Environment color keys. Durno.

As part of the concept art process, our illustrators are responsible for creating the required atmosphere for each of the scenarios where the warriors of Skara will fight each other. Obviusly, it is not a good idea to start drawing without a clear direction; they need to know the ambience, the people who resides there,  the weather, where the light comes from…

Those kind of decissions are taken at a very early stage, creating the environment color keys for every single scenario. The color keys are small thumbnails, where the concept artist avoid to go deep in every detail, but choose to balance the color palette and the ranges of tones to recreate the desired atmosphere.

In this case, for example, we needed to recreate a rainy Durno settlement in a mountainous area with a nearby waterfall. The artist does not need to create every detail, just to draw a quick sketch of the kind of light the environmet will have and the main tones that will be used. We tested four different color ranges, combinating brown, blue and green to see how the variations work on screen. Next step consists on choosing one of them and go deep into the creation of the first environment concept art.