Professional Specialisation: 2D Texture Environment

I got back from Animex Games yesterday evening as inspired as I've been in a long time. I can't recommend the festival enough. The range of talks in such a short space of time is incredible, and the chance to meet the speakers afterwards and talk with them about games is great.

As I mentioned in a previous post, for Professional Specialisation, we've to engage in some interesting dialogues with industry professionals (of 4+ years), so hopefully the artist speakers from Animex that I contacted will be willing to help me out a bit.

Today, between madly trying to catch up with the game development module, I was working on an environmental piece. Before I started I didn't really have a clue what I wanted to convey; rather, I wanted to experiment with some bold textures.

In pretty much all of my 2D work I use one of 3 brushes - none with any texture added. For the most part at least. So, this is in attempt to add some new elements to my concept development.

This is my first draft. Below it you can see the final where I pushed the blue hue of the image to push the atmosphere a bit more, and added some more detail in the mid ground.

The finished one on the bottom took about 2 hours (I think). From now on I'm going to time myself more precisely as an incentive to learn to work faster.