Final Project: Environments

There was one main thing I intended to establish throughout this project: experience.
What I have already looked at - archetypes and the notion of role- playing – is paramount to enhancing this. However without a visual world within all of this to exist, how can there truly be an experience?
When it came to designing and concepting environments, I tried to focus on what would be some of the more major places in the world. These would include the main hideout of the group of vigilantes, caverns of Aura deposits and the hidden location of Caleb's people. The paintings are only rough, since in a journal a great deal of time wouldn't exactly be taken to make them look especially pretty and pristine. That aside, it was the idea of what the world might feel like that was important. I did this before beginning to develop the characters, since I could then provide my earlier volunteers with these
environments and ‘play-test’ them, to investigate whether the visual space I envisioned was ideal for the characters I had created.
As part of the cohesiveness of a world, I wanted a strong reason for the existence of magic. While magic isn’t always intended to be understood – since in fantasy terms it is seen as an extraordinary and/or supernatural force – I felt that finding believable grounding in the existence of magic in this world would help to solidify this intended coherence.
At any rate, this gave birth to the concept of Eubellius, a continent with an illusion of peace between its seven nations. 

What is Aura?
In spiritual terms, an aura a luminous radiation that surrounds people, and that you can tell things about a person from that aura.
It was this which progressed to the idea that, in a fantasy world, who is to say that it is not the Aura that is the 'magic' in the first place? What if people had the ability to manipulate this aura, and what if aura is the child of another source, a much, much larger one.

And so, the concept of Aura was born.

Similarly to how some of my characters were designed specifically with the Aura in mind, so were a number of my environment concepts.

I think it goes without saying that I then put my environment designs through the same process I had my characters, and the above are the most suitable results, it seems. I further analyse them in my art book. I was happy with the turnout of this since it didn't take a great deal of redesigning and/or reconsiderations to create some environments which felt cohesive with the cast of characters. The whole package was pulled together through these designs. 

The Aura Sage would spend most of her journey moving between these prominent locations.