Post #5 - Final Designs

My mind was so focused on graduating that I had completely forgotten to upload my final designs as promised! I had so much fun finishing up these environment pieces and continuing to learn about lighting and perspective. I still have a lot to learn but I really love how these turned out. One thing that I did notice since finishing them was I need to make sure I pay attention to maintaining a consistent style. I found that, particularly in my mountain ranges and my shading, I varied in the styles I used to paint them. However, during my process I was definitely playing around with different styles and figuring out which of them I liked more than the other, so it’s a good way for me to visually see which one looks the best. Overall, this is a learning process, so I won’t be too harsh on myself for it, and will use this information for my future projects!

Final mushroom village environment. The shading and lighting I felt turned out really nice here! I do prefer the mountains I did in my mountain environment, but it was a learning process overall. These ones are still nice, just more cartoon-ish in comparison.

Final forest environment. I had a lot of fun with the shadows and lighting here, and I feel this environment turned out the best out of all three.

Final mountain environment. My shading feels a little weaker here and I feel as if I could have made the shading much more pronounced. I had a lot of fun with the crystals, though, I feel as if they came out pretty good! I also love how the mountains turned out here, compared to my mushroom village mountains.

I learned a lot during this project, and still have so much left to continue learning. This is my final project of my undergraduate degree, but I still have many more projects to create and explore in the future!

Post #4 - Final Design Ideas and Implementation Heading into Finals

The final stretch has arrived, and while I’m not quite ready to share my final pieces, I am able to share what I am building my final environment designs off of. In my previous blog post, I discussed my ideas for the different environments. Following that, I sat down and drew up my final ideas for each environment.

Final sketch for the village environment. I decided on less of a village, more of a small home complete with a view of the mountain range and sprawling mushroom forest. Main ideas for this environment are large mushrooms full of magical energy, and a main focus on the mushroom converted into a cozy home in the hillside.

Final sketch for the forest environment. Since life sources are the main resource for magic in my world, forests, especially this one, are a huge producer of magical energy. Main ideas for this environment include glowing blue water infused with magic from the surrounding trees, large plants full of life energy, and the large tree in the middle cracking with magical energy.

Final sketch for the mountain environment. The mountains provide an important magical resource: magic crystals. Main ideas for this environment include floating islands containing large crystal deposits, mountains in the background, and a small mine entrance.

Using these sketches, I brought them into Procreate on my iPad and began to work. I was having trouble deciding if I wanted to do line art, or go straight for the painting/coloring like I did when creating my weapons. I finally decided upon starting with line art, and using the thickness of the lines to help exaggerate perspective and make main points in each environment “pop”. I also used the perspective tools within Procreate in order to help tweak the perspective within the environments. I found perspective to be extremely difficult, and I definitely have a lot to learn, but ultimately I’m happy with the outcome of my line art and basic perspective.

I’m currently in the final process of coloring/painting within Procreate and adding more details to the parts of the environments that I believe feel a little too barren, which I did on purpose as I didn’t want the line art to dominate every detail and wanted to go into with the digital brush.

As of this blog post, I won’t be sharing what I’m currently working on since they are all still in progress, but I will be posting a final blog post with the fully colored environments once they are complete and turned in! I can say that I’m having a lot of fun with painting these environments, as I love playing with colors and lighting. I am still deciding if I want to leave the line art as black, or go over it with other colors at the very end. So far with the black line art and color, it gives my environments a very stylized pop-art or more comic book style art, which so far I’m really enjoying!

Anyways, it’s time to get back to work and finishing up these environments! :)

Post #3 - Environmental Concept Idea Phase

This next phase of my project has consisted of notetaking, jotting down ideas, and sketching. I’ve been putting some time into researching perspective to hopefully use it to the best of my ability in my environments that I create.

I’ve begun a notebook on my iPad and started filling it with notes and tips I’ve found regarding using perspective in art. It is definitely my weakest point in art, and I still struggle with using perspective with less boxy shapes (like a boulder or a tree), since a lot of perspective tends to be taught using buildings and more square bases.

I also began sketching some already-existing environments that I was really fond of, hoping to grasp how the perspective works in some of these environments and to find what I really liked about them. I’ve included some examples of those below.

From these sketches, I found I really enjoy having something in the foreground, such as a plant, or something else to catch the viewers eye briefly or make the viewer feel more immersed in the environment I create.

Alongside these, I also tried practicing and playing with some of the perspective tools in Procreate, which is my typical software of choice when it comes to digital art for this project.

Finally, I began to create some basic concepts of how I want my environments to potentially look. So far, I believe I want my forest environment to all spawn from one large tree, similar to the banyan-grove tree in Avatar: The Last Airbender. I like the idea of the magicical elements in nature wanting to all naturally gravitate together, and so a magical forest would all be connected together with the magic naturally gravitating toward the “host tree”.

For my mountain environment, I decided that this would be the place where the magic crystals would form and be harvested from. I would love to include a cave opening where the crystals typically form, as well as crystals naturally forming along the paths and ravines of the mountain ranges.

Unfortunately I have fallen a bit behind on creating ideas for my village, but as soon as I work on those I will begin my final stage of creating my final colored sketches, and final renders of my environments!

Post #2 - Environmental Concept Research Phase

In the past few weeks, I’ve put a lot of time into polishing my ideas and researching different concepts. When I first started this project, I created a timeline for myself to make sure I finish my project by the end of the semester, and I gave myself a lot of time for research so I can begin my concepts and sketches following spring break, which has finally arrived.

The largest chunk of research I’ve done is finding different art for inspiration with pieces that I feel could really fit into my fantasy world, and I will be showcasing those different works of art in this post. For my project, I decided on building up three different environments for my world, so I will have three final concepts in different parts of the fantasy world. I will be creating a forest, a mountain range/valley region, and a village/homestead area.

For my forest, I have found several pieces that I really like and would love to take inspiration from.

‘Radiant Grove’ by Lorenzo Lanfranconi on ArtStation.

I love the colors and greenery in this environment, and I also love the perspective that makes all the plants look large and full of life. My source material has a heavy emphasis on magic that uses life energy as the source of power, so a world being so full of life would make a lot of sense.

‘Mystical Forest’ by Adrian Bara on ArtStation.

I love the use of blue in this environment that adds to the magical feel of the forest. The staff that I created, which is made to look like it was handmade from the knotted wood of a tree, has traces of magical blue glow peeking through the wood. Using blue in my forest environment would add a lot of meaning to my weapon I have already created.

‘Guild Wars 2 - End of Dragons’ by Sergii Golotovskiy on ArtStation.

This environment also has a “larger than life” feel, even though it’s not much of a forest, it still has some life and trees within it. I just love the giant feel of this environment space.

Next, for my mountain range, I don’t have quite as many ideas but I’ve found several that I would love to take some ideas from.

‘Fantasy Landscape - Class Demo’ by Hue Teo on ArtStation.

I love the colors and the art style of this landscape. Again, there are large flowers and plants present in this environment, and tons of greenery, which I would love to incorporate into my environments in any way possible.

‘Mountain Above the Valley’ by Quentin Regnes on ArtStation.

This is the type of landscape I immediately thought of when I first started planning out my project. Wide mountain range enveloping a flat valley full of plants and life.

Finally, here are some ideas I have for my village environment.

‘Aziya Village Panorama’ by Ann Maulina on ArtStation.

I fell in love with this environment concept when I first saw it. I absolutely love the colors and art style it uses, as well as the magical feel it portrays with the colors, crystals, and floating portions of landscape. I also love the use of the crystals, because it reminds me of my crystallized sword from my weapons concept. This would be a great addition to my concepts as a way to add a connection between the two.

‘Alchemist’s House Concept Art’ by Mary Davydova on ArtStation.

I love the combination of the large plant life with the mushrooms, and using them as homes. I would absolutely love to create a giant mushroom themed village, because it also portrays a connection between my axe and the environments. The concept of the axe I created is meant to look handmade, and has mushrooms growing on the handle.

Overall, I’ve gathered nearly 100 different pieces of artwork to use as references and inspiration, however these are some of the ones that have stood out to me the most as I’ve researched. I hope to incorporate a lot of what I’ve found in these artworks into my own concepts.

I presented these ideas to my class this week, and received a lot of great feedback. I was told I should try and connect each environment concept to each other, for instance, maybe create an area rich with crystals that trades these crystals with other areas and place those traded crystals inside another concept. Speaking of trading, I was told to put thought into making different areas trading ports and specialize in certain things to bring life into my world.

I feel I will also take some inspiration for my world building and environment concepts from the show ‘Arcane’ on Netflix. My thoughts first go to the city of Piltover, which created hextech as a source of man-made magic and exports the technology to other parts of the world. I would love to build a world with a huge exporter in a similar way.

Overall, I’ve began putting a lot of thought into what I want to do with my environments, and now it’s finally time to begin putting pencil to paper and begin my concept creation over the next few weeks! :)

Post #1 - Concept Project Continuation Ideas + Beginnings

For my final semester of school before I graduate, I am taking DFX 452, a continuation of Project Research Management (DFX 352). Last semester, I dove into concept art and chose to create three weapon concepts using a story I wrote for another class (Non-Linear Storytelling) as my source material. I had a lot of fun with creating those concepts, and decided that I wanted to continue with concept art this semester as well.

Final weapons concepts I created in DFX 352

This semester, I have chosen my next project to be environment concept art. I want to reach out of my comfort zone, which is typically character art, and try my hand at creating environments that will seamlessly fit into the same story as my weapons.

Back in my freshman year of high school, I took a 2D animation class as a part of a two year art program called Media Works Academy. In this class, one of our assignments was to create environments based off of any story, using any art style we wanted. For my project, I chose Lord of the Rings as my source material, and attempted to recreate the background art style of Steven Universe. It required a lot of research and sketches, and I had a lot of fun with the project, so I would love to see how my art and my concept-making skills have improved since then.

In the coming weeks, I will begin my research on the environmental concepts I want to create, and then begin my rough drafts and sketches. I’m excited for this project and can’t wait to see what I create!