Monkey Studies

Environment Pen & Marker Sketches

Doing more environment art Direction for my world's design. Each page contains quick sketches of environment shots for a different part of the world. Each Sketch takes about 10 - 20 min. 

For each page I do some research and gather references to help me generate ideas.

Cold Mountainous/Forest Region 

Icy Mountain Region

Fantasy Castles/ Ruins/Fortress

Exotic Island Region

WIP

Quick Environment Sketches

To help me in my process of creating this fictional world, I needed to do some rough visual treatments for what I imagine certain parts of the world looking like. These treatments are meant to help stimulate ideas for the era, cultures, technology, politics, religions, and important landmarks that might occupy these places.

I liked the look of inked sketches, they were fast and fun to do; however I ended up running out of ink partway through and didn't get all the places done.

World Map Progress

Using the original world map as a starting place, I cropped each continent or major area and printed them. I then took the prints and traced over the top to create a higher resolution, more detailed version of each. Then I scanned them in again.

The only problem I have is that the line weight varies when I put them all together into the world map. I'm hoping this won't be too noticeable after I paint them and landmark them.

Original Map

New Version of World Map with Hi-Res Areas

Time to build a world - Creating a map

So I've decided to Build this world that I've been thinking about for a long time. It's really for a story that's been in the back of my mind for years but I didn't really know how I was going to get it out.

So I'm going to start by building the world my story takes place in. I'll start with geographical maps, then I'll write out the histories, create the cultures, create their peoples, and so on.

I'm really picturing this story being made into a graphic novel and/or being made as an animated series. However it could also be told through a video game (I was thinking a turn-based strategy rpg, since there will be emphasis on war and battle).

The story will be a fantasy epic that is more grounded in reality than most fantasies. It's not really restricted to just fantasy though, there will be a mix of all my favorite genre stuff. This story is basically going to be like my love letter to my favorite genres, books, movies, tv shows, comics, and video games.

Thus far I've done an outline of the world map; and I'll proceed to detail it further and later paint it so it looks like a cool explorers map.

A plain line drawing of my world