Mood board + gathering reference

To start, I gathered images of Sleeping Beauty and Eyvind Earle's artwork. I have a board on Pinterest which I am using to hold all the images I find, which you can find here. This board holds screencaps and concept art for the film as well as artwork by Eyvind Earle which is unrelated to Sleeping Beauty. I also put together a simple moodboard using key images which I provided during my initial pitch. At the bottom are some colour swatches which I took from these images, to look at how my colour palette/mood might change as I progress through the environments.

I tried to identify the common elements and themes in Earle's artwork by doing some quick sketches. The main theme that I found in all of Earle's work is lots of strong geometric shapes and a high level of detail. I particularly like his tree designs which use 90 degree angles almost exclusively to create these highly stylized shapes. This theme continues with the shape of ground by using zigzag edges and vertical line detailing; and again in the shape of the thorns. None of these shapes are realistic and it will be a really fun challenge to try and build shapes like this in 3D whilst still making it appear plausible.

Another key feature of Eyvind Earle's art is the use of perspective. You can see, particularly in the forest and castle interior scenes, that the perspective is not at all realistic. He pushes it to affect the mood of the scene, in the castle scenes the perspective creates these very dynamic shots which are uncomfortable to look at, enhancing the sense of distress. In comparison the forest scenes are totally flat, creating a composition which is calm and easy on the eye. This is something that I would really like to play with in my work, although as I'm not sure how it would be recreated in 3D I will have to do some further research on the subject.