The grotto project was inspired by Disney's the Little Mermaid sequence "Part Of Your World". Growing up I watched numerous animated films from American cinema. Looking into the start of the Disney Renaissance ​I was really inspired about how Howard Ashman was so passionate about Ariel having her "I want" song and how the voice actress Jodi Benson was singing this iconic song in the dark. During one of my school breaks between semesters, I played around in Maya and was listening to the song while working. It sparked an idea to try creating my interpretation of Ariel's grotto. 

     When I started working on this project, I explored the concept art of the film, the Ariel's Undersea adventure ride from the Disney Parks, and explored the Square Enix interpretation of this environment. Since the grotto was modeled in different ways from what I could gather from the references, I wanted to do something that would keep the walls of grotto very simple. I made the overall design similar to the stacking ring toy. From the top it would be very tight spot but enough for Ariel's arm to go through then to the bottom super spacious that it would be enough to store a Prince Eric statue. 

     To fill the space of the grotto shelves, I looked very carefully into the back drops behind Ariel and Flounder during the song to see what she would be collecting from sunken ships. Granted most of the backdrops consisted with books, ropes, etc. I wanted to go a little more creative and model different types of objects. Some were items I modeled for class group projects, while others were modeling practice  to understand topology.  Some were digital paintings I made for the grotto. Since the film contained a historical art painting from the Renaissance, I wanted to avoid using them and focus on more original drawings. 

        For lighting the project, I wanted to explore shadow coloring by limiting the amount of lights. Taking a lesson I learned from a painting class which stated "not all shadows are black", I made the shadow colors darker hues of teals and blues.