Environment Exercise in progress

This is an exercise I started to hone up my environment skills. I haven't done a background since Gauntlet and I felt my skills getting rusty. I have some super talented people over here at Midway that are all superb environment concept artists (check out their links).
They inspired me to do something unusual. I had been doing Characters for a while so getting started was a sort of ramp up. All the sketches below are my process of getting reacquainted with environment conception.
I was recently at Joshua Tree NF and the desert always inspires something.
The image took me about 15 hours working after work for three weeks. All the images combined took around 28 hours. I started doing basic elves, orcs and dragons in situations. Slowly weaning my self off characters.
I try an interior and mountain castle. Then a couple women, still gently weaning my self off of characters. This desert scene started appearing as I let my character side take over, I was still scattered and all over the place. I then came up with this scene with a kid or elf or something is running away into a desert tomb from a invading army. The tomb interior and one of the army tents sparked more interest. But I still didn't have the picture I wanted to do. Another scene appears beyond the tent. Once again the desert kingdom appears. I visualize the buildings a carved directly out of the towering rock formations.

I then switched the view to where I wanted to be within that kingdom. I did an initial PS sketch; I printed it out and drew some pencil details into the image. I then scanned it back into Photoshop and painted the details. I would like to color it, and one day I might....

OK I finally found the time to finish this piece. I used a photo texture for the mosaic tile on the right and I used a Photoshop filter of a sky in the background.

hope you like.








Here are the detail images of the Fantasy Background exercise. I am moving on now…..