World Building

Recently I passed up a book that I will regret not getting for quite some time. Hmmm... oh well, maybe I'll sneak and put it on the charge card because I'm such a big fan of the Dark Crystal. That's right, I'm a muppet fan. I'll admit it, I'll wear the badge proudly. I've seen dark crystal on numerous occassions and it was one of my first DVDs that I bought. There is just something about that odd other world that holds my attention.

The book however is about the artwork behind the movie. Those mysterious and half way familiar sketches of creatures I'm familiar with and some I'm not so familiar with. I've enjoyed watching on time to time the process of creating the Dark Crystal world. I like to see those early ideas coming to fruition as odd figures and strange arcane runes take form in a world that at that time, wasn't set in stone. I think I remember the artist talking about how he wanted to blend plants and animals into living beings that populated the fantasy world.

Many of the sketches he created were character sketches and doodles that while the beginnings of artwork, were not meant to be viewed as such. The artists did however create some images that were landscapes and some character interactions within the fantasy environment. These images that combined an actual setting and idea in one comprehensive piece were artwork.

In another spectrum of great fantastic imagination in which character sketches get migrated into scenes and portraits and artworks, I would mention Star Wars. There are tons of sketches for the Star Wars universe that cover mainly creatures and characters and fantastic devices. The sketches by themselves that are the plans for determining the look and feel of the individual aliens and mechinery I would not consider artwork by themselves. The finished painting that incorporates the different pieces is artwork.

There are many other instances of this throughout the entertainment industry. People build worlds by creating the individual pieces and when a design gets finalized they start to combine those pieces into a whole to create the alternate reality that is the other world. Games, movies, and sometimes even novels have sketch boards that contribute towards an underlying story.

Building a world is an exercise in creativity. Even if you are just extending a pre-existing world or universe, you are working towards the creation of a greater whole. These new worlds or extensions are generally lead towards greater artworks. There are plenty of resources on the web for building worlds that provide you with questions to answer to help fuel your imagination. They provide questions such as what kind of economy does the world deal in? What kind of ecological system does the world support? What's the bottom of the food chain? The top? How much history does the world have? Is there war? A Caste system?

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