Character Workshop: Environments and Some Previous Work

 Today's character workshop focused primarily on environments. How just like characters they can be defined by shapes, angles, lighting, mood and appearance. And can be just as crucial to telling a story as the characters that inhabit it, who are useful for conveying a sense of place.

  The workshop task was to design an environment (in the form of some sort of residence) that would fit a particular character. I was given Halo's Master-Chief. And my first thoughts were towards something industrial. But as Justin pointed out his armour also bears a huge number of more organic shapes. Nothing as extreme as Covenant armour or designs (which is all curves) and he suggested some components of his armour could be structures in their own right.

  So the first two were based on this idea he'd live something industrial, prefabricated. A military outposts that could look like it was dropped from space via an orbiter.

  Unfortunately I found they came out rather generic and not that serious. So I looked again at the components of Master Chief's armour.

  I feel much happier with this base than I did with the first two. There's a lot more going on and it feels more fitting with the Master Chief himself.

  The rounding-off task that was set near the end of the lesson was to make a scene out of two randomly-chosen words. The words given to me were "decadent tavern", which got me thinking a little. I ended up imagining a place of garish opulence filled with patrons who cared primarily about themselves or enjoying the moment. So a lot of fancy costumes,  sharing of drinks or all-round pleasure seeking. Stuff that more upstanding people may question. The narrative behind it is this could be a place where the protagonist of the story where this tavern is used is a place of temptation and danger. They are in the belly of corruption, so to speak, a dangerous place where if you are nto careful you could lose yourself forever.

  These drawings should have been uploaded last week. They were of a task where three of us were given a premise to a setting and our job was to draw three characters, one for each person, for that setting. The story my group got was about snake-based South American Vampire lords who had enslaved humanity. I decided to have a go at drawing the vampires, going though a few ideas like them being hybrids of snakes.

  One idea I had during the process was that vampire bosses could have some "super" form that could be used for boss battles. Which turned out a couple of interesting ideas.