Elddar forest was an absolute joy to art direct. Continuing the art style of the geometric art style influenced by Eyvind Earle, this was an opportunity to create a bold, fantasy forest environment. The first step in establishing the look was some reference gathering. I was looking for flora that had geometric shapes and vivd colors.

Pinterest board collection of distinctive flora reference

This Pinterest board was centered on shapes for trees. One of the terms I used to describe the tree and bush visuals was “magical topiaries”.

Working with an outsourcing company was a challenge for the Elddar Forest. For example, the black silhouettes were Scribble Pad Studios’ first attempt at designing the flora. The blue line is my art direction to push the shapes to more edgy and fantastical than familiar topiary shapes. I really wanted them to go crazy and have fun with these shapes.

The artists at Scribble Pad Studios took on my art direction challenge and delivered some remarkable silhouette studies.

Scribble Pad Studios embraced the idea and created some wonderful shapes. I continued to direct them to create depth by adding contrasting shapes like the flowers on top of the base shapes.

The color direction was pushed to really embrace the fantasy and fantastical look. Stylized realism allowed me to push the limits on how wacky we can go with the art direction.

With the elements figure out, thumbnails can now be generated for the Elddar Forest. The concept artists generated a wide variety of locations and biomes within the forest.

Scale is pushed to massive proportions for a magical and other-worldly tone.

Color and lighting studies including different times of day.

Unfortunately we only had time to iterate on one of the compositions. Shortly after this was completely, the game was shelved and the team moved on to another game.