Brewery Concepts

We have recently been discussion the possible objectives and back story for the story mission. One of the biggest questions we needed to answer was: why are the Marauders in Leeds (as it has now been decided). I had the idea of comical twist, where the player is lead to believe the marauders are developing a secret weapon, where in reality they are brewing ale to fuel their debauchery. This idea was expanded by the team, where the Marauders are using the canals to ship out booze to other clans, booze now being the fuel source which their technology runs on. Booze powered Mechs will surely offer interesting aesthetics. I quickly captured a brewery setting with a photo paintover:

This sort of painting wouldn't really be featured among other more refined concepts, but feels like a behind the scenes development piece. It relies heavily on someone else's photograph found during a google image search. It does however give a little bit of context to the brewery idea, showing a marauder monitoring the booze production. This piece doesn't really show a space that a large mech could operate in however, which is something I tried to do with this next piece:

I used an image taken by Tim as the plate image for this paintover:

Interestingly, Adam suggested that the architecture around the level could have been built originally by 'The Sons Of Iron,' and later sabotaged by the Marauders. He had a blend of victorian buildings with industrial iron features much like the Leeds indoor market:

The theme of the environment I created was that of a make shift brewery/ loading docks. The giant copper hanging object is a huge beer cask. Notice also that I am now moving away from the outline hyper cartoony style, although I will experiment with outlines when it comes to texturing, and the 3D results will likely influence which visual approach we ultimately take.

I also posted my painting to the 'Level-up' group on Facebook. A video blog page where artists can also share their work and critique each other:

I am yet to receive critique, but plan on continuing to use 'Level-up' as a source for external feedback.