Looking at 2D environment concept art

Pieces of concept art, speed paintings and tutorials. 

Now that I knew what Art Test I was going to be focusing on for the next three weeks of the project I decided that It would be important for me to do some research into 2D environment concept art in general. This was mainly to get myself into the mindset of creating this particular type of artwork as it is very different from drawing character designs. I knew I would have to flush the craving to draw people out of my system for a little while so that I would be able to focus on the project I have been set. Initially to kick start my research I started off by looking back over my Deviant Art favourites page to find environment designs that I had liked and saved in the past. I had quite a collection of images which meant a lot of scrolling but below are two mood boards with a selection of some of my favourites designs.

Usually for me I don't really go for just one particular theme of environment design so for example sci-fi or fantasy. I like a wide range of art styles and concepts, I think it all really depends on how talented the artist and what their taste for lighting and colour is in their pieces. I will admit that my preferred art style usually is Anime, something with a element of a cartoon style thrown in or a unrealistic drawing which can be seen in the images below. This is why I am quite excited about drawing Fable concept art as I think their designs are almost a mixture of those three things I like to see in artwork.

After collecting together examples of environment concept art I liked I started thinking about what I was going to do for this Art Test and how was I going to improve in this area. I know that this is an area that I will struggle in and will have to work on to get to a good enough level so I thought about looking up whether there were any tutorials for people who are in my position. Being told something step by step is is a good way to learn to learn something new so I went on YouTube to see what sort of selection they had. Unforutantly there wasn't a vast array of different tutorial videos so I just picked out the ones that seemed most useful and went through the artists work piece by piece. There were however a large amount of speed painting videos for me to look at so I choose a few that I believed would be relevant for this project. All the videos I have looked at for research are below.

Now that I have researched into a variety of different 2D environment concept art pieces I can finally start to narrow it down and focus on the style and designs used in the Fable series.