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! :)