Sketching for Environments - If There's a Smile in Your Heart...

...there's no better time to start!

Hey guys, time for another blog post!

Ed gave us a pretty unique assignment this week. And it involves a certain half-century old Disney property... Peter Pan and the strikingly varied Neverland environment. This is a great environment and I am surprised that I hadn't thought of doing a study of this before the assignment.

We were assigned two specific areas and a story moment.

My areas were Crocodile Creek and the Neverland Jungle. Thus my story moment was the pirates searching for treasure. Some background info... first of all, I watched Peter Pan for this assignment, twice, and I'm pretty sure they never actual visit Crocodile Creek in that movie. The most results that I found relating to it were from Jake and the Neverland Pirates, which present a very friendly and colorful creek.

I did a couple of studies with these open skies and sunny palms, but after that, I decided to focus more on my gut interpretation.

Looking for treasure is always an interesting topic, and since our camera can be placed anywhere that Tink can fly, I decided to show how easy it might be to rowboat past some buried treasure. But maybe this type of search was too reliant on serendipity, maybe the treasure wasn't hidden, but more guarded.

I wanted to put it out in the open, right next to the old Tick Tock Croc, here depicted in a more realistic style. Kind of like the way dragons horde treasure, even though this isn't really in line with the actual lore of Neverland, it was fun. I had trouble with the horizon line a bit here.

Both of these next ones use a similar approach, showing a fairy's eye view of a boat searching the shadowy waters. This version of crocodile creek is more like a caved lagoon area, with the bottom image being way deep into the cave, where in the foreground we see an alarm clock, a reminder of the terror that lurks among the bounty.

The jungle gave me a lot of trouble. I knew what foreground elements I wanted, but when it came time to draw the midground and background, I didn't know where my focal point was. I consider these a failure! I tried to reaffirm myself with the assignment and eventually found better compositions.