Tutorial - Quick Concept Art
Now with improved grammar!

This is not a tutorial you can really follow, but it's to show my process and techniques, which are pretty simple.

I've been meaning to write some tutorials on digital painting, but I've had difficulty finding a way of writing one efficiently. This project I thought would be a good time to sit down and write one, since everyone is doing concept art, I want to help as much as I can. It's quite hard to define and write a linear process for something which is so non linear in nature. Of course I could just do a paint by numbers tutorial which walked you through step by step, but I don't think I know my own process well enough to do that, nor do I think it would be as useful as explaining how I would go about normally producing a piece of concept art work.

I've found doing concept art for a project is so much harder than painting for fun, you can't just add random effects and colours to make up stuff to make it look good.
It's got to describe everything in the level as closely as possible to how it would appear in game.

Hopefully this tutorial will give you some insight into how I paint in Photoshop, my process, from start to finish. This by no means is the best or fastest way of doing something, there’s a lot of techniques out there, a lot of them better practice then what I'm about to do, but it's how I do it - I still have a lot to learn myself.

Alright, these are the brushes I'm going to use, and they are pretty much default brushes that come with Photoshop, although normally I like to use the texture option in the brush palette, we won't need that for this painting. I've uploaded the brushes which I use, and they are the only ones I use in this painting, they're all default brushes apart from a few which are tweaked. If you download it, and go into Photoshop, with the brush tool selected, right click on the canvas and go to the arrow in the top right of the brush menu, then go to replace brushes and find the downloaded brush file. This will basically make it so only the brushes you’re loading are in your brush menu. If you want to get the default brushes back, then go to the menu again and click reset brushes, and click ok. If you have lots of custom brushes, make sure you save them as a set before you load another one or reset. In this image I've numbered the brushes 1-9 so it's easier to reference them.

Ok, this piece of concept art is pretty simple, basically, the aim of this is to illustrate the condition of assets in the main hall area, and how they would look when interacting with the roots growing around them.

I start by creating new document, and set the size at 1680x1050, the size of my screen resolution, it isn't that big for a painting, and it's about the right size if I'm going to scale it down by 50% when I'm finished. Plus we can crop any parts we don't want later because I'm not going to use all of the space.

Press F once to go into full screen mode, with the task bar still showing, and F again to go into full screen mode without the taskbar. Press tab to hide the menus and hold space to navigate the canvas, especially useful when your menus are hidden and you’re zoomed in.

This is the reference photo I took; I open it in Photoshop so I can look at it when drawing the sketch.

I now create a new layer; this is what I'll have my initial sketch on. For sketching I use brush 1, with 70% flow and opacity. Before I start, I have the image in my mind, planned out, the feel, the colours and elements I want. For this scene, I imagine, because of these many, many years exposed to the elements; the surface will be extremely faded, and ruined. It will probably also be half buried, the roots surrounding and enveloping it - reinforcing the feeling of entrapment and claustrophobia we want to achieve.

Ok now I've done the initial sketch, I'm going to review it - I see that it will probably look better tilted, as if it was being pushed outwards by the roots growing behind it.

I press ctrl - A to select all, then ctrl - T to bring up the transform tool. Using the handle I rotate it slightly forwards. It doesn't matter that the roots are tilted too, because they're not defined yet. Ah yes, it’s also a good habit to name layers, I've named the layer with the line drawing on, sketch. If you've accidently drawn a sketch onto the white background layer, don't worry, change the layer blending option to multiply, and it will make all the white values transparent, so your able to colour underneath it. For the next stage, I will be painting the basic colours under the sketch. I make a new layer called base colour, and move it under the sketch layer.

To begin colouring on the base colour layer, I start off with a gradient fill; I'm thinking I got to get rid of this dreadful white space. I use a darkish brown, and a charcoal red. The colours are probably a bit too dark looking at it now, oh well; this is just a base colour. More of a mid tone would have been better here...

I start applying basic colours, reds and browns blocked in very quickly with brushes 4 & 5.

Now I add quick shadows and highlights and work on the valve a bit. I used a soft brush (brush 8), lowered the size appropriately, set it to screen for highlights and multiply for shadows. I just use the same colour as the background. The brush opacity is set quite low, so it's not over exposed. Alright, now I make a new layer, and move it on top of my sketch layer for painting over it.

I grab brush number 6 and start refining these shapes and adding more variation to the colours, do note, the colours are pretty horrible right now. I'm not too bothered about following the colour palette for the main hall yet; we will sort that out later on. I'm just trying to get a feel for how the roots are working. Now that I've refined the forms a bit, I just take a moment to review that it's going in the right direction. This is probably only 15 minutes or so into the paint, so it's very early on and not too late if you need to restart if you’re not happy with it.

Ok, after looking at it, and because I know I want the fire extinguisher to be quite corroded and dirty, I know this shade of red is far too strong. So I'll probably sort out that colour in a moment. I'm also thinking at this stage I need to do more of the area around the fire extinguisher, because the aim of this concept piece is to see how something like the fire extinguisher will be incorporated into the environment. So next I want to concentrate on blocking out the surrounding area. I use brush 7, with a high opacity, 85 or more, and just liberally apply a few shapes, colours and see what forms start to appear. I refine the forms a little, with the same brush but smaller.

In this picture, I've finished blocking out the surroundings, I've got a little view down the hallway, and this also helps the overall image colour and composition wise. What I don't realize at the time is that the horizon line is wrong, but I fix it later on.
Because the scene is overcast and drizzling, the lighting will be pretty diffused, although I'm going to leave most of the atmospheric effects until later, I will paint some of them in myself.

I refine the colours and use brush 6 with opacity set to around 10%, colour set to a light blue and paint highlights in the foreground. The light direction is from the top and slightly to the right. I need to start making sure the colours are correct so I open up the colour palette that we have agreed on for the hallway environment.
I'll colour pick from the colour palette and add them as I paint. I've worked on refining and the colour changes quite a lot at this stage. Getting the colours right is probably one of the hardest and most important factors of concept art. I've also added detail into the background on this one, showing some catwalks, a root in the foreground, and I've also started adding puddles to show it’s wet. At this point I'm starting to see I've done the perspective wrong, but I haven't fully realized it yet...

I want to keep the background pretty basic, because through the mist you will lose a lot of detail, and it has a nice quality at the moment, so it probably won't need much more. Right now I need to define the texture on the fire extinguisher more, which I've done by firstly finding a reference for a rusty fire extinguisher. I couldn't get this reference myself, so I found one on the internet. If I'm going to use this reference to colour pick from, I edited the colours of the image slightly, so it’s more faded and slightly blue.
To prepare the reference image, because the photograph is quite low quality, I first resized it so it was smaller, and then used the unsharp mask filter to bring out some of the detail.
I duplicated the layer the image was on, image > adjustments > hue saturation, ticked the colourise box, moved the top slider until it was the blue I wanted, then moved the saturation slider left. I clicked ok, and reduced the opacity of the top layer.

For the detailing, I zoomed in, and used brushes 1,2,3 and 6 and 7. I mainly concentrated on fading the colour, and getting it to match the surroundings.

Now that I've detailed the fire extinguisher, I'm going to go around defining the environment around it a bit. Since the main purpose of this image is to show how the fire extinguisher or other assets might interact with the roots, I'm going to focus the detail around it. Probably more highlights too. On this image I've added some foliage up there, but you probably won't see it too much with the atmosphere layer applied. At this point I feel like there’s something that needs fixing. I might do step by step tutorial on foliage techniques later.

So I flip the canvas horizontally, to see mistakes easier. At that point I still hadn't seen the error in perspective and the scale problem it was causing, but I'm getting to it. Right now anyway, I was thinking the roots needed more highlights because they didn't match the root on the fire extinguisher. Anyway I flipped it back with crtl-z before continuing.

Alright, now I see there’s a pretty big problem. At this perspective and viewing angle, it makes it seem like the fire extinguisher is massive, several feet tall at least. So I think, I'll add some vertical height... oh yes, and I added in some highlights to the roots as well, with brush 7, with greys picked from the colour palette, and at 10% opacity. While I'm expanding the top I may as well take away the empty spaces from the sides and bottom. I expand the crop selection upwards beyond the top, and bring it in around the sides and bottom using the handles.

Now, to fix the problem I use the polygonal lasso tool, select the background, ctrl- T and then scale it and move it upwards so that the horizon line is moved above the extinguisher - so it’s now below the viewers eye instead of the viewer looking up at it like it was before. Do you see the difference in scale? All I need to do now is block in the blanks, for this brush 7 will do perfectly. This seems like a pretty drastic change, and it is, but it's needed to be done or else the images integrity wouldn't hold up. Really I should have planned everything out in much more detail from the beginning, and it would have saved time in the long run - but I didn't know I would end up with a background as it is.

Alright, I've filled in the blanks, added some hint of a ceiling and light source - I keep the details quite vague, so I don't have to spend too long on it. The floor is probably too wet, and looks like one big puddle, but our hall will have puddles, so I'm not going to spend more time on it. I've added in wall detail too, I want to reinforce the fact that the roots have come in from behind the wall and pushed outwards through it. The old red of the wall with the gold lines suggest an ancient regality. I've also added some suggestion of branches in the top with brushes 6 but on a smaller size, and brushes 2 and 3 for hints of foliage.

Anyway, time for post processing. This is where some simple adjustment and overall effects will give the artwork a polished edge.
Save as a jpeg at a high quality, or flatten the image. Resize to about 50% of the original size, and I use filter > sharpen > unsharp mask, at around 45% - this brings out the details lost when you resize.

For the blue mist, I create a new layer, and then with brush 8, I drew in the mist where I wanted it - with the bluish grey picked from the colour palette. No fancy blending option changes needed now - just reduce the opacity of the blue mist layer to around 40%. I'm going to leave most of the far off background, because it's already quite misty.




I think you can always see the colours better in a painting if it has a border. So open up the jpeg, set the background colour to black, and using the crop tool, select the whole image - hold shift and alt, and pull on a corner outwards. There we go, a nice border. And here is the final image.


This concept has actually ended up showing 3 aspects of the scene, the interaction of roots and assets, the light quality of the main hall, and how the roots push through the wall. This is pretty bad, because I should have just concentrated on the fire extinguisher and the roots, but I got carried away, but it reinforces concepts that I've already done, and will help people who look at this link my other concepts together. Anyway, in total, the painting time was about 2-3 hours.