Initial Ideas and Sketch

Creating a mood board

Before starting to sketch my ideas, I went through all of my saved images on ArtStation and put together a few of them on a mood board. This will help me in being able to quickly refer back to pieces I like at a glance. 

I want to create an environment painting, so the images I put on the collage are all environments rather than characters. I have included the mood board I created below.

I definitely see a theme in the type of work I like,  I have saved a lot of forests and nature based environments. A lot of what I have looked at seems to also be medieval/fantasy themed so I think this is definitely something that will inspire my work.

Sketching process

I wanted to start out by sketching some initial ideas and play around with making and environment. Because of the number of illustrations that I saved which were themed around forest areas, I wanted to make my initial sketch a forest. I will walk through different stages of the sketch process below.

I started out with some initial placement shapes and rough lines to get a vision for how the piece would look.

I then started to add in some details for the environment, I wanted to create a scene with pine trees by a pond, with rocks scattered and snow on the ground. 

I added in some detail to the pond to help visualise the scene better.

I wanted there to be something interesting about the scene to draw in the viewer, so I added a bright star/planet into the sky to draw people in.

I still felt like the sketch was lacking something, I wanted the viewer to feel intrigued to learn more about the environment, so I added more into the sky to make it more visually engaging. 

The finished sketch

I really enjoyed making this sketch, it was definitely a challenge as it was my first time painting with Procreate on a tablet. It was also my first time creating an environment painting in a number of years, but I am happy with how the sketch turned out.

I was definitely wanting to get some more detail in and some colour, but as it was an initial sketch I didn’t want it to take too much time. I have included the finished sketch below.