Environment Concept Development

After I put my mood boards together I begun planning some rough concept art for what I wanted my environment to look like. These concept sketches involved terrain and studies of some things that I looked at in my mood boards and mind maps.

This was one of the fist initial sketches of what I thought my environment may look like, to begin with I imagined it as a large  cove area with an overhanging cliff face with a large waterfall coming over the top, the main explorable area would be where the waterfall goes into the lagoon at the bottom.

Later on I decided not to focus so much on what was going on above the actual play area and focus more on the ground itself, adding a cave behind the waterfall with two dragon statues stood either side on large platforms. Although I did not draw the interior I wrote down what I wanted to include in the cave ie: Dragon bones.

Here is a slightly more detailed version of the concept shown above, drawn from a different angle. This is still continuing how I wanted my fairytale environment to look and I tried to make it look peaceful and serine.

Following the theme of using dragon statues I drew up a few studies of different kinds of dragons, Chinese Dragons (top), Japanese dragons (middle right) and a statue of a westernized Dragon (bottom left). It was at this time that i decided to try and model the more westernized Dragon as not only was it already in a statue pose from its source image, it was also the kind of Dragon more commonly referred to in fairy tales and myths.