Environment Concept - Ant Colony + Ant Studies

 

This one is linked to the fungal people/ group from my last post: it turns out ants can farm fungi (Timmer 2024), so I thought that ants in this universe would do exactly that, and make colonies in landfill, slowly turning it back into soil as the fungus processes it. Our fungus cult guys could work with the ants (not domesticate them, but coexist in a sort of symbiotic way). In this scenario they've also evolved to be ginormous and the fungus is an unspecified neon colour/ glowing (I'm just using pink for now) because it looks cool. Hidden deep under several layers of painting, airbrushing, and ants is a photo of landfill which you can find in this research document: 

 

The player would find these colonies accidentally by falling through a pit trap/ areas where they've tunnelled too close to the surface and the walls are weaker/ thinner. 

Progress/ process:

First of all, before anything else, I put together a moodboard and did some studies of some of the images from the moodboard. I put the crabs in there as they too have exoskeletons, and I wanted to keep them in mind as I drew these more monstrous ants, I thought some crab-like features would be cool. I ended up drawing normal ants that were huge, but their design may change later with bigger, more threatening parts. Maybe the queen of each colony is more mutated somehow. These ant studies are also why I tagged this as toolkit 2.

 

I forgot to take screenshots from the start but basically I mirrored the landfill photo and put it on the bottom third of the canvas, and edited the hue/saturation/brightness a little bit. Then I painted over the top and bottom, and the pic above is the result.

Then I added a silhouette of a neutral-ish figure (we haven't designed the player yet) on the floor as if they've fallen through.

Then I added some shading with the more textured brush and some light entering from the top with the airbrush as an add layer.

After that, I sketched in some ants. I only drew two ant poses, then copy and pasted them all over the place.

Began to paint over the ant sketches, copy and pasted them at this stage too.

 

I put the sketches over the solid colours and merged the layers to try and add some texture/ break up the shapes a little, I wish I'd changed the colours of the sketch beforehand but you can't really notice them later so it didn't make too much of a difference.

 

 

 Shaded all the ants individually

 

Turned the brightness of the ants down a bit

 

 

There weren't enough ants so I copy and pasted them some more, and turned their brightness down even more to add some depth.

 

 

Added some glowing parts with a marker brush I'd modified to have opacity by pressure. I also added some details to the face of the ant closest to the player stand-in with a non-modified marker (which results in clean, non transparent lines)

 

Airbrushed over some of the glowing parts to make the "light" diffuse more

Finally, I added a tiny detail at the top in front of the light - it's hard to see at first but I tried adding something like dirt or debris falling from the ceiling.

 

 Update: in one our classes after I painted this, our lecturer reminded us to make sure the values are good in each piece, so I've went back and turned the saturation all the way down on this artwork to check if it was still readable, and I think this one was quite successful. I probably got away with it as when shading I use add/multiply layers, so the values are definitely lighter/darker. You do have to consider values even for the flat colours, so I might start in black and white next time I do any designs to ensure the values are all distinguishable if needs be.