Snowflake Scenery Sketches

In the last few posts related to the snowflake project, we created the character templates for the snowflakes and have worked out some rough storyboard ideas. In this section of the process we are going to work on several scenery sketches to set the stage and potentially the style of how this work will come together. I will be taking samples of several potential story locations that I have been working on and try to translate them into illustrated form. These will not be the final product by any means but will help act as a stepping stone on the journey to piecing together this concept.

Getting Started

Several of the scenes that I will be using for inspiration are the flight through the clouds, falling in a rural setting with mountains and trees and the like, and last but not least resting on the ground or packed into a snowman/snowball. When generating concept art it is always a good practice to pull from real world examples, in this case I will be collecting and referencing a number of stock photos of areas and perspectives that i think will fit well with the story line, from there it will be a matter of translating that into a digital illustration. Sounds easy right?…

Starting with the cloud scenes, when I was working on the storyboards draft, I kept picturing those videos of planes flying through cloud canyons and how fun it would be to ride the wind along a journey like that. Pulling together a Mood Board of the cloud shapes and colors will help me in later phases of this project. You can find examples of what I am using below.

Using a similar activity we can start sketching out some landscape scenery for when the snowflakes have exited the cloud layer and are their final approach to landing on terra firma.

Now that I have a rough plan shaping up, it is time to move to the trusty fallback of pad and paper to help shape out the next set of sketches to see what will work and start figuring out what is not usable.

Checkout more on the Snowflake Project pages!