So I decided to give in and do the lineart with pen and fill in the base colours in photoshop before getting carried away and doing things backwards. Tis looking better, and at least now I can fiddle with colours and atmosphere much easier. Rachel suggested fireflies. Fiber optics possibly?

I think a photoshop paint is the answer, because I'm just not getting it with other media... I tried collage and acrylic, and those are SO AWFUL you don't even get to see them.



...Not that I think these are particually fantastic. But for me, drawing enviroments, they are.

Trying a small sculpey allosaurus. (I should really finish previous sculpts before I start new ones...) I thought it would be a lot harder to get it to stand on it's own than it has been so far. I think when the head has more details and it's got arms I may have to add weight to the tail.

I've not done half as much uni work as I should have this week and progress is slow. Oh well, I feel like I'm actually learning something though and that's why it's taking longer and seems quite difficult to find a breakthrough. Chessington tomorrow! Which I hope will help inspire me a bit more.

Found an old Jurassic Park Velociraptor toy that was broken so I took it apart and edited it. Fixed it's arms into a more realistic position, with the palms facing inwards and and added feathers. Still looks noting like velociraptor though. Maybe dromaeosaurus?

There are very slow improvements. It's starting to feel more natural to draw. I think I need to do some drawing from life of environments to aid spacial understanding. There is mostly playing around with layout and colour and I've introduced a section where the ride passes over the pathway. I want to keep the area enclosed looking, dark and foresty.

This is a WIP sculpt of the Pokemon Feraligatr for Rachel since she collects feraligatrs. :)

There's something quite nice about modeling. Past the annoying fiddlyness and how long it takes, you're left with something that seems a lot more ...worthwhile? than a flat picture. I'm resisting starting other things before this is done. Might try something realistic next.

Photo collage playing around with composition of the tengu space and colours which will help convey mood. Still having trouble with the viewing area.


And I misribly failed at keeping a colour pallet minimal. Pen over watercolur is quite nice and quick, but i suck at watercolour. Need t try this a few more times I recon.


Some early doodles for a Norse/Fenrir inspired dark ride combined with wolf exhibit.

Here are some very early initial ideas/sketches for a themed animal exhibit featuring wolves (and possily wild boar, european bison, deer, etc) for the Europe area of the park. European animals are boring, and wolves are extinct now, so the idea is to make it more interesting with some fantastical woodland theme or some kind - and possibly tie-in some kind of ride into the area... based on werewolf legends perhaps?



Here's a comissioned drawing I did today for http://yodabar02.deviantart.com/


And a baryonyx I drew when I was bored this evening.

A new sketch, playing around with roughing out colours in photoshop. I'm shit with colour choices. this sketch features a viewing area, Tengu statues and the station of the ride, a temple deep in the forest. Also shows a mid ride concept sketch. I think to make the area look like a forest, there would need to be a more enclosed feel, and not such an open space.

Scrapped the wooden coaster idea for a S&S "Free Fly" or "Eagle" coaster, again themed to the Tengu. I thought the wooden coaster would be more appropriate to ideas I've got for Wild Africa. The Free Fly is rather unique and simulates flight, so it seemed more appropriate for a Tengu theme in Wild Asia. The ride could also ground hug and wouldn't need to be very tall.

Adventurers are snatched by the mischievous Tengu and taken on a flight through a Japanese forest, swooping through bamboo, trees and over ponds. The ride would feature a viewing section for non riders to see the roller coaster perform it's unusual maneuvers. The cars on each train would be themed to a humanoid and an avian Tengu, one red and one blue. Adventurers could chose which side to ride in a queue line split.

Concept for a wooden roller coaster located in the Wild Asia section of the park, themed to Tengu (mountain/forest goblins) and the Mt. Takao area. Roller coasters are hard to draw, especially wooden ones. :( I don't think you'd see much of this coaster anyway though, as it would be very foresty with thick bamboo and trees and themed buildings and a topple tower ride.

New project. Attraction concept designs for Chessington. Some initial brain farts.


Need to sort out the platform floor on the topple tower...

Some allosaurus. The bottom one's legs are horrendous. Looks like it's got prosthetic ones.

New text experiments, also different colour, composition and shadow/glow to separate the text from the bg. They don't look much different, but I think the shadow is slightly better.


More changes, this time opacity and colour changes with no blending options added. Cleaned up and removed some red in the second with slight colour change.

Experiments with text placement. Rachel mentioned that the image is more balanced in the bottom right example. I think I'm starting to agree.

Hurray for cuttlefish, tiktaalik and diloposaurus.

Removed all the colours except black and a single red. Also finally flipped it. The original of this image is vast at 600dpi and large enough to print out at A2, and so it's taking ages to do anything with it. I did this because the original image is only A4. The Macs at Uni couldn't even cope with scanning it at 600dpi, so I'm at home upsetting my poor PC with this ridiculously large file.

I'm not sure about the red. Lighter, darker? And the text isn't currently very legible - good or bad? I like that it you have to work a bit to see what's going on because I don't think as an "illustration" it communicates very blatantly in the first place. I don't want it to look like the text was slapped on to a failed piece of communication to force it to communicate.