Scene Design

[Wilco23]

I was going to put a vote button here but only just realised there isn't one ???
Anyway, I'm trying to decide what the best or most liked method is for scene design. Do you tend to use real life pictures/photographs and copy over them, or does your scenery primarily come straight from your imagination? Obviously if you're creating alien/fantasy type scenery it would tend to come straight from your imagination, but in that case do you upload hand drawn pictures electronically and then copy over them, or simply drawn them straight into the game engine?
I have looked for tutorials in this respect and found one or two, which are quite good, though I'm still interested in what techniques the people here actually apply. As I'm not a very good drawer, I'm thinking I'll have to take picture with my digital camera where possible and copy over them in SCI studio.

[troflip]

I was planning on using a digital camera to take photos of real scenery and try to trace it with SCI Studio... but I find that real life scenes are hard to capture with EGA graphics I have one on the title screen of my game, and it looks way out of place. Seems like cartoonish graphics are more suited for this.

So for almost all my scenes, I have been drawing them with pencil and paper first, getting them pretty much how I like them, and then I take a photo of that (don't have a scanner) and use that as the tracing image. It seems to work pretty well. Getting realistic shading and shadows is the hardest part, I find.

[Kon-Tiki]

Straight out of the head. I first put the composition down, then draw the outlines in the boxes, put the perspective into the outlines, not just the boxes anymore, then do the shading, add details and fill it all up. Got a tutorial on it on Agidev.com