Art Style/Planning

In the planning stages for my thesis one of the more difficult obstacles I've run into is deciding on an art style. I wanted to accomplish something that emulates my own digital painting style and also emulates some of the unique art styles that exist in my favorite types of video games.

For my digital painting style, I have a somewhat messy speed painting style. I like to make a lot of my own custom brushes and paint in low opacities so that I'm layering colors and then blending them together as if I was creating an oil painting (Which is my absolute favorite kind of traditional painting). The result is a somewhat cartoony/comic booky style that has reminiscent of realistic painting. However, I like to avoid complete realism because of the theory that the more realistic something is the less human like it becomes and the more people shy away from it. (Like in the Final Fantasy Movie The Spritis Within - it was incredibly realistic, especially for the time, but it lacked that "human quality to it, which made it all together a very unsettling movie).

I'm actually not the biggest game player in the world (I lack the proper coordination to be able to play successfully, except in easy mode), but I love watching people play video games and I absolutely love the art styles of many video games. One game I keep going back to over and over again to reference the art is Gearbox Software's Borderlands.

I love the unique use of the sharp toon outline combined with a shading that is somewhere between cell shading and realistic. But the Borderland art style has a quirky quality to it that definitely makes me feel like I'm playing in some sort of comic book and even though the actual game play can get quite intense, it still has a quirky quality that makes me feel kind of happy and excited.

I'm looking for a style that's a bit more dramatic and invokes something unsettling and has a little bit of a feeling of a horror game. (We are following an asylum patient after all, and I can't imagine having a pleasant happy time in any sort of psychiatric hospital.) So I looked into games that are of the darker/horror genre, such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. 

This particular game has a lot of the nonrealistic shading, though it doesn't use the sharp toon outlines of Borerlands, but the color scheme of this game is a lot darker, rooms have a lot of browns, blacks and greys as well as other earth tones. It also makes use of a lot of dramatic lighting generating by small light sources. The result is a unique art style that still invokes the intense feeling of a horror game.

In the end, I decided to speed paint a piece of concept art that mixes the styles of what I would like to accomplish together. I ended up using sharp, dramatic, comic book style shading with more saturated colors. Each element of the color palette has a monochromatic shading scheme. I tried to emulate the heavy shadows that I've seen in horror genre games, such as Amnesia, but I also added the extra element of a realistic texture on top of the low opacity painting.