I recently finished a course on environment design at the Concept Design Academy taught by Bruno Werneck. I learned a lot, and I wanted to share some of the work I did!
We started out designing a sleek and high tech spaceship meant for research. A good design should scale to any size, so we were then tasked with using the ship in creating our first environment.
I decided to go back to a different thumbnail and use the same approach using the actual spaceship less. The last image is what I ended up with after a paintover and some feedback from Bruno.
Next we were instructed on how bring more epic-ness to our paintings and were tasked with applying this to one of our old environments. The only kind of fully realized environments I had were the ones from my Airborne project, and I thought those were a bit too similar to what I just did. So I went way back to an environment I did in one of my first concept art classes. It was a part of a series of environments based on The Odyssey. I wanted to depict the island of the Sirens as a trap for any ships that sailed too close to the island.
Finally, we went over using SketchUp to create 3d renders that we could then composite in Photoshop as a base for the environment. I hadn't used SketchUp before so it was slow going at first. I really wanted to try and take advantage of the 3d aspect by having a lot more buildings in this environment as opposed to a lot of natural formations. I also wanted to try the backlit lighting scheme that we were seeing in a lot of the matte paintings we were being shown as examples in class. I learned a lot on this one. It ended up being our final assignment, so it was good practice trying to implement everything we had learned up to that point.
Thanks for scrolling through!
