Spring Project - Open Water Concept

There are 3 main bodies of environments within our proposed game. We have the starting cave, the open waters and the abandoned city/ruined cave. Each of these areas requires a different environmental feel so as the player progresses through the game the sense of danger increases and the player begins to feel more and more out of place.

I first did some quick sketches to try get a feel for what I wanted the area to look like. I knew I had a starting point of large structures with a meso-american feel to them but wanted to take this further and try and develop a sense of scale. This application of scale began to merge into the idea of massive pyramids or obelisks which dwarfed the player to create a massive sense of scale and a feeling of being in the open ocean. Furthermore the addition of large sea creatures could increase this effect. I decided to take the top drawing of the second image below forward and develop it.

The final image took a while for me to develop correctly I moved between greens and blues a lot trying to establish a nice deep sea environment. The greens had the bonus of provindg a really strong murky effect but make the piece feel very dark and damp. The use of curves on the RGB scale (specifically the blue) allowed me to alter the image to a much nicer ocean feel. I also had to play around with the values of the image a lot as I found myself creating many black areas within an image which created null zones with  the painting that were too contrasted. Another point worth noting is the use of photo images within this piece, this is something I have never really used before so it was interesting to try apply this to the image and whilst in some areas I think it turned out okay in others it needs more refinement. But as an initial concept I think it will do.