Our second brief was to design a 'cathedral' or place of worship. My initial ideas included rock-based structures, caves and possibly living organisms so I created some shadows in Alchemy with these basic concepts.
I created quite varying silhouettes which made it hard to pick favourites at this stage, but I decided to develop two of them further.
One of the designs was a giant floating rock that would have hundreds of passages going through it and would be a place for 'cloud monks' to reside. I designed a couple of iterations, including other rocks being chained to it and twisting tree branches that would unravel to let in sunlight.
I also developed an idea of a meteorite that had struck the Earth and frozen in place. An iteration included parts of the meteorite falling off and people had placed scaffolding to try and protect the precious site.
Next I created some thumbnails for more concepts with a focus on light. My favourite design was the middle bottom one, however I was struggling to think of how I could draw that when it came to the model sheet.
And then I changed my mind entirely. Someone mentioned Avatar the film and I began to think about the bio-luminescent plants in them. I also thought about how over-glorified that film was as no one cared about it anymore - as if people perhaps even... worshiped it??? I put the two together and came up with the idea of a tiny little bio-luminescent plant that would be put on display for the world to see, but not touch, and would be the kind of thing to be posted all over social media.
My favourite idea was the simplest plant as it would be over-glorified even more, so I went on to try out some designs for the cabinet it would be held in. I knew that I wanted it to be made of mostly glass, however I preferred the black bottomed case the most for its simple design.
From there I was able to create some thumbnails to show how and where the plant would be showcased and to try out some basic composition ideas.
I also created some iterations of the final plant design to try out slight colour variation and leaf shape. I chose the bottom right plant to be my final design.
I started the model sheet and realised that my design would look the same from nearly every angle, so decided it would be wasted effort to draw a side or back view. I decided to go with the octagonal cabinet from before and adapted it to create a larger glass case to go around it. I also explained my concept in general because at first glance the connection to 'cathedral' seem almost non-existent.
I decided to tie in the idea of over-glorification on social medias that I would show someone liking a faint picture of the plant on 'Instascam', bringing the like count to 7,006,342. I really struggled to shade/colour the hands for this and they look more like gloves than fingers, but I hope to develop my drawing skills in the future.
For the background I got a photo I took in Spain and put a Gaussian blur on it for a strong depth of field.
I struggled to stick with an idea for this brief and I have never been particularly creative when it comes to environment design, however I look forward to getting better at environment work in the future.