MORE CONCEPT ART

After eeking away at this, I've finally got my new concept piece done... this one is showing a typical scene you can expect to encounter if you're ever unlucky enough to find yourself in the vicinity of ++ THE FEEDERS ++

This area, which should measure about 3kms by 3kms can be thought of as a perimeter around the centre of NOVA ZONAs affliction, and is directly linked to the incident that unfolded to create a New Zone on the once relativity uneventful Border Island (Kordonu Ostrovy).

If you did manage to somehow pass this "perimeter", your life would be almost immediately on a count down as there is yet no known way for living beings to survive for more than 20 minutes in the actual Ground Zero of NOVA ZONA... hence, there is a lot of interest and exploration attempts to pass THE FEEDERS as who is to say what you could find where few have managed to tread and return..?

The vague similarity to a Concentration Camp is intentional- I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp a few years back and was struck in all sorts of ways, but the visual appearance was absolutely horrific to me.

As for the relevance of the actual spheres themselves- lets just say that there are exactly as many of them as there were civilian inhabitants on Border Island... each one represented a once living person, now long dead.

Where you see a full single sphere- that was an adult. 

Where you see clusters atop each other or otherwise joined- that represented a family unit.

Where you see a half sphere- that was an infant.

So from this hopefully you can begin understand the horror of what the Border Island Authorities were actually involved in, and believe me- it's not even close to revealing the enormity of what they were doing over a very long period of time- that part you will have to discover for yourselves.

MORE CONCEPTS

Two more concept art peices here, one for NOVA ZONA and the other was directly inspired by THE LAST OF US.

With the NOVA ZONA image, I roughly modelled out the scene first, dropped a few lights in and rendered it out and used that as a base to start painting over. The main advantages of this method is you can obviously nail your perspective spot on from the off (I adjusted the lens also, to be a bit "fisheye"), and you can tweak the light sources until you're more or less happy and then go from there.

I was trying to create another atmospheric piece, this time of an interior that subtly hints at an Anomaly down that big round tunnel- hence the greenish blue glow. 

During the process I had all sorts of variations of anomaly drawn up, but the more in your face they were, the less convincing they seemed to me- I even had loads of greenish yellow gas pouring out of the entrance but it seemed too over the top for what I have in mind for NOVA ZONA... 

I even sketched in a Stalker, pressed right up against the wall under the light to show him trying to summon the courage to turn the corner but it made it look too "gamey"!

I also decided to do one directly inspired by THE LAST OF US as I've never played it but have seen enough of its development artwork to really want to have a go myself.

From seeing various screenshots, I really liked the way their artists tried to convey a sense of nature reclaiming the earth after mankind has gone and also that the apocalypse doesn't necessarily have to be a grim and desolate wasteland all the time- there could be little pockets of beauty and graceful decay if you were to look hard enough.

Again, I'm trying out different techniques here, having first done a very basic model and light pass and used that as the basis for starting the paint over.

There were a lot of little details in this one that needed fleshing out, so it took a little longer than it should have really.