Wrapping up the enviroment art (Deadzone)

 Here's the final environment design and keyart:

I thought the level could periodically flood and drain, either automatically, or from something the players do in game, so the design is shown with puddles of water on the floor, while the keyart is meant to appear submerged. I thought first to do the keyart half submerged to better convey the idea in just the one image, but for the sake of time I did it fully submerged as that was a lot easier to do.

 I made a couple of varioations for the keyart as I wasn't sure if the graffiti/ red stains and fake lens flare were too much/ quite right, I prefer it with them so I'm using it as the main keyart, but just in case here's some versions without some or all of the extras:

 

The red stain was actually done with my mouse after I'd transferred the art to my PC to upload from, I hadn't originally planned for it or the lens flare, just the gradient overlay and light rays. It's still a little flat in areas but I think I'd need to practice lineless painting a lot more than three or four times before I can get to a place where I'm happy with it. That being said, I think from now on I'd prefer to stick with lined artwork, or a mixture somehow, like in the design (mostly lineart with roughly painted background). I managed to tighten the environment keyart up a bit by using a wider variety of brush sizes but it's still not quite right.

 

Environment design colour variations:

 

This was the original colour scheme I had in mind, trying to match the colours of official nameless stuff that's already out there - I then basically put a blue filter over it.

 

I thought something like this might be cool as well, but with the shading and rendering it might've become a bit too visually busy.

 

 

 

 

 Sketches and lineart here too, some with the colours on very slightly/ on a low opacity as the seaweed in the back didn't have any lines.

Keyart process: 

 

You can see here I sketched in a line for where the water would've come up to had I gone with  my original idea. The lines going across/ between some of the buildings have also dissapeared, I'll be honest I just forgot about them, but they're not essential anyways - I just imagined the players would have a zipline type device for more movement options. Initially I kept everything on seperate layers in case I needed to go back or needed a clipping mask for anything, but it was just too many layers, so I saved it as a seprate file just in case, and then merged most of the layers on the main one (apart from the important things like the background, overlays, etc). 

Update: I had a bit of a brainwave in terms of drawing it half submerged. Something like this is about the best I can do:

 

 

 Upside down somehow makes it look more like you're looking through the water's surface, so I included it so hopefully you can see it

 

I'd never be able to find references for something so specific unless I literally went and took them myself, but that would be quite difficult as I don't live near any beaches/ etc, so I used this reference photo and sort of made up the rest:

 

 

(Swissmediavision 2020)

 

Reference:

 

Swissmediavision, 2020. Directly below Underwater shot of woman diving in Mexican cenote stock photo [online]. iStock. Available at: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/directly-below-underwater-shot-of-woman-diving-in-mexican-cenote-gm1197298332-341790955 [Accessed 16 May 2025].