Snippet from my latest concept art breakdown for Everhaven

I’m excited to share a snippet from my latest YouTube video where I break down some of the concept art I created for WoW the War Within !

🎬 I break down the full creative process, from "Blue Sky" sketches to managing lighting in dark biomes, in my latest video. If you are into Concept Art, Lore, or just love WoW, check it out here: 👉

Concept art isn't just about pretty landscapes. It's about planting narrative seeds. • Ancient shipwrecks in underground seas? 🚢 • Machinery left by Titans? ⚙️ I tried to layer history into architecture, pathways, ruins to give the Team narrative hooks to play with

You can't have an underground zone without a hidden threat. I visualized a faction of Trolls summoning ancient Nerubian masters. I tried to design that cinematic "Payoff Moment" the split second the player realizes who they are actually fighting.

I imagined a colossal root network deep below the surface. The concept? A new World Tree, or perhaps Teldrassil itself, secretly being healed by Trolls underground I wanted to capture the spirit of life persisting beneath the destruction of the surface

How do you make a cave feel like a world? I pushed the verticality to the extreme. The goal was to make the ceiling feel so high it vanished creating a sense of "openness" and discovery. I wanted players to find a vast, living civilization, not just another dark cavern.

In 2021, I realized a lifelong dream: doing Visual Development for Wow The War Within ⚔️🌍 I was tasked with imagining a massive underground zone : Hidden Troll empires, the return of the Nerubians World Trees Here is a look at these unseen concepts & the story behind them 🧵👇

One of the many quick paintings I did back in 2022 for WoW

Yasuo the Unforgiven 🎋! Illustration made in collaboration with Riot Games, special thanks to the Riot art team for direction and feedback <3 -Fireball Studio: Final render: Didier Nguyen Sketches & Clean assist: Xinyue Li -Riot Games Team

D A R I U S

A strange place I designed when working on World of Warcraft

Journey into the ethereal. ☁️ This is just a glimpse of the spirit realm we helped create for Spirit Blossom Beyond. From the floating islands to the glowing spirit house, our goal was to make a place that felt both mystical and inviting. What's your favorite part of this scene?

For Spirit Blossom Beyond, we explored countless ideas to find that one entrance that would truly capture the sense of awe and mystery. This is just a small sample of the sketches our team created. Which one is your favorite?

Under water exploration idea : I think it could be fun to have swimming revisited in WOW, kinda like flying was reinvented with Dragon Flight. What if you could swiftly move around, dive, find speeding currents, etc... all in a beautiful underwater area 👀

When I was working on the visual development for World of Warcraft, I did a lot of quick concept arts. Blocking out some volumes in 3D was still valuable so I could paint different angles of the same area, or iterate on top of it. Here's a quick video of my process

By J. C. Leyendecker

I lead a very cool project last year at Fireball for the Spirit blossom Beyond event for League of Legends! Pretty proud of this one, check out the work of the team on Artstation ! https://t.co/rdFPPO83ke

A fun piece I did during my time on World of Warcraft The War Within visual development

They're alive! 👻 One of the coolest concepts we worked on for Spirit Blossom Beyond: statues taking on a life of their own & spirits unleashing onto the village. What's your favorite detail in this piece?