How Elder Scrolls Online landscapes are drawn with concept artist Joe Watmough
Charlie Floyd, Harry Kersh, and David Ibekwe
Insider spoke to Joe Watmough, Principal Concept Artist at ZeniMax Online Studios
He showed us how he'd go about creating concept art for a video game
His drawings form the basis for a large portion of the game world in The Elder Scrolls — Greymoor
Following is a transcript of the video:
- Harry Kersh: This is "Modern Icons," the series where we meet the artists behind some of the entertainment world's most iconic art to find out how they bring it to life.
- Joe Watmough: My name's Joe Watmough. I'm the principal concept artist at Elder Scrolls Online.
Harry: He's going to show us how he designs the game's stunning landscapes, like the ones found in the latest expansion, Greymoor.
Joe: I actually started as a tattooer. I was a tattooer for 15 years before I worked in video games, and I've been into video games my whole life, ever since I was a kid.
Basically just took it on myself to learn how to do concept art. The Elder Scrolls Online is the online multiplayer Elder Scrolls experience. We draw pretty heavily from the other entries in the Elder Scrolls games. The lore to us, it's like the Bible. [laughs] It's super important.
Especially on the concept level. MMOs though, they're just so big. They're so big, and there's so much stuff in them, and it all has to fit together and feel like it lives in the same world. It's a balancing act.
Harry: So, this is going to be Blackreach. In terms of, like, when you were getting the brief, maybe from kind of, like, the art director and even, like, the biomes team, what sort of things are you kind of eventually hoping to include?
Joe: So, when it comes to, especially like a quick sketch like this, what I'm trying to do is make a composition, which is primarily positive and negative space. And from there, I'm thinking about foreground, middle ground, background. And we tend to do things always from the player's perspective.
I think it's important to, especially doing environment concepts, to understand how the player is gonna experience the space. The negative space is almost more important than the positive space, especially in environment design, right? Because environment design isn't about, like, with characters, when you're designing a character, it's a portrait. You're making a portrait that people identify with.
With environment design, it's completely the opposite. There is no, your focal point is often empty space. It's about the space; you're trying to define the space that players walk around. So it's a really different way of thinking about it.
You can see that the white space, right, is pointing right towards that kind of, like, middle area along that bottom quarter or so. And that negative space to me is, I'm already thinking about, that's where my focal point's gonna be.
I don't know what it's gonna be yet. I'm gonna put something there, but the negative space is gonna lead your eye. And in environment design, that's super important.
We're always leading the player. You know, we want to go over there, or I want you to go from here to there. How do we do that?
Harry: And you're gonna start to add some background details and really kind of give a sense of depth to the piece. Do you wanna just talk to us a little about how you go about adding depth and the tools that you're using to do that?
Joe: Well, especially early on, I try to keep the foreground, middle ground, and background either in separate groups or on separate layers themselves, because I've kept it arranged in layers or groups. And then, you know, use, like, a large, soft brush just to place on top of one of the layers or behind one of the other layers to indicate atmospheric recession.
When things move further away from you, they become lighter in value. There's less value contrast between the darks and the lights, and it tends to get cooler or more desaturated as things recede into space.
Harry: That's pretty interesting. I wish I understood any of it. [laughs] But I'm sure people at home who know more about art will appreciate it, yeah.
Joe: Well, it's like, you know, just imagine it this way. If you're looking at mountains way in the distance, they always get lighter. And it's just because there's so much actual water vapor in the air between us and them that the light itself becomes diffused. So that's why things get lighter as they recede into space.
It's one of those big wake-up calls, 'cause I'd been drawing since, you know, forever. But then when I started to, I wanted to make things look realistic, things from my imagination that look realistic, how do I do that? All right, I don't know how light works.
So I went outside and started painting. And when you realize that you have no clue how color or light works in the real world at all, it takes you 300 paintings to figure it out. But you have to start to, you know, understanding how the rules work, the actual physics of it. And not just the physics of it; how, psychologically, how we interpret what's happening in the real world. Because a lot of it, you know, a lot of it is that just as much as it is the actual physical product.
The interest, I love to learn, and, to me, that's one of the most important things about being a concept artist, especially in an MMO, because it's such a huge world and there's so many things that we have to figure out.
Harry: What are your sort of, like, your favorite tools?
Joe: I'm a tinkerer. [laughs] I like to, when I was tattooing, I liked to build my own machines and tune my own machines. I still, I do that with Photoshop. I like to build my own brushes. I've experimented with the Photoshop brush engine a lot.
I like to have a combination of things that can make hard edges, things that can make soft edges, and then something that can do something in between, like some texture. Yeah, I do a lot with the Lasso tool. It's a way for me to sketch without committing to anything.
This is the thing: I do a lot of watercolor painting as well. So, it's something that you, you're kind of forced to learn watercolor painting, because it's super hard to control edges in watercolor. So when you can let them go, let those edges actually really blur into each other, a lot of times you get a much more realistic effect.
Harry: Quick question, I forgot to ask, do you normally work on a tablet, or are you on some, like, a straight-onto-the-screen kind of guy?
Joe: Yeah, I have a Cintiq that I work on straight on the screen. It's much easier for me. I know people that don't like it, 'cause I started with a regular Intuos just like everyone did, but... it's, for me, I really like that one-to-one. This is where I'm going to make the mark, and I can see it directly on the screen.
So, I had started out fairly, like, a fairly low-key, darkened-value sketch because I knew that I was gonna add something lighter in that focal point area. I wasn't sure what I was gonna do for a while, and then I decided I was gonna do a waterfall.
And with the idea that the light's, I had really simply roughed in there that the light's coming from that kind of upper right. So, in terms of water, a waterfall has two main textual elements to me. That's what I'm thinking, is you need to show kind of particle density, you know, 'cause water is breaking up.
And then you need to be able to soften that edge up a little bit as the mist kind of sprays off. And then I'm thinking, well, why is this area framed? Where am I leading the player? I'm leading the player from this dark, rocky area to that lit-up waterfall.
If I were a player, that's where I would wanna go, right? What's over there?
Harry: I was gonna say, it's kind of interesting to hear you talk about that in almost, like, game-design terms and, like, the kind of gameplay side of things. 'Cause even at the concept art stage, you're thinking through the mind of a game designer and thinking about -
Joe: Totally, yeah, I think that that's important, especially for an MMO. I think it's important to, if you can imagine what the needs are of the world builders and, what assets do they need to build this area? So I always try to break things down into individual units. Like, what is one rock shape? And you can see, I did that even in this sketch. I made individual rock shapes that I kind of placed around. I try to think about it from that perspective, from the beginning, because if I can do that, then it makes it easier for me to break out the pieces for them later.
Harry: Is there ever a point where you have to step back from a piece and just tell yourself to kind of stop tinkering and be like, I'm done?
Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think once I've said what it is I'm gonna say in this particular image, then I have to stop. Otherwise, instead of, I think if you work too long on something and you're not clear of what you want to do, what you're trying to say, then a lot of times, instead of making it better, you just make it different, and that can go forever.
I can make this different forever. And then you get to a point where you're not really sure what you're saying anymore. And it only gets weaker after that. I try to think about first, second, and third reads. So, the first time you look at it, you look at a particular area, and then the second time, you're looking at, well, what's that over there? And then I try to think about a third read that's leading it back to the first read.
I think that's important to, for successful environment design, to be able to keep your eye from settling too much on one thing or being directed to the thing that you think is less important.
Harry: How important is it to get feedback on your work from other people? Do you think you can kind of get lost in your own work sometimes?
Joe:Well, I totally can. Yeah, and it gets weirder and weirder. [laughs] You know, I think when you work in a bubble, you're always pushing, I think the instinct is to always push. So I need constant feedback. You know, I'm pushing it too far or you need to push it in a different direction.
Harry: Where do you normally do your research for things like this? Are you looking at, are you actually like going out into caves and looking at rock formations, or more online?
Joe: I wish I could. [laughs] For something like this, I have to do it online, but for other things that we did, like, when we did Summerset, I'm a pretty avid plein air painter. So I use a lot of that stuff almost directly in the work that I did for Summerset. I paint outside often. But for something like this I have to research pretty much online. For this specifically, I looked at a lot of caves in Vietnam. They have some giant caves that actually have a lot of water features and flora inside the cave because there's enough light that gets in because they're pretty open up in the top a lot of times. So I used that for inspirational, for a lot of the Blackreach stuff I did.
Harry: So, you've basically got your finished piece there and what you do here kind of blew me away in terms of that, with very little effort or so it seems you've change the color and the feel of the whole piece. So I just want you, just talk us through what's going on here.
Joe: Sure. Well, it's a pretty classic painting technique to build it up in gray scale and then basically color it. It's basically your ambient light. So if you could think about any environment seen as having two main lights, an ambient, which would be, for us here like outside, and it would be the the sky. So there's a large blue light that's reflected on everything. and then a key light, which would be your main light source, which, you know, outside would be the sun. So everything that's getting hit by the sun has a kind of warmer highlight, but it's also affected by that cool light that's over everything. And in Blackreach what they did is they made that ambient, that cool kind of blue-green, so I'm thinking I'm just gonna use that to illuminate my environment. So I just made an overlay layer, picked color, used a large soft brush, and then just kind of used the pressure sensitivity to put it where I wanted to do it. It's a lot like watercolor. And it's just a way to add that atmosphere super quick. You know, when you're thinking about environments especially, you think about dark and light, positive and negative space, when you start to add color, I also think about warm and cool. Because you can use the same process to emphasize or de-emphasize things.
Harry: Obviously this is now the final article, just a speed painting, but still the level of detail that you've achieved in such a short time is fantastic.
Joe: Aw, thanks.
Harry: So once you've got a piece finished like this, and you have a sense of the direction that you wanna take an area in, which team does it go to and how do they go about kind of translating it into what you actually experience in the game?
Joe: I could take individual assets out of this, you know, the rock shapes, the mushrooms. I would make sure that they have the stuff that they needed. It can be additional sketches to detail things. It can be real world references. We did a lot of that for Blackreach in particular, I did a lot of rock studies, like 90 pages of rock studies, and then they go and they build the pieces, and then once the pieces are built, it goes to the world builders and then the world builders kind of basically level design with the pieces.
Harry: Before we finish, is there anything like, any key nuggets of wisdom that you wanted to share with people about what you do? Particularly for people who may be hope to one day be in your position.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to approach, concept artists study. I think it's important to get outside and learn how, how to paint real life and then think about positive and negative space all the time, and using lighting to direct the player into the play space.
Harry: Joe, thanks so much again for joining us. Hope to speak to you again soon, have a great day.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely, it's been great. Thank you guys very much.