Art of Darkness - Art Assets Batch 1! (Patreon)

Buckle up, because there's a lot of this stuff!

Art of Darkness totals over 1200 assets, that's everything from frames of animation (which make up about 500 of the drawings) to backgrounds, to individual bits of scenery. When you build scenes in 2.5D the number of images to need can rack up fast!
For example, the shelves in Joey's office alone have around 25 different Bendy trinkets and nick-knacks that all had to be designed.
Whilst I won't be sharing EVERY asset here (there's a lot of 'TABLE_LEG_LEFT_END_002.png' sort of thing that I don't think anyone has a use for!) there certainly is a LOT to share so I'd best get started!

For this first batch we have some of the earliest pieces of art done for the video. The scenes in the Multiplane camera were the first thing I created back in early 2018 and when I returned to the project in 2019, I ended up having to re-work them a bit. Initially I was creating the video in pure black and white, with the plan of adding the sepia tone in post production. But when it came to doing so, I realised it gave me very limited control over the colour and brightness, as everything white became brown everything felt dark. I needed the option to add highlights AFTER the sepia colouring, so I opted to re-colour all of the old art directly in sepia. This is how assets for the video were created from then on!

Also featured in this batch is the art for the first chorus. This was actually one of the last scenes created for the video (second only to the final verse scenes) and I think you can see a noticeable development in the art style in the year between those earliest drawings and these ones! I had a lot of fun drawing the many drawings on the wall of Alice and Boris, there's some pretty silly ones in there for the eagle-eyed!

Also, fun art fact! Alice's pose with the mirror here is a reference to a painting by the great Norman Rockwell called 'Going Out'. It's not so iconic or well known a painting as the Mona Lisa later in the video but Rockwell is considered one of the great American artists of the 20th century. He's known for paintings that often sum up the 'American ideal', happy suburban living, aspirational imagery of the 'American Dream' and his art is most widely known from advertisements of the age. I felt this resonated with Alice's aspirations of being her perfect self, the perfect Alice, just as Rockwell's paintings often dealt with the idea of 'the perfect American life' so I chose to pose her as the model from one of Rockwell's paintings.

In this version however it is revealed Alice's mirrors, the way she sees herself, are broken.
Am I thinking too much about these things? Maybe. But I thought it was an interesting little twist on the original painting for those who like to overthink things like I do!

Also, whilst I didn't include the young girl from the painting, there is a dog at her heels, mirrored on my piece by the many Boris remains. A nod to the original so subtle it may have been unintentional. Was it? I'll never tell!

That's all for this batch! Lots more on the way though throughout the week. Stay tuned, folks!
~Stupes