Stylized Environments (Fanart)

One of the challenges of making hand painted art is keeping that feeling of traditional materials in a digital medium. I always like to start off when I concept by pulling out a sketchbook and pencil and making loose sketches. This integrates traditional mediums into the DNA of the environments I'm working on, elevating that hand painted feel. 

To start out I did some excercies in both league of legends and Warcraft styles. This gave me a venue to both practice my hand painting and get the style right, but to also practice different methods and programs in a smaller does before beginning larger projects.  

 For the league props I did redesigns of props in summoner's rift, this allowed me to gain practice designing in the League style, but let me really focus on getting the technique's right and capturing the aesthetic by working on things somewhat similar to existing props. 

I felt more comfortable to try something pretty out there  with the windmill, as the Vrykul do not have any windmills. I also learned how to use trim sheets, and learned how best to adjust my lighting in unreal to make it seem more like World of Warcraft.

This was my full league of legends environment. It is an entrance to a summoner's base. The league style doesn't have cast shadows from the environment and is made to look like a painting.

This is my final warcraft game environment and props. I was going for a group of Vrykul that were trying to forge towards a more peaceful future. I learned alot from this including how to use UV sets and I improved on my trim sheet workflow.

These are shots of my progress in unreal, starting from the top left and continuing right. Along the way I kept making adjustments to my models and lighting in unreal. I had  to do some fiddling around with the lighting so Unreal would keep my handpainted textures and not blow them out.

This is a walkthrough of my environment