Drawing Environment Art

Noah Bradley
Noah Bradley is an extremely well-known and creative environment artist. He focusses on creating huge landscape environment based in different times and universes. His work has won him multiple awards and what I really love about his art is the colours and scale he uses. They define his work and create the uniqueness in all of them.
This work in particular piece caught my attention because of it's details. I especially love the little huts built around and within the mountain's body.
The beautiful colours are clearly shown and creates a calm, relaxed atmosphere. It also indicates the evening sun fall and the light from the windows are incredibly realistic.

I created several thumbnail images. These images took around 1/2 minuets long and they were parts of the image I was inspired to draw.

As you can see I used certain parts of the image to use as my own and gave it my own style.

These image then helped me with my final sketch.

With my final sketch, the previous thumbnail images helped a huge amount and I choose to go with an idea I came up with previously. The finally sketch took around 35 minuets to complete. I wanted to indicate a lot of shading and lighting within the scene to show realism in my image. The style of the sketch is rough and dirty which was deliberate. A stair way within a rocky mountain side is never clean and structures. The environment takes over and they become one. In my final image, I really want to show that.

Heres the final concept of my environment. I used the perspective skills I learnt previously to create the depth and and gave my brushes opacity to create the shades. My concept was a huge help as both a reference and a concept. You can clearly see some of the concepts features transferred onto the final image. I wanted to create a nocturnal atmosphere and the glare from the lights help create the effect. I also only used shades to learn about the lighting and shading environments and this exercises really did help me improve.

The environment didn't feel finished/complete so I began to elaborate the design and create new features.

  The final outcome of my environment came as a surprise to me. I really didn't think I could create it but after the lessons and tutorials, I now have the confidence to sketch up concepts for environment.

As you can, my inspired piece from Noah Bradley had a lot of involvement including the building structure and landscape. I also used the light seeking through the windows to create the night-light effect.

I used highlight on the rocks to create the sunrise and angle of the sunlight and mid tons on the stairs to create depth and my perspective skills allowed me to create the depth with the stairs and building. 

All in all, Im extremely pleased with this piece and I can now continue on with other environments with confidence. 

The Use & Purpose of Concept deisgn

Simply
The purpose of concept art is a way to visually show an idea of a group or individual to other. It can be used as references and inspiration for films, games and shorts.

Detailed
Concept artists are incredibly creative and innovative people. Their role is to create both rough and highly detailed, inspirational drawings to help other developers visualise their visions. This is vital in every CG pipeline including film production, game design and creating advertisement, both motion and still graphics. Where visual and special effects are required, concept designers are needed for the first step in creating creatures, characters, buildings, and environments.
Not only are the concept designers needed at the very start, but they usually help in the middle of the development process with series of illustrations to help sell the to potential distributes.

Concept design might look like drawing fancy images of buildings and characters but there is much more behind the paper then meets the eye. Within every image has a story. Emotions are shown in characters, atmospheres are created in landscapes and beauty is in every item. And all of these aspects are created within the concept designer's mind without reference images and only ideas to guide them through.

Concept design involves a variety of utilities which give the artists many different ways to produce their vision. Usually, concept is drawn and developed using traditional method with a pencil and pen and then chork, smudges and other techniques are put in later. With today's technology, artists are able to inport their pencil drawings to the computer and share it as reference images to modellers, animators and other developers. This helps the modellers hugely and is one of the main features they're used for in visual effected videos and games.

Purpose of Concept Art in Games
Characters;

Here on the left shows some of the very first concept art of Sonic the Hedgehog. On the right shows the final version of the character used in many of the games and animations.


Clearly, from viewing these two images, it demonstrates the transformation from concept art to the final design. The first image has, without doubt, influenced and helped developed the final render. Nearly all characteristics are the similar but some further development has taken place in order to improve the concept. The shoes are a perfect example/ Compared to the original they have a more complex design and they actually have the appearance of detachable shoes where as the first sketches just look like his feet. The size has also been increase and they stand out a lot more then the concept image. I believe they did this to get more attention towards the shoes to portray the character's speed and light weight. The character looks more cute and younger which was probably a desicion to make because of their young target audience.

 Environments;
Once again, the concept art is on your left and the finalised gameplay is on your right. These two images are from the game World of Warcraft. Clearly, there is a resemblant between the two and this is because of great communication within the CG pipeline.
From both images, I feel the landscape is a formidable place of great size and height. They both portray the hot and active volcanic activity and they've also kept the outer-dimensional aspect and focussed on the involving floating islands. Even the colour scheme is the same and helps create a blistering hot, sharp, volcanic atmosphere.
As said previous, they're almost identical and its a great example of a perfect concept to gameplay graphics and this is exactly why conept artists are hired for. Without them, all the other developers and modellers would create objects in their own vision and the scene would fall apart.

Andrei Pervukhin
Instantly this image has a lot going on and by looking at the texture of the colours, I believe this image was painted digitally and given effects to create high values and rough textures. This roughness adds to the character's identity to show their dirtiness.
In my opinion, the main feature in the image is the large beast. The middle space is utilised by large, dark colours where as the background is light. This draws you straight to the large creature. The other character's expressions, stances and colours create a terrified yet humorous atmosphere. The main focus is the hiding of the dwarfs from the large beast that hunts them and we know this because of their expression and emotions of both sets of characters. The beast's jaws are wide open and it's eyes are showing it's anger. The beast's weapon is also held at a striking pose which also portrays the anger and horror in the scene. The hard edges create the strong fearful armour the beast wears, 
the dwarfs expression portray the complete opposite. The facial expressions portray how scared one dwarf is yet his weapon is held strong in both hands, showing us the character's courage. The other dwarf changes the atmosphere slightly to more surprised. Both his facial and body language show us his confusion. And the final character is hidden in the shadows behind. Only his hand and face are shown and yet he looks extremely calm in this serious situation they're in. In my opinion this show this character to be much wiser then the others.
The colours in this image help contribute to creating a cold mood. Both the dark whites, greys and light mist indicate the winter season and the chill in the air.
In conclusion, this image focusses on telling a story of survival. 

Created as concept art for Guild Wars 2, this magnificent piece of art demonstrates the amount of detail and effort that goes into the weapons and armours for games. I believe it was digitally painted because of the huge benefits. Immediately, the colours (blacks, greys) portray evil and give out a cold atmosphere but this is counter with the fiery details on some of the objects. It adds to the evil effect and helps create the dangerous appearance. The lighting a lighting on the blades portray the sharp edges. This is telling me these weapons are 'ready to kill'. Small details like the weapon handles give us a clue to how big the wielders are and shows the strength they have and also emits the raw power from the image. Other little details such as the rags on the handles indicate the brutality and roughness which also give us an idea to whom these items belong to. The sharp, hard edges emphases the sharpness of the weapons and the clean smooth brush strokes also help to portray how unsafe and dangerous these items are.

This creature concept was taken from a well known website RPGCreatures.com and unfortunately, the artist is unknown. 
Although this creature look extremely alien-like, I believe there has been a lot of influence taken from today's insects such as a beetle which gives the concept a realistic appearance. The colour help define the size of the beast by darkening the foreground and lightening the background to create the length of the shell. Not only that, but the colour help indicate the rough and hardness of the back scales/tail which portrays a strong structured beast. 
Even though the creature doesn't have eyes, eye brows or nose, we can still see the strong anger in it's face through the showing of the teeth and I believe this was done on purpose to do exactly that. This creates a fearful and scary atmosphere and the cold blues emit a spine chilling feel also. The blacks also portray evil and the pale background with the shadows allow the creature to visually stand out and take on a 3D appearance. Even the stance it's in gives us the feeling it's ready to kill/attack and adds to the disturbing theme.
The sharp edges and clean paint strokes help define the strength of the creature and although the legs are thin, the muscle definition and flexible feet give the impression this creature is an extremely fast predator who uses speed to catch it's prey. All these effects create a horrific and scary themed image.

Created by Natiq Aghayev 
This image clearly has a sense of realism to it because of the high amount of detail in the colours, shading, shapes and the perspective is extremely accurate. The artist has created an apolitical sense in a modern city. Without human activity, nature has conquered the area and has widely overgrown. 
The lighting in this image is used to portray the mystery within the city and the freedom outside of it. 
The water especially, creates the calm, quiet and slightly suspicion atmosphere because of its stillness and I believe this is done on purpose for that reason. 
The objects have been created with rusting aspects to give the impression of age and 'left alone' feel which contributes to the atmosphere.
The colours are both vibrant and darkened to give both the natural feel and the dark, mysterious look to it.