Derek Weselake
Concept Design | Illustration | Visual Development | [email protected]
What is Concept Art?
Concept art is, at its core, a visual communication, problem solving, and brainstorming tool to explore and bring ideas to life in the clearest way possible in the shortest amount of time.
What are the uses for concept art?
What is the history of Concept Art?
What is the Difference between illustration and concept art?
What is in a Concept artist's toolset?
Concept art is, at its core, a visual communication, problem solving, and brainstorming tool to explore and bring ideas to life in the clearest way possible in the shortest amount of time.
What are the uses for concept art?
- Pitching projects: This is the most critical part of any large project. In a world where there is not enough time or money to fund everything, pitching an idea in the best way you can is paramount. If everyone is pitching with just words, Google images, and AI, then a focused set of concept art will make your project stand out above the rest before they have to read a single line. Even when a pitch fails, a beautiful pitch document can have a life of its own and make your career like it did with many people that would have been part of Jodorowsy's Dune.
- Ideation: Sometimes you have a great idea but you need an artist to flesh it out using their decades of knowledge they hold in their visual library and the fundamental skills to bring it to life.
- Connecting a team: Concept Art can get everyone on the same page on a team. Loose, unconnected images and words are a Rorschach test where everyone will see something different, but with concept art, the visuals are more directed, and you can almost see the end goal, and everyone works more efficiently because of it.
- Inspiring a team: Similar to above, Concept Art or even Concept Trailers (something Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame likes to produce) can inspire the entire team and stakeholders. Concept art can even inspire how and what game engine's tools are created.
- Marketing: Similar to pitching, everyone loves to see behind the scenes. In a world where you are fighting for attention and constantly have to update social media, having a steady flow of concept art can build a fan base. Making concept art beautiful is often done on purpose for even just this.
- Additional Income: Concept Art can be packaged as an art book or a poster and sold at stores or events. It can even be packaged digitally as a digital collector's edition content with an extremely high profit margin.
What is the history of Concept Art?
- Traditionally, Concept art in games was done by the person at a game studio that just happened to be the best at drawing, or an outside illustrator and has since expanded into being its own discipline. In film
- For film, Ralph Mcquarrie popularized the discipline for bringing Star Wars to life before it even hit the screen.
What is the Difference between illustration and concept art?
- They complement each other and work together. An Illustration is usually a final product on its own and can have its own concept art leading up to it, while concept art is a form of ideation and communication towards a much bigger goal.
- The majority of concept art is never seen by the public due to cancelled projects or holding onto concepts to use in later projects.
- Concept Artists have different roles depending on the phase of the game they are working on:
- Bluesky: anything goes, and your goal is to get out as many ideas as possible to inspire the team and get everyone on the same page. This is my favorite thing to do.
- Pre-Production: Things get a little more specific but loose enough to be cut at any moment, style can still be explored at this point.
- Production: A production pipeline is established and work gets more detailed and specific, acting like blueprints for 3D artists.
- Post-Production: Concept Artists will often become illustrators at this point, working on things like in-game stickers, posters, and cards.
- Live-Ops: In a live ops game, you have mini production cycles where you start over from pre-production over and over.
- What is the process of creating a piece of concept art?
- The process in concept art changes between each piece but usually:
- Research and reference gathering: This is when you search the web, offline libraries, museums, talk to experts, and even act things out yourself, getting as much information on a subject as possible. Often, you end up making something like a reference board for the team to look at and discuss. Repeat until approved.
- Sketching and Ideation: In this phase, a concept artist will explore as many ideas as possible in a looser style. If time is tight, these may be done to a greater finish with fewer iterations. Revise and repeat until approved.
- Rendering: When the final direction is chosen, this is when time is spent communicating the idea as effectively as possible. Revise and repeat until approved.
- Pass it to the 3D artist or Production artists. But wait, there's more: once it is done, you may need to help guide the 3D modeler with additional paint overs/references as they work. Someone has to determine what a scribble is.
What is in a Concept artist's toolset?
- Visual Library: This can be life experiences, references, built-up 3D models, etc. No matter what the tool, if someone doesn't have a strong internal visual library, they can end up drawing very boring stuff even if they think it's fresh.
- Fundamentals: This is the backbone of all art creation. A strong set of fundamentals weaponizes a strong Visual Library no matter what tool is used. This includes things like composition, color theory, anatomy, perspective, brush economy, light and shadow, etc. Some of the best film directors can draw really well, and the better your fundamentals, the better your eyes are at observing the world.
- Tools: Drawing materials and software. In the past, all concept art was hand drawn, but recently, photo-bashing (using photos as textures), 3D, and even game engines themselves are used.
- Things you might not know:
- Most of the concept art you see online and in art books is chosen for being pretty, but a lot of concept art behind the scenes can even be as crude as near-final screenshot draw overs.
- Concepting is often more than just for visuals; you often end up influencing level design, gameplay, sound design, boss patterns, story/lore, you name it.
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