Syllabus Projects Class Schedule
Digital Illustration: Environment Design
Create the world that your characters live in. Does your story take place in a city, a jungle, a desert, on another planet or some other interesting location? What do the plants, buildings, machines and landscape look like? Illustrate several scenes that give viewers a glimpse of the world you’ve created.
Project Specs
- Write a short paragraph explaining your proposed solution to accompany your initial thumbnail sketches. It should briefly describe the environment the story is going to take place in, including any traits that make it unique.
- Keep a time sheet for your project. It can be downloaded here. TimeSheet
- Design two to four scenes from where your story takes place (day, night, inside and outside). Some stories may take place completely inside or outside, or only at night, or in situations where day and night don’t matter, so draw only what’s relevant to your story.
- Give careful consideration to your lighting and color palette for each scene. They should reinforce the mood you’re trying to create.
- Create a full color (RGB) illustration of each scene.
- The size and shape of your illustration will depend on your project’s format. If you are doing an animated movie or series it will need to match the extended horizontal shape of a movie or television screen. If you are doing a video game that is meant to be played on a phone vertically, it needs to match a phone screen’s dimensions. A graphic novel typically will have vertical pages, but a 2=page spread would be horizontal. A children’s book can be vertical or horizontal. Research your format to find the correct dimensions and orientation. Once you determine that, make the artwork 300ppi at the correct size and orientation.
- Populate your scenes with props from the world you’re creating, such as tools. weapons, toys, vehicles, furniture, etc.
- All finished art must be done either in Illustrator, Photoshop, a combination of both or another professional-level drawing app, such as Sketchbook or ProCreate. Preliminary sketches can be done with traditional media and then scanned.
- Email the professor a screen-resolution PDF (Name file: lastName1stInitialEnvironment) of the finished project including your written proposal and time sheet.
