Concept artist Slawek Fedorczuk shares his top tips.
(Image credit: Slawek Fedorczuk)
Struggling to add interest and atmosphere to your landscape art? Below, I suggest 10 powerful techniques you can apply to show narrative through the design of your environments and make your landscape the perfect setting for an absorbing tale.
If you need equipment and tools, see our pick of the best drawing tablets and the best digital art software. In the meantime, here are my 10 top tips for creating engaging landscape art.
Slawek Fedorczuk
Slawek is a freelance concept artist and illustrator with over a decade of experience working for games and animation studios. He focuses on creating environments, colour scripts and key visuals.
If you look closely at nature, you’ll often see only a handful of particular colours. I take advantage of that, for example relying on cool and warm greens, plus some neutrals.
Shadows can sometimes break up your image with unnecessary contrast. I like moving the light around to avoid creating noisy, heavy shadows in random places.
Extra research always helps. Look for specific shapes of leaves, the texture of the trees, or even how reflective the stones can be in a river to inform the story.
If you keep your values and colours limited, you can now take full advantage of that with the focal point. This is where I add the extra colours and strong values.
Scale variation gives the scene strong believability. Even here, having that character in the scene can help establish how big your individual shapes should be.
Take advantage of the tiny details. Add shadows, reflections, footsteps on the ground and other little hints in order to make your environments more believable.
This content originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine, the world's leading digital art and fantasy art magazine. ImagineFX is on sale in the UK, Europe, United States, Canada, Australia and more. Limited numbers of ImagineFX print editions are available for delivery from ouronline store (the shipping costs are included in all prices).
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Slawek is a freelance concept artist and illustrator with over a decade of experience working for games and animation studios. He focuses on creating environments, colour scripts and key visuals.
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