I wanted to post some of the artwork that went into making 3 Armies. This is Cavalyard, the first place you encounter. The finished background was uploaded as two separate files to help lower memory. I built and colored this in Illustrator, then imported it into Photoshop to make some final tweaks.
Since I had a strong idea of what I wanted to do, most of the backgrounds I penciled were pretty loose. Below is the pencil rough I worked from.
You probably noticed that I didn't draw out the entire background. Since you don't ever see the entire background on the screen at once, it allowed me to reuse some of the BG elements. :-)