previous.