Designing a Fountain | My Concept Art Process

hey my name is Lily and I am designing my own video game concept project to push me further and further out of my comfort zone to help my art skills grow I've done a video explaining my premise and so I'm moving on to actually designing the world and characters using my channel as a little visual diary to show my progress my project is about fantasy Garden which you explore as a botanist and learn more about the characters and story so I thought about where I wanted to start with designing the world I could jump straight into the characters there's so many I have planned each definitely going to be a fun challenge to design but I thought that would start small today and focus on a fountain design for the garden as some practice as well as sharing what has really helped improve my concept art also just a quick reminder that I'm not actually designing a physical game at least not right now I'm just structuring a story concept for one to push me out of my comfort zone and to learn to consider the constraints of Designing for a video game I am definitely by no means an expert on video game design but I'm very keen to learn more about it and apply it to my own work so let's begin with my process for Designing this fountain before I begin the concepts I do some small studies first to warm up to the structure of a fountain I don't do anything complex just some sketches I spend maybe a couple of minutes each on just to get an idea of the different types of designs I could go for knowing the basic structure of a fountain means that I have a better understanding as well on how to exaggerate the visuals to create more Unique Designs I then move on to doing some thumbnails of my ideas I don't spend ages trying to perfect each sketch for me personally it just needs to visualize what I'm thinking of like trying out and then I can spend more time on developing My Chosen thumbnail I really liked all of these designs but number two seemed like a fun one to try out next I make a little design sheet of the rough Fountain shape and some of the elements I'm planning on adding I try to keep the shape simple but interesting and I start to think about some of the characters to add around the fountain to make it feel like a world that's lived in I thought that some giant Birds would be pretty cute then we move on to I think what is my favorite part and a part that's helped me load with my concept art is by using blender so designing concept art like this is something that I've never felt too confident with this was usually because you know the perspective was off and this would impact the rest of my workflow also even when I did draw something I was happy with I then had to try and Tackle drawing it from a different angle which never really ended well this step is something which has really helped me with elevating my concept art I'm not a professional in blender I can't really do anything too complex but that's fine for me since all I need it for this is just construct the basic shape for my Fountain so you can see up close that there aren't any details to this no plants or patterning because that's something that I like to add in my next stage and also it would take a lot longer to model them all in I also don't add any characters because I feel confident enough to draw them in but if I ever needed to model them in I would just use some really basic shapes just a place where they would be so using blender isn't an assess City but it's definitely something which has helped my own workflow and can be really beneficial if you're not just doing concept art but say designing a comic or an animation and you need to use the same environment over again it's easier to draw it from different angles and helps to get your perspective more accurate I would say it's definitely quite daunting to start blender as I'm not good at this kind of software but I'm grateful that I gave it a go and it's become a main part of my workflow there's some really helpful tutorials online and I'll mention them in my video description if you want to check them out so my next step is to just take a viewport screenshot of my blender model at the sort of perspective I'm wanting then I transfer over into whatever painting software I use in this case it's procreate I then draw my Fountain over the model as the reference underneath using my little design sheet that I made earlier to add some character to the overall visuals this is then where I add the plants and flowers and the fountain first roughly sketching out the layout and then going over again in more detail later I'm pretty happy with how the line work came out at this stage but the fountain is feeling a little bit empty so this is where I decided to add in some characters so yeah I begin sketching in the characters I kind of want around the fountain so I knew I wanted my bird characters in there so I did two of them with another character with them and I also decided to do another little character a little rabbit character which I thought was cute for the garden theme and they're reading a book with a little cup of tea sat on the fountain Edge which I thought was pretty nice uh you can see here is how I sort of broke up the shape of the bird just so I it was a bit easier for me then to translate it over into the perspective I needed them for the Fountain and I was pretty happy with how it turned out overall um I didn't want to do too many characters around it since I felt like the fountain was sort of the main centerpiece and I didn't want sort the overall illustration to feel a little bit too overwhelmed so I thought this was a good amount of characters to do and I'm pretty happy with how the sketchs work for them turned out so the final step then is just to add in some colors so I begin this stage by just adding in some base colors uh these won't be the final colors it's just so I can make sure that I've got every part of the illustration covered and there's no sort of like blank spaces after that then I do start experimenting with the color palette I decide on the most kind of like light gray color for the fountain which I bought was like a nice Stony look to it and then I start adding you know more details to sort of the plants in the pond the fountain Pond as well as the lily pads underneath the water and like the little orange flowers on top I also add some Moss to the plant pots which I thought was a nice little aged look to them and then there you can see I've just added in some tile patterning around the steps which I thought looked quite nice and I gave it a little bit of a gradient and I rubbed some of it out so it looked a little bit more aged uh yeah then after that I added in some smaller details to the pots then uh and then I start sort of blocking in the main basic uh colors for my characters I did struggle a little bit with my bird characters I didn't really know what color palette to go for for them so I started with a blue color at first uh but I felt like it might have been a bit too sort of uh blending in with the fountain so I wanted to maybe have a warmer color for them something which maybe sort of matched the red orangey plants in the water so uh yeah then I sort of edited the color to make it a lot more like a warmer Brown and light purple and yes this is sort of like the finalized part of it I thought about adding some soft glow to the plants and the water afterwards as well as some steam rising from the falling water which I thought was like a nice little fun touch to add to it [Music] overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out it felt great to practice with blender again after having a much longer break from it than intended uh yeah I basically had to completely relearn it but it was good experience uh there's definitely some parts of this I would improve on perhaps spend more time considering the different color palettes I definitely want to try and explore some of the other Fountain Concepts that I had because I thought a lot of them were pretty cool but it definitely felt good to have a go at it and I'm definitely excited to do more like this for my project I hope you found this little process video useful and let me know if you have any questions and I will see you in the next video thank you foreign

Channel: Lilys Illustration

Views: 12,791

Keywords: Concept art, digital art, digital artist, concept artist, illustrator, art video

Id: KiMnzB3vBO8

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023