Oh, all sorts of places! With a lot of the ones I've been posting, it was often more a matter of 'I want to do something warm and foresty' or 'I want to do something with more of a far background", since I was doing so many of them, and the results formed out of those parameters. But really I think it helps in general to look at a lot of photos of real-world environments, since there are some amazing ones out there! Observing and doing studies of those really helps to buff out your mental database, so it's easier to come up with things later.

Oh gosh, thanks! It's been a while since I did this one, so I can't remember specifically what started this idea. I like overlooks in general, though, and probably wanted to see if I could do some layered hills. Or maybe I'd watched Princess Mononoke sometime around that date, I don't know, hah. I do keep an eye out for enjoyable environments on sites like tumblr, though, and just taking in a lot of photos of pre-existing landscapes tends to help build up your mental capacity for creating new ones, I think.