<back
I created this piece as part of my final portfolio project at Syn Studio under the instruction of Reda Amarti. This was the first time I used Blender in my workflow and I found it to be a huge help with coming up with a large variety of compositions quickly. I find myself incorporating Blender into my workflow quite frequently now.
The Horned King’s Castle
My first round of sketches were unique, but didn’t feel right to me. My first idea was to create a small castle that could be sculpted from the surrounding environment, similar to the houses in Cappadocia, Turkey. However, I didn’t feel particularly excited about any of the sketches I had come up with so I decided to go back to the drawing board.
My second round of sketches nailed the vibe I was going for. I figured out that I wanted to show a huge structure that had hints of brutalism with it’s lack of windows, but blended with round friendly-looking shapes that would fit well with the ghibli style I was going for with my project
I tested out a composition with one of the designs from my sketches, but I felt like as cool as it looked, it didn’t really feel like a castle. So I decided to go into blender and quickly mix and match some of the shapes from my sketches to create some more complicated designs that might feel more like a castle
Sketch I ended up going with
I made a quick blockout of my design in Blender and took some renders at various camera angles. I then quickly painted over in photoshop to come up with some quick composition ideas. After I became more familiar with the different possible angles, I polished the blockout up a little bit more and took a final render to use in the illustration as a base
From this point I just continued to paint on top of the model until I had a full illustration I was happy with. I really wanted to showcase the grand scale of the castle while also showcasing the surrounding environment and mood