ENVIRONMENT COLOR KEYS

Assignment
Part 1: Paint six (6) master copies—black & white or monochrome value studies of environments (landscape, city, or interior space) similar to examples below. Due Wednesday, August 29 for weekly reviews. Post your work to the blog by 1:00 pm.

Part 2: Paint six (6) master copies and/or original color studies of environments similar to examples below. Due Wednesday, September 5 for weekly reviews. Post your work to the blog by 1:00 pm.

Part 3: Paint six (6) original color studies of environments similar to examples below. Create your own studies based on environments in the book Uglies. City locations include:

- New Pretty Town - Center of young party life. Floating architecture suspended with magnetic technology.
- Uglyville - Less spectacular dormitory district across the river from NPT, where "ugly" (normal) youths live while they wait for the operation to make them "pretty" when they're 16.
- Crumblyville - Suburbs where married "middle pretties" raise their "littles."
- The Rusty Ruins - Rusted metal ruins of 21st-century city filled with destroyed buildings, cars, and overgrown with forest.
- The Smoke - Low-tech village of exiles and refugees far from the big city who live off the land, hidden in the forest, where they deliberately remain "ugly."

There are also underground factories, coastline, mountains, rivers, vast fields of flowers and other outdoor locations you might want to explore. Consider the effect of color and value for communicating a sense of light, temperature, atmosphere, and mood. Value and color studies should be rendered in semi-abstract shapes with very little detail. Use value changes to indicate space with aerial perspective. Due Wednesday, September 12 for weekly reviews. Post your work to the blog by 1:00 pm.

Medium
You may choose to work in gouache, acrylic, or digital media (Photoshop, Painter, etc.)

Size
Each study should be no bigger than a business card.

Time
Try not to spend more than about 45 minutes on any one of the 18 studies. If you can do them more quickly and you want to complete a greater quantity, feel free.

Goal
Explore ideas for creating a sense of place using color and value masses instead of specific details. Warm up your visualization skills and try to convey the feeling or mood of different locales where story scenes take place.

References
Below are some suggested sources for your master copies. If you enjoy doing color scripts and want to see more inspiring examples, I recommend The Art of Pixar 25th Anniversary: The Complete Color Scripts and Select Art from 25 Years of Animation.

Nathan Fowkes
http://nathanfowkes.blogspot.com/p/available-originals.html
http://nathanfowkes.blogspot.com/2012/03/location-studies-now-available-for-sale.html
http://nathanfowkes.blogspot.com/2012/04/whether-youre-landscape-painter.html
http://nathanfowkes.blogspot.com/2012/02/puss-in-boots-and-tres-diablos_22.html
http://nathanfowkes.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post.html

Lou Romano
http://louromano.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-incredibles.html
(Scroll down to "Color Scripts" and "Lighting Thumbnails."

James Gurney
See pp. 34-35 in his book, Imaginative Realism for good examples.


Dice Tsutsumi
http://geektyrant.com/news/2009/12/22/6-images-from-the-toy-story-3-color-script.html
See more in the book, The Art of Toy Story 3.

Mike Hernandez
http://conceptdesignacad.blogspot.com/2012/08/gouache-landscape-painting-with-mike.html