During week 7 we were tasked with choosing a concept artist, explaining them and their work before creating a concept art image in a similar style/setting towards the concept artist. I chose the concept artist John Wallin Liberto.John Wallin Liberto is a matte painter and concept artist based in Sweden, currently working at OculusVR and he has been working in the games industry since 1999. He has worked on many famous movies and video games such as Halo 4/5, Star-Wars, Pacific-Rim, Harry Potter and many others. He is also known for his work on computer graphics.
Unfortunately John Liberto doesn't give much information about himself on his bio, however he had been featured in an interview where he discusses his past further. Unfortunately, this interview has since been removed from his website.
John Liberto has worked on many sci-fi type projects (among others however his most famous concept pieces are his works on Halo 4, Pacific-Rim and Star-Wars and is commonly referred to as a science fiction artist) created with immaculate detail, this allows him to give a large sense of depth and realism to his work.This sense of depth can be shown in the Pacific-Rim concept art shown to the side; giving a sense of fog and lighting colouration due to the brighter colour across the streams of light and darker colours around where less detail is needed. This draws your eyes towards the robotic body because it not only appears close but it also has the least extreme difference in colour.
As reference for the image's layout I took inspiration from one of Liberto's destroyed city environment concepts. I first started by creating the portal, making sure to add lots of detail similar to Liberto's style. Eventually this lead to me being rushed for time and I moved onto the center island, copying its design of other islands but not directly copying the center island.
Then, I began filling the sky with stars and floating islands in the background. I also used a white outline to show the placements of different objects, characters and stairs.
Once the islands were created, I began working on the stairs by creating a new separate floating island, before copying, re-sizing and re-positioning it to give the effect of a floating staircase.
As this was finished, I decided to add a blue star/sun in the top left by creating three separate layers of different shades of colours, starting with red/orange/yellow the next being purple/dark blue and the final being a light blue.
Next, I created a spaceship (ship) on the right hand side of the image, I settled on a red colour for the ship and added thrusters on the bottom side of the ship, I attempted to make it appear as if the ship was coming into land on one of the farther away islands and added an old metallic appearance for additional detail.
Lastly, I began creating ideas for characters, such as a militant/soldier-like character in uniform; similar to riot police as a form of protection along side a group of scientists and people in small mech suits designed for collecting materials from foreign worlds. Once everything else was finished I began shading. While not entirely consistent, I shaded everything in the scene relative to the sun. On the left side of the scene, however, as I was pressed for time I was unable to create the shadows of the characters and didn't adequately shade the spaceship as well as I would have liked.
Unfortunately due to me forgetting the task for a select amount of time due to other projects, it didn't show the level of detail that I would have wanted. However I believe that I did well because of the appearance and layout of the floating islands and portal. If I could improve upon this I would have added more detail to everything but the center of the portal, specifically the spaceship and research team.
