Joanne Tran is an incredibly talented environment concept artist, known for her work on projects such as Hades with games company Supergiant Games. Her distinctive use of colour and dynamic compositions really drew my attention. Hades as a game incorporates narrative elements i really enjoyed, that I would take inspiration from if i was to develop Avant Guards narrative mechanics further. Additionally, the game as a rouge like dungeon crawler game appeals to my concepts hypothetical play style as a cross between dungeon crawlers and open world games.
This piece comes from the video game Hades, as a depiction of Asphodel in the Underworld. Tran use a combination of different composition rules to create a piece that draws attention, and helps guide the eye. The use of the Golden Triangles creates balance and harmony, ensuring the piece doesn’t feel too ‘top heavy’ or ‘bottom heavy’.
This also helps guide the eye from the bottom left to the top right, in following the way English speakers read from the left to the right. In addition to the golden triangles, Tran uses shape language to make the focal point of the piece clear, The juxtaposition between the use of circles/rounded shapes and the triangular structure helps make this obvious to a viewer. She also uses the Rule of Odds in regards t the circular structures to create more visual appeal.
Finally, her use of colour in this piece aids her composition, as she reduces saturation and increases the value of objects appearing further from the camera, to create a sense of depth. Her use of a limited colour pallet means she had to pay close attention to values in the same hue to show distance, instead of relying on different colors/hues. The increase of value works for the tone and story of this piece, alluding to the protagonists struggle through this difficult area of the map, and the way the game gets harder as you progress.
In this piece, Tran uses the Rule of Thirds to create a harmonious composition. The rule of thirds ensures a piece feel natural and organic separating the foreground, background and focal point. Furthermore it helps to visualize any unnatural breaks in the piece that need to be filled, which Tran demonstrates with the structure intersecting the bottom and middle right sections.
Tran uses values and saturation differently in this piece, as shes working with a larger colour palette. To show depth and distance, instead of increasing value to create shadows, she decreases value to simulate the way items in the distance become less clear due to the increase of dust particles. This works better for this piece as a dark background would decrease the impact of the focal point.
Below I have added a mood board of her environmental concept pieces I found visually, and narratively appealing.
