Coming to the final concept.



 



Recently, I received another haul of books for this (and other) projects. These include;

 

• Anatomy for 3D artists - The essential guide for CG professionals.
• The Goblins of Labyrinth.
• Faeries
• Animals Real and Imagined
• The Art of The Last Guardian
• How to Render. The Fundamentals of Light, Shadow and Reflectivity.

I may be referring to each of these books as I use them throughout my studies.

 

In the meantime, I have developed further thoughts on what I should do for my project. One of my issues is that I haven't been able to figure out to what scope I am doing this book. Though I would like to do as many creatures as possible, I do not want this book to unintentionally limit the story by giving a finite number of creatures that the characters will find, and there are also a number of creatures that I do not want to include yet because they are concepts that I am either going to omit entirely or work further into at a later date. Therefore, I have come up with two ideas for the book title that fits into the story context. These are;

 

• Creatures of Upshire. The entire story tends to take place in the county of Upshire (which is the GG universe counterpart to Yorkshire). Upshire has a much more extreme landscape, particularly with Upshire valley which is a limestone gorge roughly the size of the Grand Canyon and a stone stack in the middle called "Precarious Rock". It also houses the largest forest in the country, Darkling forest. However, I still haven't figured out all of the locations of Upshire so I may give this one some consideration.
• Creatures of Darkling forest. This is the aforementioned forest that is rich in its diversity of hidden ones. This is due to the fact that all of the creatures want to stick close to Poig, the resident forest spirit, thus creating a "hotspot" of forest magic. Most of the story takes place in and around this forest, so it makes sense to have a journal written from Gretchen's point of view accounting her experiences with each of the creatures. My only issue is that quite a large number of creatures may be omitted from the book and narrowing the scope too much.

Whichever idea I go with, the scope is at least starting to narrow a little more and my ideas have more clarity. What I really need to start doing now is study zbrush as I haven't yet done anything for this.

 

To finish off, I have done several sketches which I did to loosen up before working.