Fantasy Environment Concept Art

These environmental concept designs were created for my final project management class I took in Spring 2023. This class was a continuation of the previous project management class we took in the semester prior of Fall 2022. In this class, we were given the choice to either continue our project from the previous semester, or we could choose a completely new project to tackle. While I previously thought I would want to directly continue my last project, which were fantasy weapon designs, and model them in Maya, I instead came to the conclusion that I wanted to continue my exploration of concept art. While not a direct continuation, I decided to challenge myself to now create concepts for environments based on the same story my weapon concepts came from, and to make sure each environment represented the origins of each weapon.

All environments were hand drawn and painted in Procreate.

To give myself a starting point, as well as some inspiration, I looked back on a previous project I did my freshman year of high school in an animation class I took. We had been tasked with creating environments based on already-existing media, and attempt to draw the environments in a style from another piece of existing media. I chose to create environments from Lord of the Rings, in a Steven Universe-inspired style. Looking back on this project, I knew what I needed to improve on for this task.

My attempts from 2014 were a good start, but needed much more detail. They felt like a bare bones minimum of what the environments should have been. It is also be very difficult to tell that these environments were meant to be locations from Lord of the Rings, as there is nothing at all to suggest the idea. So, I knew several things that my new attempt at creating environment concepts needed:

• Storytelling within the environment to help the viewer get an idea of what they’re looking at without being told.

• Plenty of detail so they feel like finished concepts rather than still being in the “ideas” stage.

• Overall character and style. While my initial attempts were meant to have similar charm and style as the Steven Universe background style, I felt like I missed the mark, and the environments lack interest.

The next step in designing my environments was gathering research and inspiration. I sifted through dozens of different artworks, gathering many different ideas and thinking about how different elements could apply to my story and the origins of the weapons I had previously designed. Ultimately I settled on three key ideas:

• One environment needed to be a forest seeping with magic, to represent the staff and the trees it was likely carved from.

• The next environment needed to be a valley full of magical crystals, to represent the crystallized sword and how it came to be formed.

• The last environment needed to be a mushroom forest, to represent the worn axe and its tendency to grow mushrooms from its hilt.

Next, I moved on to research other environment concepts and perspective. I went through and sketched several different pre-existing environment concepts other artists had created in order to get a feel for the perspective and styles they used. I also went through and researched perspective in art and horizon lines to brush up on some of my understanding of perspective.

Next, I created some initial sketches of each of my environments, taking notes of what I would like to see in the finalized concepts of my environments and practicing styles for the final sketches.

Nearing the final stages of my design process, I sketched out what I wanted each of my final three environments to look like. I made sure to include the details I initially decided upon when in the discovery and research stages of my designs, such as the crystals in the valley, the mushrooms, and the forest.

For the mushroom forest, I chose to instead make it into a mushroom home on the cliffside above the mushroom forest, for multiple reasons. First, I didn’t want to make two slightly different forests, as that felt unoriginal and stale. Second, I wanted to give life and meaning to why the axe in my weapon designs looked so worn and handmade, so by creating a home it makes it feel like this axe was created by whoever lives there. Finally, I wanted a better way to incorporate some mountains into the image as a way to connect that environment to the valley environment.

For the magic forest, I chose to create a large centered tree with its roots snaking into a pool of water below. This way, I could add a subtle glow to the water to convey the idea that the water itself is full of magic, and the trees are soaking it up through their root systems. I also added a small mushroom as a nod toward the mushroom forest environment.

Finally, for the crystal valley, I added floating islands with large crystal deposits on each of them. This was to convey the idea that the crystals are extremely powerful, to the point that they can lift large chunks of the earth beneath them just by simply existing in that spot. Meanwhile, there are smaller crystals scattered about that don’t seem to affect the environment around them, meaning they aren’t quite large enough to be as powerful.

The final step before finishing up the concepts with colors and shading was to bring the sketches into Procreate, clean them up, and add the line art for each environment. As a way to convey proximity to the viewer, I stylistically chose to make objects closer to the camera have much thicker lines than objects that were further away. After completing this task, it was time to add color, and then my environment concepts were complete!