Environment Concept Design Course | Foundations for Digital Artists
🎨 Course Overview
Learn to build believable worlds from the ground up.
This course takes you through the complete process of environment concept design—starting from foundational exercises like composition, color, and lighting studies, to creating cinematic final scenes ready for professional portfolios.
You’ll explore how to observe, simplify, and paint environments that tell a story, combining artistic fundamentals with real production workflows used in film, games, and animation.
🏜️ What You’ll Learn
Visual Foundations & Composition
Understand how to compose powerful landscapes using shape design, perspective, and depth to guide the viewer’s eye.
Lighting & Color Theory
Master how light defines form and atmosphere. Study real-world lighting conditions and apply cinematic color grading to your paintings.
Film & Photo Studies
Analyze master shots from movies and real environments, learning how to translate realistic scenes into stylized or story-driven designs.
Environment Painting Techniques
Develop workflows for painting natural environments—deserts, mountains, caves, ruins—using Photoshop and 3D tools for structure and realism.
Worldbuilding Through Design
Go beyond painting. Learn how to design environments that feel like part of a living world, rich with story, scale, and purpose.
🧰 Software Used
Adobe Photoshop – sketching, color studies, and painting
3D Software (optional) – Blender or similar for base lighting and composition blocking
🎯 Course Outcomes
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:
✅ Build believable environments from reference to final render
✅ Apply cinematic lighting and color techniques used in production
✅ Create mood, atmosphere, and story in every composition
✅ Present professional-quality environment concept sheets for your portfolio
👩🎨 Who This Course Is For
Beginner and intermediate digital artists
Concept artists learning environment and lighting design
Game and film students who want to create cinematic concept art
Artists aiming to build a professional concept art portfolio
The Course
This will give you a broad understanding of concept art, the tools we use, and how to build a portfolio, and more.
In this module, we'll cover all the essentials for building a strong foundation, including light and shadow, composition, design principles, and more.
This will be all about the tools. Blender basics, 3D Coat techniques and some of the most used techniques inside Photoshop. Everything to get you started in using 3D as a tool in your pipeline.
You improve your skills by practicing. This module will show you some of the best practices you can do to improve as an Environment Concept Artist. From film studies, material studies to landscape and design studies.
Our first project brief: designing a checkpoint prop area for our dungeon-crawling game. We'll go from iterations and sketches to the final design and presentation.
We will dive deeper into the environment by creating large scale callouts and color compositional sketches.
Every dungeon needs a treasure chest so we will be designing another prop that we will use to populate our environments.
In this level design, we'll create our first complete environment. Using the props we've already crafted and envisioning a character exploring before facing a boss, we'll delve into set design, player exploration, and how the character navigates the scene.
We go back into designing another prop that we will use for our previous environment. From sketching to the final design and presentation.
MEET YOUR INSTRUCTOR
José Vega
José is a seasoned concept artist with over a decade of experience in the video game, animation, and movie industries.
Currently, he excels as a Senior Concept Artist at Wizards of the Coast, contributing to the iconic Magic: The Gathering franchise.
Throughout his dynamic career, José has collaborated with some of the most renowned names in the entertainment sector, including Netflix, Castlevania, Warner Brothers, Sony, and Riot Games. His extensive portfolio showcases an impressive range of artistic styles and creative innovations that have captivated audiences globally.
Clients include:
Wizards of the Coast - Magic the Gathering
Netflix - Castlevania
Warner Brothers - Multiversus
Marvel - Guardians of the Galaxy
