Lorelle Zhao was one of my students in 2019, and successfully completed her Bachelor of Design in Games last year. During the Character and Creature assessment she designed The Traveller and their companion, Mothpup, which can be seen in the screenshot below. With the following assignment, which then focused on Environment Design, she set about designing a key archetypal location in the world that The Traveller and Mothpup inhabit and move through, namely Planet Ammos. Taking her wonderful designs she created a prototype for a narrative-driven adventure game.

I am immensely proud of Lorelle, and indeed of all my students. An overview of her final game project, and a downloadable copy (be sure to leave her a tip!) is available by clicking here.

On that page, hosted by ACMI you’ll also find a link a link to her Instagram page where you can see more of her beautiful work. Her Artstation page, where her designs for The Traveller and Mothpup can be viewed here.

Here I demonstrate a relatively simple workflow for those with little experience in application such as Photoshop. What is also demonstrated is how to address a brief, the initial brainstorming process using mind maps and other techniques, creating moodboards, thumbnailing approaches, thumbnail selection and refinement, consideration of shape-language, and readability through silhouette, and a hierarchy of form and of secondary details, of values and of saturation. Readability includes considerations of directionality, environment, style, level of detail, functionality (friend or foe), and personality. Finally there is the consideration of refinement and presentation, including turnarounds and callouts.

In the demonstrated example, the brief calls for a a Non-player Character – a Quest giver for an isometric, fantasy-style RPG with a cartoony, painterly and highly stylised visual style. for the purposes of demonstration, the style, the brief, and the design are deliberately kept simple.

I demonstrate a non-destructive workflow for students intimidated by working in colour and value in Photoshop. Colour and value are handled in separate layers (using the power of the layers and adjustments system applications such as Photoshop to work for you) to ensure a infinitely tweakable non-destructive workflow that achieves great results with minimal stress. The demonstration is over two weeks. I’ve only included some highlights here.

This video is a part of a demonstration that I created for my concept art and previsualisation class in the School of Design at RMIT University Melbourne.

These videos in total demonstrate a relatively simple and straightforward environment concept art workflow in students new to concept art from thumbnail iteration and selection, to a final, polished deliverable that involves the use of Blender for blocking out purposes before taking a completed render into Photoshop for completion.

The completed image is featured in my work portfolio on this site.