SET AN ATMOSPHERE WITH DARK FANTASY CONCEPT ARTWORK

Video game artist Kay Tang shares the process behind creating a grimly unnerving sacrificial scene from her personal universe

- Kay Tang

Being able to create well thought-out environment and prop concept artwork is a super valuable skill for video game production. During my experiences in the industry – working as an artist for clients such as Bandai Namco, Grinding Gear Games and Marvel – I’ve found that using a high-fidelity 3D workflow offers the other art teams a close idea of what the work will look like when it reaches the final product.

When creating a concept, it's important to not only undertake plenty of research, but to make decisions about how the world your design exists in would affect its appearance. This could be factors such as: what materials and tools would most likely be used for building it? Is there a commonly used visual motif in the world’s cultural history?

If you’re building your own personal world, then you don't need to have all the answers, especially as worldbuilding can be daunting, and every creation is an opportunity for exploration. But these are nonetheless good topics to think about thoroughly, and it makes a huge difference in the believability of the final design result.

In this tutorial I’ll be showing you my process as I create a dark fantasy concept of a sacrifice ritual to a goddess, set in Rituals of Malah, a personal world I’ve been building.

01 BEGIN WITH A BASIC BLOCKOUT

Sometimes the most difficult part is starting, especially when faced with Blender’s default cube. The best thing is to just dive straight in without thinking too much and create a super basic blockout. In this environment, the main focus was to figure out what was going on with the main ritual and the structure of this bell, so I just blocked that part out first. I also made sure to add in a human model for scale; even if you change it later, it helps give a better sense of grounding in the world.

02 THE POWER OF A SKETCH-OVER