This course was entirely dedicated to environment design. Designing and creating environments is just as important a storytelling aspect as the told story or the dialogue.
This lesson is a brief summary of the course. For many beginner environment artists, it may come as a surprise that they should study interior design on top of digital painting workflow.
Be it 2D or 3D art, fundamentals are still an important part of any art. Especially two fundamentals stand out for the environment design: perspective and composition. To make believable rooms and landscapes, one should learn these among other fundamentals of course. Color theory and shapes are also important, but perspective and composition handle the heavy burden of the design: how to make the image interesting and pleasing to the viewer's eye.
The landscape, with the ground meeting the sky in the distance, is a natural scenery in art. The scenery may contain man-built structures and people. The assignment was to create multiple thumbnails of landscapes and pick one of them to refine it into complete concept art.
The idea behind thumbnails is to unload all the ideas from the mind and see what works best. After refining the thumbnails, it was time to pick one of them and continue working on that until you felt it was ready.
Interior design may come as a surprise for many, but many environment artists recommend learning it. The Interior Design lesson focused solely on interior design and its fundamentals, and the next lesson gave you an assignment to complete.
Fundamentals:
• Spaces
• Lines
• Form
• Light
• Colors
• Patterns
• Textures.
At the end of the interior design section, the assignment was to make interior design in isometric projection. This is a flexible way of making nice-looking spaces. Isometrics is used for many games, so if you are interested in game development, you should practice it more.
One lesson was dedicated to showing you how to create a simple tileset and assets. A tileset is a collection of tiles that vary in size. They have been used since video games started to use pixel graphics, as they are light on the hardware performance.
Photobashing is a quick and easy way to create new artwork, be it environment concepts or fully polished character art. By combining photos and 3D assets, you can create concept art, for example a place that is actually found in the real world. If the photo lacks a crowd, you can simply add people from other images to fix that.
Some artists use images of things like industrial components to create awesome fully detailed robots. So, try it out and don't let anything stop you.
This course introduced many ways of creating environments for games, books, and animations.
Remember that the methods taught are not set in stone, they are merely a starting point for you to find your own way.
Next up, the knowledge test. Review the course materials and do your best. Good luck!