Digging through all of my LU art folders I came across a few more very early project concepts from early 2007. One of the first levels, or as we called them 'content zones,' that we worked on was based on a pirate island cove called Swagger Town. This was when the concept team was still just Jerry and I. We had a lot of fun with this area, coming up with tons of cool structure and environment concepts. We started to develop methods of translating concept drawing in brick form in conjunction with our master LEGO builders and even did our first bit of dabbling in level design with some of Jerry's amazing 'amusement park' style drawings of the area. All of which I am sure will be posted in time...
For now, I wanted show a few plant and cloud studies I did for Swagger Town. For me these are interesting for a couple of particular reason... The first being style - if one was to look at these drawings out of context they could easily be used for any sort of stylized concepts, nit really referring to LEGO at all. It took Jerry and I, and consequently each new member of the concept team, time to find a proper balance of LEGO style within our drawings. We did not want to meticulously draw every piece out in brick, obviously - and out master builder team did not desire that either as it took away from their own creative interpretation of the work. However, down the road and with further understanding of the limitations of the LEGO brick, we were able to add bits of detail, scale, and shape that would add LEGO style to out drawings and also help them to successfully be interpreted in brick.
Secondly, for me, these drawings represent a change in tools for me. The tree and plant drawings are done with marker and colored pencil. The clouds, however, are painted digitally. It was around this time that I was given my Wacom Cintiq. With the efficiency it lent me I was soon after doing 98% of my conceptual art for LEGO Universe digitally.
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