ADAPTED TEXT - SKETCHES + CONCEPT ART DEVELOPMENT

FINALLY uploaded all my development work with my scanner, because i dont like working with sketchbooks. Instead I draw on seperate pages, and i dont want them to get lost by handing them in uni for asessment.

P.S. for older posts search by month on the side-bar. some of the older posts are not displayed on the main page anymore.


SKETCHES + CONCEPT ART


My desk. Where all the magic happens.




i've done a LOT of development work. now you see why i keep putting off scanning that all onto my computer...


For my adaptation project i was required to design either the characters, or the envirnments. I decided to do both.

Here are some of my original sketches for Dante. I only uploaded the most signifcant pictures, because i dont have time for every single one.

Dante




Head/face









Final design. To make it less dark, and feel more like a graphic novel style, I exaggerated the proportions and deliberatley made him really chunky.





VIRGIL

With Virgil i started drawing straight into photoshop with my tablet.


This was the defining sketch, and I took it further from here.

This concept was done in a similar style to Dante, looking quite bulky and muscular. However I wanted the blue skin and wings to give him an etheral feel, like a spirit guit ( which is essentially what he is )


I toned down the body mass for the final design and made his lower half fade like whispy smoke. i did this to make him look more like an apparition than a solid being.



CREBERUS


The first concept for cerberus was just a three headed dog as described in the orginal text. Nothing special but it was a starting point.


After playing the game and seeing Wayne Barlowe's rendition of Cerberus, he took a radical design change. Heavily influenced buy the game, this Cerberus was a gluttonous monster ready to devour everything. In fact hes so fat he needs wheels.


Barlowe's Cerberus.


this is the final design. I took two of the heads off because they looked far too similar to the game's version, and instead gave it just one head. I also increased the boy mass tenfold to create what is basically a giant blob.



LUCIFER









CLEOPATRA

The stars really aligned when it cmae to designing the guardian of the circle of Lust, Cleopatra. I drew it straight in Photoshop and it was one of those drawings that just worked. I was so surprised with the outcome, I Immediatley knew I wanted to keep this design.


The bondage outfit and whip symbolise lust and punishment.


My desingn was influenced buy the art style used in World Of Warcraft. The similarities are evident.


ENVIRONMENTS


LIMBO


My original concept for limbo ( shown here ) was a huge cathedral on a cliff face, with King Minos ( Judge of the dead ) picking up sinners and judging them to their circle buy throwing them of the cliff into their corresponding circle. I came up with the idead of a huge conveyer with platforms holding piles of sinners going up to the cliff to minos.




These are some speed-paintings i did to show what the top of the cliff would look like it. Sinners travel up the pathway to Minos' cathedral.



The early cliff concepts didnt quite capture the huge scale I was looking for. being the first circle of Hell, I wanted it to be vast, dainting and impressive. So I came up with the idea of a giant spire, witch sinners would be force to ascend to reach Minos' Cathedral at the top.


For this final render, i changed the lava to sewage water. This was partly to symoblise that the souls trapped in limbo were not clean enough to ascend to heaven, yet not worty of punishment as serious as the rest of the circles. Plus it makes a change from the generic notion of hell as just lava, fire and rocks.


Charons Boat: Originally I had this idea I was super excited about doing, Chanron's Boat. Charon was the ferryman who would take the sinners from death and transport them on his boat to the first circle Limbo to be judged. I wanted to have the boat docked at the foot of the spire, but i didnt have enought time to take it further because I already had 9 circle to design as it was.




GLUTTONY

The second circel, and possibly the most incluenced by the Dante's Inferno game. I loved the idea that the circle was made of flesh and stomach lining/ intestines.
The environment will literally eat up gluttonous sinners, while worms swallow them whole.







Wayne Barlowe's version of Gluttony for the game:




LUST

Home of Cleopatra, and the circel in wich Dante's wife is enslaved in for commiting adultery. Lust was a one of the hardest circles to design, yet most interesting. The early ideas and sketches were inspired by surreal artist H.R. Girge's biomechanics and fleshy organic worlds. his paintings are filled with sexual undertones and bodies intertwined together. It was the perfect place to start getting some ideas.
I baugh one of his art books for inspiration, thetashcen 25 years of H.R. Giger.


The fleshy substances from this picture immediatley gave me an idea:
" I can make Lust like this!"
Inspired buy the game i wanted the circle of lust to be filled with sexuall nuances and reproductive organ symbols.




The sexaul undertones are very apparent here.



After looking at Giger's paintings i came up with these rough ideas and compositions:


I then did a Speed-paint for them, and I really hated it. It really didnt convey what I was going for and turned out nothing like I had imagined. I thaught it was flat with zero atmoshphere:



So then i turned to other areas of Gigers work. I noticed he did some sculptures for an unreleased film. These sculptures were sharp, dark and had a crazy leather/bondage
look to them. I realy liked this idea and started to move away from the fleshy organic look and veer towards this metal, leather and spike look.









I actually took the arms and legs here and created them into a walkway, with impaled sinners on the spikes.


This concept eventually became the final version. It features a gian statue filled with bodies, as well as spiked walkway. Its also worth noting the pools of bodily fluids in which the sinners are drowning in. I was really hesitant about wether this was pushing in terms of being innapropriat or just downright tasteless. Lust definitely turned out to be the darkest circle of all.


Final Render:



GREED






Im going to leave out some of the rest of the circles ( including Greed) because they dont actually feature in the story. I only did them because I wanted to.
The last two circles to feature are Violence and Treachery.


VIOLENCE

This is the circle Dante himself is condemned to for killing his wife's lover.
I particularly wanted to focus on the styx marsh, where violent sinners drown in boiling blood. In the distance you can see Lucifer's icy lair in the last circle of Treachery.


This is a speed-paint done in 2-3 hours. I was really pleased with the result, so i decided to keep it as a final design.


Finally here are some scrapped character designs. I didnt have time to work to much on these because I was focusing on the main characters, and getting them done in time for the final crit.


KING MINOS

The Greek King Minos never made it to the final cut. Descriped in the original text as a blind serpent, I tried to stay as true as possible. I added details like candles and lanterns as well as a mask.


DEMONS

A design for the slave driving demons that Virgil saves Dante from.

ADAPTED TEXT - DANTES INFERNO [ RESEARCH + DEVELOPMENT WORK]

Because I've been a little preoccupied with finishing all my animations in time for asessment the past few weeks, I havn't been regularly updating my blog. As a result Im going to have to back-track a bit to upload all the source research and sketches i did for the project.

DANTE'S INFERNO

The epic poem written by legendary italian poet Dante Alighieri was first introduced to me by a friend of mine who knows I have always had a huge fascination with the history of Christianity. I've always known of the poem, but never really knew much about it. Let alone read it. He recommended i give it a try, because it is one of the most defining and influencal pieces of religous literature of our time. He figured it would be right up my alley.
Even though it is considered fiction, Dantes visions and descriptions of the nine rings of hell were so dark and real that many people of the time believed it to be fact. It helped define our vision and notion of the Christian Hell.
I downloaded the entire text, but because of the old linguistic style ( and the fact that its an italian translation ) I found it much to dificult to read, so i read a condensed version in contemporary language. I became more and more fascinated by Dante's dark and thaught provoking world.
Soon after the we recieved the adapted text brief. I immediately jumped at the oppertunity to do my very own adaptation of this epic piece. The timing couldn't have been better. Since I want to be a concept artist when after I graduate, a project about character design and concept art was really apealling to me. I have always been interested in Narrative and how it relates to characters, so the narrative tutorials with Keith Tutt were a great exprerience.
I knew it was going to be ahuge undertakeing to adapt such a big piece of literature, and it was at this point that i started to do research and dig up on existing adaptations and animations based on Dantes inferno.


DANTES INFERNO: AN ANIMATED EPIC



This was the first animation I came across. Its called DANTE'S INFERNO: AN ANIMATED EPIC and was directed by Mike Disa and written by Brandon Auman. The plot revolves around a story loosly based on the original text. However in this version Dante is a Knight who faught in the Crusades, and did some terrible things and now finds himself trapped in the inferno. I decided to buy it and watch it for reference to how they imagined and represented Dante Alighieris visions. The result was a visually striking movie.
Each circle was animated by a different animation team, resulting in different art style for each circle ranging from manga to more traditional animation. Some of the world's leading animation studios contributed to it ( including the team behind ghost in the shell, one of my all time animations ).





The animation took a very dark and bloody approach, and the different art styles really got me thinking about doing something similar. I also really liked they took Dante, who was only a poet and turned him into a sythe weilding anti-hero. It used a lot of artistic liscencing to great effect.

TRAILER


I learned shortly after that the animation was actually based on an up-coming video game relased by EA and developed buy Visceral Entertainment. I emmediatly watched the trailer and developer dairies for it, and eventually baught it on its relaese date.


my copies of Dantes Inferno animation and game


DANTE'S INFERNO XBOX 360/PS3




I checked out some artwork for the game, for ideas and concepts and a lot of it was really amazing. A lot of care and thaught had clearly gon into into bringing the inferno and its creatures to life. Just look at these concepts:


Gates Of Hell



Limbo



Limbo


Dante


Greed Hoarders


Virgil

This Design for Virgil Inspired the design for my version of Dante. I wanted him to look like the dante in Gustave Dore's original etchings. This picture inspired my very first concept for Dante:



The first ever rough sketch that would later develop and manifest into something much greater.

I completed the game for research purpouses, and it was so wonderfully crafted and designed, that it really did inspire me, and give me a ton of ideas for characters and environment concepts. Here is a trailer:




Me doing some primary hands-on "research" ahem... no seriously it helped a lot!


Me looking exhausted after killing Cerberus the guardian of the circle of Greed.

After Watching the animation and completeing the game i was intrigued as to how they crafted the story and designed these amazing locations and creatures. i Found a whole series of Developer Diary videos that really shed some light on the creative process and the people behind the game.

DEVELOPER DIARIES:



This developer diary really inspired me to start working on my own vision of Hell. From the very beginning I knew I wanted soemthing that wasn't quite as dark, but at the sametime i wanted it to be serious. I started to veer towards a comic-book style of drawing. The characters would deliberately be chunky, beefy and almost out of proportion.




ARTIST: WARNE BARLOWE

Wayne Barlowe is an established concept artist famed for his visions and paintings of hell. He released a book title Barlowe's Inferno full ofhis sketches and paintings. He also worked on the Dantes Inferno game and designed the circle of Lust. Here are some of his pictures:









ARTIST: GUSTAVE DORE

Gustave Dore was the first artist to illustrate the inferno, and his etchings are still most commonly ascociated with the poem.