Hello guys, long time no see!
It's me Eujota again with another art related devlog!

Last time I introduced how the process of our Art Style Exploration Journey began, showed some of the problems and difficulties we had to face, and explained the main goal we wanted to achieve with the artistic style of our game.
If you didn't read the first part of this series, you can check it out here.

Today I want to present the steps we took to explore and define the style of our Arctic and Asian themed levels.
As I explained in the last post, we want to have the local cultures to directly influence the artistic look of the game while the player is in a specific region.
So for example, every time the player visits a Chinese village inside the game, the look of the environment and elements in the area will match the local Chinese art style.

Without further ado, let's dive into the explorations!

Arctic Style

Since no civilization has inhabited the archipelago of Severnaya Zemlya, the first region in the game, this means that there is no local art style, making it the closest to the pure look or, as we call it, the "base style"of the game.

As we want the locations in the game to be accurate, we need to start with research and working on various references.
The archipelago geography is manly comprised of sea, frozen ice, rocks and mountains (some of which are actually huge glaciers); these are exactly the elements we wanted to capture and have in our exploratory sketches.

Photos from explorers, scientists and Russian documentaries were really helpful for keeping us grounded and faithful to what real life Severnaya Zemlya looks like.
Here are some of the main references we used as a base for our creations:

The next step is to start working on the references and turning them into rough sketches to iterate on.
The focus was on the deserted, motionless and uninhabited feel that the area has. The lack of culture and history made it easier to only think about the location itself.

Those are Cunha's first set of rough sketches and studies for the Arctic. As you can see, his style is realistic and here he tried to explore how to make all the icy and white masses not look boring in the composition, while keeping the uninhabited look of the island.

Following the rough sketches, we made a new set of paintings, trying to spend some more time in the finishing rendering in order to represent how the final visual of the game could look like.

Notice how Cunha's style is way more realistic than mine (Eujota) in every aspect, from the forms and shapes, to the way he renders and choose the colors. This difference is not a problem at all, in fact, that's something that helps us a lot when doing this kind of exploratory sketches, since we can take different paths and merge the best parts.

When we take our pieces and present them to the team, they have a wide variety of options to choose from, and it makes it easy for us to point out exactly what we like and don't like about each option. At the end we all balance each other, and by merging our styles we have what we showed in the last devlog: The base style of our game.

Asian Style

Because the Asian culture is so rich and diverse, we didn't want to aim at any specific country or region in this first set of explorations yet. What we did is to research and study some Chinese and Japanese art, to see what kind of tools and approach we could use to mimic their artistic and painterly style and how to apply them on top of the base style of our game.

As always, we start with references, research and lots of observation.

We always try to get as many real and historical references as possible, to keep our game realistic and accurate.

Then we can start with our sketches again! This time we tried to use some trees for our explorations. This way we can focus on a single object instead of drawing a whole scene every time we want to test a crazy new idea.

First let's take a look at the workflow I used to sketch my trees. I started with basic shapes and silhouettes, so I can try many different directions as fast as possible. Then I try to finish some of them, so the team can see what kind of idea works best. And after that, I take the one we choose and try giving it different finishing styles.

Here you can see that I always keep my references close to me when I work. Sometimes it is really easy to get lost and to start doing whatever your mind feels like doing. But especially when you are drawing something you are not used to drawing, it is important to observe how things actually look in real life.

With the basic shape silhouettes, I used a round hard brush and only one color: black. This way I can focus on one specific aspect of visual communication first, which is the balance of shapes and sizes, and how to make my tree look Asian with just this set of limited tools.

After choosing what shape looks the best, I can try making a set of decent finished trees to show to the team.

You can see that in the second step of my workflow, I focused on something completely different from the first one. Here I tried to make the finishing and rendering style of each piece unique and different from each other.
In options "A" and "B", I wanted to show the possibility of having a watercolor or Asian Ink look, and in "C" and "D" I wanted a mix of modern and old Japanese art.
Out of these, we ended up choosing "D".

Because our game requires a more finished and rendered art style, I made some new versions, trying to maintain the ancient Asian look while adding the digital finishing that we want.

Now, let's take a look at some of Cunha's sketches for the Asian style:

With his trees, Cunha kept the realistic shape of his original references, and focused on finding the perfect rendering, or painterly style for the game.
Notice how he tried to apply different techniques on each tree, giving the team many different options to choose from.

After all our exploration, Cunha also did a sketch of a small scene, where he tried to apply all we've learned and experienced about the Asian art style, just so we could have an idea of how things would look in a finished piece.

This piece is of course not as finished as the other trees we painted before, but it shows how being simple and "clean" is useful when trying to transmit the peace and mastery of the artistic style we find in Asian culture.

Final Thoughts

This set of explorations helped us understand and iterate over several possible options for the look of the Arctic and Asian regions. It also gave us lots of experience in mixing a base style with another one.

But this is not the end!
We are very excited to show more drawings, paintings and designs in the following weeks as we continue our series on our approach to art style exploration for Tales of Kulplex.

You can get in touch with us and stay up-to-date on:

- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/talesofkulplex

- Discord: https://discord.me/talesofkulplex

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/talesofkulplex

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/talesofkulplex

- Giphy: https://giphy.com/channel/talesofkulplex

And, of course, feel free to leave a comment! :D

Take care!

Eujota