Initial Idea 1
This piece is was inspired by the Greek underworld. Greek mythology is something I've always found really stimulating, especially the different beasts such as the hydra and minotaur. I looked at a few pictures of the generic hellish look and liked the whole lava waterfall concept. Another thing that was pretty cool was the lava stepping stones derived from the Tomb Raider game.
I think there is a lot of potential behind this scenery I could use.
Initial Idea 2
For this piece I was looking at just a few generic space pictures. The astronaut is heavily inspired by the animated series Spacemen on youtube. A very comical pixel animation about to astronauts being stranded in space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYMAs2RSPPk
What stopped me from going ahead with this was that there's a very limited amount of things you could do with space that hasn't already been covered.
Initial Idea 3
This piece is very simple. I wasn't overly keen on how little I had to go off on this but when I eventually had it down on paper. This was inspired by my tutor who had drawn a quick doodle on the white board of a snowy tundra looking environment. In the cave you can see a sad rabbit who will probably freeze or starve to death... we'll see.
Initial Idea 4
I really loved this one. This has a lot of inspirations behind both the character and the scenery. For the background I was inspired by Pokepark, There are two locations in the game that motivated the design; the Flower Zone and Sky Pavillion. Both locations are either high in the sky or literally floating. Another one that was unexpected was the Avatar film, the floating islands were very alluring to me and the way the water dropped over the edges was very 'heavenly' to match the same kind of vibes I was going for.
The bird-like character you seen in the front was heavily inspired by Zelda Wind Waker - or more specifically the Rito Tribe. The appearance of the tribe is very humanoid however all of them feature beaks where their noses would normally be, I loved the concept for how distinctive and unique it looks. Where as most bird/human hybrids are the usual 'human-with-wings' looking aspect it was weirdly attractive. Going off from that topic I was secondly inspired by the book series Maximum Ride, originally written by James Patterson and later illustrated by Narae Lee in an eastern manga style. The only difference I made with the wings was that their wings came out from where their arms would normally hang, much like a harpy.
Initial Idea 5
This idea was inspired by my best friend Caoimhe who had originally drawn a very mythical looking scene with abnormally large mushrooms. Her drawing had reminded me of one of my all time favourite games Trine. I really enjoy the scenery of Trine 2 for it's colours and pleasing aesthetic and more so it's abnormally massive mushrooms and other pretty aspects.
After consulting my tutor with the different environments I had created he recommended that I did a mash up of my initial idea 1 and initial idea 5. The idea of moving through a very pretty fairyland and on the flip side would be it's parallel. A very daunting hell-world. As much as I liked my 4th Idea I would like to save it for another time. I really like the idea of mixing both ideas up because it sets a kind of story in itself. It also gives me a chance to do two ideas in one.