Environment Sketches

Whenever I read a good novel, I find my mind constructing the locations in vague yet somehow simultaneously vivid detail. I am often tempted to try and draw those elusive images out of my imagination. However this impulse usually strikes right when the story is getting so involved that I cannot put the book down. So I don't, and I finish the book - usually getting such catharsis from the story's completion that any desire I had to draw those images quickly disappears, and my attention shifts onto something else.

As a Christmas Present last year, my brother generously gifted me the first two novels of 'The Deepgate Codex Trilogy' by Alan Campbell (he must have been quite confident I would like the first one!). The first is called Scar Night, and I read it while camping on the Coromandel Peninsula over Summer. It wasn't a stand out favourite of mine among all the novels I've read, but there were some cool moments and some great locations in the book. As usual I blitzed through to the end without so much as thumbnailing a location or character, but I really want to break that cycle. So I am trying now to put some of those images down.

Of course the process always twists and changes the original thought. Especially now, many weeks after I closed the book, so these are more "Inspired by" the book in some way, as opposed to directly designing it's locations.

Anyway enough words, here are the first very quick sketches (pencil sketch and photoshop colour studies).