To start off, I want to show you a quick process of making one of these thumbnails. Limitation is what leads you to mastery.īe fluid, try to think of random cool concepts in your mind a lone tree in a vast valley, spiky rocks with a hero standing next to them, a lake with some mountains in the background, just keep it simple in the beginning.Ī quick tip : The sky is the brightest thing in a painting often, so I reserve the white for the sky, and for eventual water reflections, and the nearer something is, the darker it usually gets, so the black is mostly reserved for nearer things. Try to make your composition out of these colors only. Just use your hard round brush without opacity pressure sensitivity setting, and keep color picking from the down right corner to pick between the white, 33% grey, 66% grey and the black. Remember, only use about 4-5 minutes each, and don’t sweat any details. Now, we need to fill these empty boxes in with some thumbnails.

Here is the environment concept we will reach from one of the thumbnails we choose later in this tutorial: Doing this will result in a set of thumbnails that you can later on refine if you find that some of them are better than the rest. If most of them are crap, that’s fine! Remember, you’re only spending a few minutes on each – about 30-40 minutes on the entire set of thumbnails. You want to spend only a few minutes on each of the thumbnails, working fairly zoomed out, and using only a few black-and-white values, and with only one type of brush. The whole idea is to not care about details or any specifics what-so-ever – mostly only about composition.

Thumbnailing can be used not only in environment painting, but also any other concept art and design. This painting technique is called thumbnailing, and what it means is that you have a grid of about 3 by 3 rectangles, and you quickly paint in random ideas using simple tools and achieving fundamental compositions and designs, resulting in a total of 9 loose concepts. There is one technique I love using when practicing environment concept art, and I use it a lot to come up with great ideas when clients give me their brief with description of the pieces they want to have for their game, movie or various projects.

Jump paint tutorial