Hello Steemians !

Today I will talk about research and why this is really important not only as an artist but also in any kind of fields (Dear non-drawing readers, your feedbacks are more than welcome, thank you !)

The case study is about a pitch I was given for a personal project earlier this year. I will get a task to realize followed by some guidelines giving me the window of action I will need to perform it.

The Pitch was :"Create the Outpost of an Evil Empire in the mountain. The place should be impossible to take and 1000 men can defend against an army of 10000 or more. The style is realistic and should fit in a 3D Isometric game." I set myself 2,5 days to work on it.

I. Where to begin ?

When I was in secondary school and throughout my general scholarship, I learned to ask problematics and to analyze them in order to deeply understand and answer them in the best possible way. (It seems I still remember a few things...). And that is important in most of the field I went through studying so far.

Whether it is Design, Hacking, Philosophy, Economics or science, asking the good questions and answering them in the most accurate way is key.

But how do you do that ? By doing your homework and researches before putting the pen on the paper (or stylus on the wacom).

A few advantages to that is it will greatly improve your performance and your art as you won't have to ask these questions midway through your process but also make you gain time further down the way as you won't have to back a few steps to redo the whole thing or be off-topic. _

Back to our pitch. I first need to understand properly everything (moreover since English is not my native language, It is easy to think I know one meaning while the truth is...I don't.) Here, I only had "Outpost" as troublesome, therefore it needed some quick googling.

Wikipedia (I know) says "an outpost [is] maintained by a sovereign state on its border, usually one of a series placed at regular intervals, to watch over and safeguard its border with a neighboring state. Usually at a station in a remote or sparsely populated location".

Here I have it.

II. Finding the Key words

Now I need to get the important informations from the pitch which are :

Outpost
Evil Army
Mountain
1000 men vs 10000 is easy battle.
Realistic but 3D Isometric game (Diablo and Dofus are isometric games for example)
2.5 days

Out of these informations I get a pretty clear idea for my outpost. It should be :

In a remote location in the mountain, Highly visible for the friends but totally invisible for the enemies.
Strong enough to maintain harsh weather in the mountains but not too big nor small to host a thousand men.
This is the border station of the Evil Army. Their first defense line, it should inspire fear if seen from afar.

I also decide to go with 2 pictures, one which will explain the idea for the whole team and one view from top isometric view on its translation In Game.

research sheet

Having about zero knowledge about environmental designs, I promptly go on Google, Pinterest and other browsers (DuckDuckGo, etc.) in order to find similar places such as Helm's Deep (LotR), Minas Morgul (LotR), Josselin Castle (in Brittanny, France), and other european castles.

What I saw was, for a fortress, no need to put big defense strategies and catapults and other defense machinery. A good positioning prevents most of the attacks. So I bring references of these castles and fortresses but also dug into movies such as 300 and Redcliff. Because with a good positionning in a mountain, you can use the terrain and the weather at your advantage.

I decided to go for a cliff in a high position in the mountains. The cliff gives a narrow space to get to the entrance of the outpost and a wider exit behind in case of forced retreat. Moreover, being that high over a steep climb makes the outpost pretty much invisible from below preventing any attacks by foot and letting the skies for only attacking point. To add some more natural defenses, the chosen spot is really inhospitable with sharp edges like spears and the changing weather brings clouds and mist easily making the post even harder to detect.

"Kar'shak sees everything, hears everyone."
Knowing this, the inhabitants on both sides of the border are psychologically weakened.

In case of attacks, the station needs defenses :

Lava to drop over the cliff to burn the foes and create more mist, spreading panick and confusion over the enemies ranks.
Towers to see, prevent the attacks, defend and also one tall observatory tower to alert other outposts and ring the alarm.

Finally I ended by drawing the Ingame view to show the concept from a less abstract way as well as giving some more informations about what lies inside the fortress and behind and giving a sense of scale.

Here is my thinking process to create a piece ! Or at least what I try to do everytime =)
If you want to go further, I just let some ressources here below :

The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Gorin No Sho or Treaty of the 5 wheels, Miyamoto Musashi
The Redcliff (based on the story of the 3 Kingdoms in Ancient China)
300

I hope you found this useful, feel free to give feedbacks if you think I can be clearer in my writing. Thank you for reading !

I also want to thank you soooo much for all the love and support through Steemit and Discord, I just passed my first 100 followers so big big hugs to you guys ! Keep spreading the love =D

Have a wonderful week !!
Cheers !

Ha ok sorry, Nick Carver is Artist at Blizzard, he uses a whole array of techniques to go faster, you can check some on his Youtube channel I think.
But what I wanted to say is that he draws a bunch of assets with the same light source (or no lightsource), same perspective, on different layers. This allows him to be able to create modular environments.

It's like your mech, you can draw multiple legs, arms etc and if one day you have to draw multiple variations of a mech, you just have to get into your previous sketches, mix them up however you want it and overdraw the parts you want to change. Does it make sense ? =)

For the Isometric view it is fairly easy, draw an isometric grid and trace over it =)
to draw an isometric grid..... haha Sephiroth had a video before but I can't find it back...
But I drew a flat grid and then rotate it and flattened it 50% more or less. I put Nick's video and Sephiroth's below for you to check =D Cheers !

The Importance Of Research : A Case Study From A Standard Concept Art Pitch

I. Where to begin ?

II. Finding the Key words

What a great research, and a wonderful art work too.