Concept Art 101

[Seedling]

Pardon my absence! You folks have been busy! Right on!

Wasker – Oooh, nice light coming through that door! Something to look at: the ceiling looks like it is sloping downward to that door. If that was intentional, then you should consider adding in some other element to make it clear that it wasn’t a mistake of perspective, such as a topping element on those pillars that clearly show they are intersecting the ceiling at an angle. And the “emo horse”. . . haha! :-) I don’t think that a dark mood automatically makes things “emo”, but the idea of communicating an emotion with an image of something random, like a horse, is a great exercise. In fact, you’re giving me ideas. . . Good job with the horse, by the way. I think you succeeded particularly well with the colors. It’s a challenge to properly shade something that is a very dark color. Something that could help you more – throw something in the environment to fill up the space and give the eye something to compare the horse with. It could be as little as drawing a shadow under the horse in an otherwise blank gray space. That shadow gives us information about where the light is coming from, what color the light is, and the intensity of the light. Great job!

Kale – Haha! That’s a fun image, particularly the teeth and eye enhancements. Doing research to improve an image you have already started is fantastic! I can see that you learned some good anatomy in the process. Something that you didn’t carry over from the observed guitar drawing is the side of the guitar. That is a very important detail. The frets are also just crooked enough to look a little funky. But, you really caught the tuning knobs nicely. Ooh, and what an ambitious self-portrait! You captured a good strong mood in the unaltered one. I don’t see much of a resemblance to you in the altered version, but you did get a much more realistic character out of it than you would have if you had done it entirely from imagination. I would consider that to be a success. :-)

I'm still not sure whether Concept Art is the "career" for me, but damn it does look interesting!

I think it’s safer to consider “illustration” as a career path than it is to just consider “concept art”, anyway, if you are interested in making images for a living. If you learn what it takes to be an illustrator, that opens up many career doors, including that of concept artist.

Cheers everyone!

[Seedling]

Composition is the art of working within a rectangle (or other shape) with line, color, value, and form, for the purpose of making an interesting non-representational set of patterns.

Composition is non-representational. That is, a good composition can contain representational objects, such as people or buildings or monsters, but it doesn’t have to. It can be nothing but smears of color, and still be effective. A good composition grabs your attention and makes your eye jump to specific parts of the picture. A bad composition makes you want to look away, or directs your attention to the wrong thing.

********Assignment #22 - Studying Existing Compositions*******

Go pick out a favorite piece of art. It can be the cover of a novel, a page from a comic book, a still frame from a television show, or a painting by an old master. (But for now, don’t pick a sculpture or other 3D work – this is all about 2D.)

Do a sketch of this piece of work. It doesn’t have to be a meticulous ten-hour labor; half an hour should be ample. Leave room around the edges, because you are going to take notes.

Take a look at the original. Where does your eye keep returning to within the image? Chances are, if there is a story being told, then your eye is being drawn to parts of the image that tell the story. If someone is menacingly wielding a knife at a dog, chances are your eye will most often go to the face of the attacker, the knife, and the dog. This is not an automatic result of there being a story told here. Your eyes are going to those focal points because the artist has arranged things in the picture to assure that those are the most important bits.

Consider that this same knife-and-dog story could be told in a setting of a lush green forest with a waterfall and a giant levitating glass castle glittering off in the distance. But what good would those extra details do if they were just there for decoration? Either that castle had better be important, or it had better not be there, because a floating glass castle is going to steal the show from a guy wielding a knife at a dog!

Anyway, back to your image. You can see the important places that the artist has directed you to look at. Or, maybe the artist didn’t do a great job, and you find yourself repeatedly looking at a boring rock. Either way, take some notes on what you see. You can even draw big arrows pointing from your notes to those details.

Now, why is it that your eyes go there? What tricks did the artist employ, or fail to employ?

Chances are those focal points are high in contrast. All sorts of contrast, too. It might be that the value (dark-to-light range) is highest there. The darkest darks and the lightest lights are right next to each other, whereas the rest of the image huddles in a grey area. Or there is contrast in the hue (color). Perhaps the dog is bright orange, the knife is purple, and the rest of the image is much muddier in hue. Perhaps the entire image has been made with little dashes of color – except for the faces of the characters. Because they contrast in texture, they are where your eyes go.

Or, maybe there are shapes or lines within the image that lead your eye around like railroad tracks leading a train. The important areas interrupt these lines, and act a bit like train-stations. Or, perhaps the focal points are like islands – your eyes drift continuously around until they bump into solid land. Or, perhaps there is another reason why your eyes are going where they are going. Figure it out and write it all down.

This won’t result in a pretty sketchbook page, but it’s a good way to start wrapping your head around the idea of composition.

[Vaejoun]

A very nice threat, its very usefull, even if you already have some experience.

I think the hardest part is (what you already said) to force yourself to draw.

When it comes to me, I always had (and still have) problems with girls and so I started to read Mangas and comics with nice and good looking women inside. I took my sketchbook and made a really fast sketch, just looking on proprotions. No shading and no details.

this is very useful, I can use this thumb-sketches for later pictures as inspiration without really copying from another artist. Its just the pose. now I have about 2 or 3 sketchbook just about female characters and I think I get the right feeling how to do it.

Maybe I post something later.

I would love to hear something more about Layout and composition. I am just working on a poster and I would like to hear your oppinion.

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=87910

[Sanest]

How could I have missed this!?! Seedling you are a true genius, I will have fun reading through the rest of it. I will definetly have to start working through the assignments...like now!

[Vaejoun]

Well Im not a beginner any more, though I will start this lessons from the start.

Here is the first one and what I came up with.

[Seedling]

********Assignment #23 – Finding Compositions Within Compositions********

This assignment requires glue, scissors, and a magazine.

Within every composition are a dozen other compositions. Find a full-page advertisement. Cut out a postage-stamp-sized rectangle from the advertisement, and see if you can make what is on that tiny rectangle be a complete and interesting composition on its own. Glue it in your sketchbook

Fill two pages of your sketchbook with these tiny found compositions. On one page, glue images that contain recognizable features, such as an eye, a tree, or a word. On the other, glue only compositions that are more unrecognizable – perhaps the folds in a shirt and a bit of skin and a bit of some other color. Try for a range from minimalist to details-galore. Try rectangles with different aspect ratios, from square to tall and thin to short and wide.

Take notes on what works compositionally and what doesn’t, and why.

********Assignment #24 - Non-Representational Composition ********

Say you’ve got a hankering to draw a lone figure rappelling down a vast cliff. Or a group of ninjas fleeing across an intergalactic garbage dump. Or, a giant ramshackle space-station. Each one of these things consists of patterns and marks that almost don’t represent anything at all. Aside from the challenge of making a cliff-face look recognizably like a cliff-face, how do you make the pattern of it look interesting, and how do you make it compositionally nifty?

Use a ruler to draw a series of tidy rectangles on a page or two of your sketchbook. The size is up to you – maybe two to a page suits you best, or maybe a dozen thumb-nails. Each of those rectangles is going to be a complete composition. Using your medium of choice, start filling those rectangles with marks. The only rule is this: don’t draw any recognizable images. This is an exercise in non-representational art.* That means that marks and colors themselves need to look good, without the added burden of also having to look like something else.

Use line, value, pattern, hue (if working in color), shape, and anything else you can think of to make these rectangles into interesting things to look at. Use this to explore what works and what doesn’t – which of these rectangles would you want to pin to a bulletin board to look at again later? Which would you want to throw away? And why?

Use this to find out what your favorite medium is capable of, while you’re at it, because chances are you’ve never fully explored the range of uses for that pencil or those water-colors. You can use PhotoShop for this, but don’t use any funky filters for now.

If you want to get really methodical about this, then do a longer series. Do a batch of images that focus on value, then another that focuses on line, etc. Try to identify which element you are the least comfortable with – and then try to improve at that one thing.

Oh yes – and don’t agonize over any of these. They should be fast and fun. Spend exactly as much time on each as you feel you need to, and no more.

The next time you want to try speed-painting an intergalactic garbage-dump, you can use this approach to build an interesting composition before agonizing over what sort of garbage such a dump would be made up of.


* I am avoiding the word “abstract” here because abstract implies starting with a recognizable object and then simplifying or changing it.


********Assignment #25 - Build a Composition with Perspective from Life********

Say you have to draw a building in perspective – and you also have to make a good composition out of it. That’s two large technical hurdles to overcome at once! How do you do it?

Start with a chair, or cardboard box, matchbox, lunchbox, or some other object that is made up of basic rectangles. Toss it in the middle of the room, and sketch it. For now, stick to pencil outlines – but do use a straight-edge and your knowledge of multiple-point perspective to get it as accurate as possible.

Then, once you have a correct image of your object, use your straight-edge to draw a rectangle around it. Study the relationship between the object and the rectangle – does it make a stronger composition in the lower portion of a square, or the left of a horizontal rectangle? What happens compositionally when the rectangle slices right through the object, cropping it – is the composition improved by showing only part of the chair? Has the negative space, the space around your object, become as interesting as the object? If so, that’s good!

Repeat this quickly a few times, drawing the object from different angles and then bounding it with different rectangles.

******Assignment #26 - Build a Composition with Perspective from Imagination*****

Repeat exercise 25, but using an imagined subject. Start with something as simple as the object that you drew from life, such as a pirate’s chest, a throne, or a simple building.

******Assignment #27 - Build a Composition with a Character from Imagination*****

Repeat exercise 25, but with a character from your imagination. Bend and twist and pose and crop your character to make the negative space interesting. A well-designed character is great, but a well-designed character in an eye-catching composition is even better.

[carlosranna]

Hahaha, Vaejoun! Very cool and very well done!

[Seedling]

Hahaha, Vaejoun! Very cool and very well done!

Totally! (Sorry, I meant to reply sooner.)

[Chizome]

Seedling, you are the epitome of awesome. I've started up on those assignments (they're pretty challenging...), and I've gotten the first one done. Tell me what you think, please?

(By the way, ignore the one in the 'middle'. It was a dud.... and the original is a piece of candy I snogged in 7th period.)

[Seedling]

Communication – that’s the whole point of illustration. Some examples of communication in illustration: “this is a guy with a sword”, “this book contains medieval romance”, “this dragon’s wings could conceivably bear its weight in flight”, “this is George Bush”, “this is a sleek new car design”, “this is a landscape that invokes sadness”.

Communication in images includes everything from conveying the idea of a material (grass, stone, flesh, etc.) to acting, to conveying a mood through non-representational marks.

******Assignment #28 – Mood, Non-Representational*****

Pick a simple emotional state – happiness, sadness, anger, etc. Without using any representational or symbolic imagery (meaning no pictures *of* anything) try to convey this mood. Use color, shape, line, value – whatever you want.

For best effect, do at least two, so that you can compare one to the other.

There is no “right answer” to this assignment. And if you feel intimidated by the idea of just drawing marks and shapes – don’t be. There are artists who have made a career of making marks and shapes, who would be intimidated by the idea of drawing a superhero; and there are illustrators who would shy away of drawing non-representational art. But the most versatile artists are the ones who can do both. If you can do both, then you can use the marks and colors and shapes to reinforce the mood that the superhero is in.

******Assignment #29 – Mood, Representational*****

Set up a still-life, draw a landscape from observation, or draw something else from direct observation. But before you start, pick a mood to convey. Perhaps you are drawing a pear, or your shoe. Make it a sad pear, or an angry shoe. Don’t add anything from imagination to this one – no sad faces or angry rusty spikes. Use changes in color or shape or mark-making to communicate the mood. Perhaps the pear slumps a little more in your image than in reality; perhaps the colors have shifted to moody blues and grays. Perhaps the shoe is rendered in reds with jagged strokes.

If you have done assignment 28, you can try applying the same mood and technique to this representational image. For instance, if you drew “sadness” using soft swatches of shades of blue, then draw your “sad pear” using the same colors and types of marks.

******Assignment #29 – Acting, Facial Expression*****

When you include a person in your image, that person doesn’t just sit there like a piece of fruit. That person becomes an actor. You are the director, and it is up to you to tell that person what they should be communicating, and how.

Pull up a mirror. Imagine yourself in a fantastic setting where something dramatic is happening. You are being abducted by aliens! You are leading a charge across a battlefield! You have just won the lottery! You are about to see the fruit of years of malicious planning!

Got a good facial expression? Good. Have you got it lit dramatically? Light from below can add creepiness. A bright, sharp warm light, with a weak blue secondary light can mimic sunlight.

Draw what you see. Then show it to your friends and have them guess at what is going on in the image. Write down their reactions in your sketchbook for later, like a journal entry.

******Assignment #30 – Acting, Body Language*****

For this assignment, you will need a buddy. You will be drawing one-another. No, you don’t have to take off your clothes.

Start by writing down a list of dramatic scene ideas. For instance, you have just stepped in a pit full of snakes! You have defeated your nemesis in battle! You have lost your wallet! You have just failed to save the world from a terrible doom! Keep these ideas handy, because if you have never posed as a model before, it is easy to get embarrassed, or get a case of the giggles, or otherwise wonder “what the heck am I doing here?”

Now, take turns sketching each other. For the model: make big, dramatic poses! Use every part of your body. If you can only hold a pose for thirty seconds, then tell your friend to sketch quickly! For the one drawing: don’t bother drawing facial features, and don’t get hung up trying to render details of clothing or hair. Try to capture the whole body – arms, legs, torso, head, hands, and feet. Try for something that is more substantial than a stick-figure, but if all you can manage are generalized shapes, that’s s good place to start. Hands can be simplified to mittens; the direction of the face can be indicated with some quick marks for the location of eyes or jaw-line or nose.

Don’t forget the really fun poses – flying! The model can get into crazy horizontal or upside-down poses using a chair or by lying on the floor. Draw outside on the grass if there is a danger that your pose may result in falling. And use props if you want – a broom-handle makes a wonderful sword, cane, tree-branch, light saber, pool cue, baseball bat, etc.

Be sure to try drawing foreshortened poses – that means draw with a view looking down at the top of the model’s head or up at his feet, instead of drawing from just the side.

Have fun!

[Seedling]

Hey Chizome, that’s fun! I would say that the biggest obstacle here is that it’s darn hard to visually communicate the idea of a cellophane-wrapped sphere. By the time your candy has become part of a fancy weapon, there isn’t really any detail left to hint that it is a ball of candy in a wrapper. But it was a good attempt, and you made a nice weapon-thingy out of it. The imagined object has a nice shape, and I dig the feathers!

[Seedling]

So, who will be the first brave soul to try a more recent assignment? The first person to try an assignment gets a virtual cookie - or a beer if you’re old enough.

[Chizome]

I'd love to, but I have a bit of an OCD so I'm forcing myself to go through them in order... and I'm stuck on the self-portrait. Your parents are your worst critic.... I was just fine with it until dad said it looked nothing like me! Subsequently, I stayed up until midnight trying to get the lips right.... and then I ended up scrapping it anyways.

This could take a while. ._.

[Nerahla]

^^ Chizome, then don't do a self-portrait, do just a portrait and then mix it up -- that's what I did (since technically I already did it via self portrait months ago heh)

Anyway, I actually did these two for this, might as well show them.



It was really fun to mess with the first image, thanks for the cool inspiration

[Wasker]

Left one is dynamite Runecaster the right one's eye is a bit too skewed IMO but the colors are great anyhow.

[Chizome]

Alright, finished #2 and halfway through #3! Unfortunately, due to scanner problems I couldn't scan in the self-portrait before I changed it, but I took a photo which is... at home... on the camera. >_>;

Self-portrait- Four hours total (two for the original, two for the modification)

Landscape- Roughly three-four hours, off and on

EDIT: I've finished the landscape, which took another two-three hours to add on to it. It's right under the original now.

[Chizome]

Assignment #4!

Reference photos:
http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/gal...%20Leopard.jpg
http://212.227.92.102/img/13894/wm/pd748199.jpg
http://animals.timduru.org/ids/album...er-Roaring.jpg

And the drawing. It may be hard to tell, but it's an oblique view from behind... if that's the right way to say it. About half an hour to forty-five minutes, maybe. Done in Biology class. >>

[Seedling]

Awesome!!!111!! :-)

Runecaster, that’s neat – I hadn’t really thought of using the self-portrait assignment to try fun things with makeup. Oh, the possibilities! Lighting and color wise, you got a very magazine-model look: very soft white light, no shadows, no surprising colors in the shadows. Something you might want to play with in the future are different lighting situations – sunlight, harsh artificial light from an unexpected direction, colored primary light, colored secondary “fill” light (to add color to the shadows). You obviously love drawing that eye! ;-) (Aww man, eyeballs are so much fun!) Be careful with the eye-whites – there should be more shadow around the edges to show that there is a white sphere recessed under an overhang of skin. You got that pretty well in the left version, but not so much in the right.


Chizome – You have tied together the real and imagined portions of your self-portrait well. And I really like the way you have handled the tones in those landscapes – you got a good range from delicate grays to those nice crisp black bits in the trees. Aww, yawning kitty! That turned out well. Two things look a bit funky to me: one is that the jaw seems too long – cats have short faces. The other is that the lower jaw seems too thin. There should be more bone and muscle in there for biting power.

Something you might want to try is drawing more with line and less with shading. That will speed up the process for you. Pencil isn’t a great medium for thorough shading, because it takes too long. It’s more effective for line drawings, or line drawings with some shading or hatching dropped in. Or, if you want to keep up with shading, try charcoal or pastel or some other medium that can be turned on its side.

[Chizome]

Thanks! I'm glad it turned out well. ^__^ My dad was giving me a hard time with the landscape... but it's the first landscape since 7th grade, so five years. :0

You're right, my leopard is a bit funky. I noticed that after I scanned it in- so I've fixed it. I thought it looked a bit thin. >.o But here's the revision. I thickened the neck and the jaw, but I think that if I tried to make it shorter it would look a bit... odd. Do you think it's a bit better now?

Since I can't get to a scanner over the weekend, I'll be working on my commissions and doing the assignments- so I should have a good bit by the time I get back in school on Tuesday. I'm so excited! But my D-20's gone missing. (Talk about bad luck.)

[Chizome]

Alright, finished #5 and halfway through #6! *shamelessly copies/pastes comment from sketchbook*

The first is a pair of antlers I found, hanging off of the axe in the living room vase. I took some photos and then drew them from a totally different angle- which was VERY awkward. I decided to try chalk on brown construction paper, but I've only used chalk once before.

The second is a Naga, my character/warped self-portrait Dakatsu Chizome. I really like the way this one came out; I'm not entirely sure it's anatomically accurate but hey, I'm happy with it. I think I'll call it Redemption. (I've been listening to too much Gackt...)

Just so you know, Chizome's actually a REALLY old character of mine... I've been slowly developing her since I was about fifteen. o.o

And now, to draw from the HAT!!! 8D

[Chizome]

Ta-da!! I'm going to do some other iterations tonight, and maybe another sketch to mess with. Followed by cubes. the cubes!

[Wasker]

Thanks for the crits, Seedling.

Here's assignment_5, I didnt have a d20 but thanks to 20 small paperclips I got number 7, add horns and pointy stuff, it probably took me about 40min-1h.
As a modeler, Seedling, would you have been able to make a 3d object out of it? (Since there's no view from the back, I guess you couldn't.) And if no, what changes would it require?

Some other questions of curiousity, Seedling. You're the only one in the industry that want to respond to these questions I realise you are a modeler/enviromental artist but I guess you see what the other guys do and what you prefer to model.

- How 'good' do you have to be a concept artist? I realise this is a silly and often asked question to which the answer will probably be 'as good as possible'.

- What defines a good character concept? Angles? Should it have accessory? Any differences between doing a fictional animal concept vs a fictional humanoid?

- What defines a good enviroment concept? What should it tell the guys that convert it to 3d graphics?

- I have heard many artists are proficent with both 3d and 2d on the company. Aren't there any artists that are just 2d and go for characters and enviros only?

edit1: forgot this one - How long is appropriate to spend on a character/enviroment concept (for example, "I want you to do a jungle monster with a protective hide of some sort" or another example for enviros "I need a impressive gothic interior with several floors visible and a large statue in the middle")? I mean ofcourse till it looks good and have achieved a good level of realism (or whatever the company aims for) but is it ok to spend a week or do most companies expect you to pump out several finished concept each day?

I'd be glad if you were intrested in sharing your industry experiences

[Seedling]

Chizome, you’ve been busy!

Believe it or not, I think the kitty’s jaw would be even shorter from this perspective. Cats have very stumpy heads. Don’t worry about fussing with it – the graphite is ground on too hard to make revisions terribly possible. Your Naga – is this the Art Direction Game? :-) I take it you rolled “add spikes”? I’m really curious about her wings/wing-like structures. She looks like a good complex subject to try drawing from multiple angles, and she’s also a good starting point for research. You could go look at snake, bat, human, horned mammal, and insect anatomy to get a better idea of how to make her look natural. (It’s useful to have a muse that inspires you to do research! Mine was dragons.)


Hi Wasker! Yeah, as a modeler, I could make a model from this drawing. The basic form is there, and there are lots of vague details that I would be happy filling in myself. However, an art director might have different thoughts – and this sort of work would always have to go through an art director before coming to me. The art director would be likely to have very specific requirements that she would want to see visualized in a concept drawing before the work was given to me, especially if this is a player-character or important monster in a game. Such as, what does the back look like? What do the articulations on the joints look like (i.e. how does this thing bend)? What materials is this guy’s suit made of, and what sorts of details are on it (rivets, rust, embossed patterns)?

I’ll answer the rest of your questions over in the games industry thread. . . good questions, by the way!

[Carnifex]

oh wow,how could i miss this thread? outstanding stuff,i'ma have to try the assignments as soon as possible.

[Chizome]

And another iteration! XD

My Naga baby. I love her so much. I'm planning on doing other perspectives and studies on her wings anyways. The horns, even though they were just an iteration from the Art Direction Game, are seriously tempting to add to her actual design. (Wheee! Dragons! Those were my first love.)

The result of watching a Tutankhamun special and looking at a cat skeleton. Oh joy! Demonic thingy. And an iteration on it with Gothic flying buttresses!

[DoubleXdragoN]

Ok, so far as I read the assignments - they look very great and very playful!

I recently started to sketch intensively, going out and observing poeple from the outside of the cafe balcony or secretly sketching those who sit nearby.

I am sure to start them assignments ASAP and post my weird results. XD

[Seedling]

Carnifex – thanks! :-)

Chizome – cool, desiccated cat! ;-) That’s a good way to study some animal anatomy. Did you start from memory or from a photograph? And which instructions did you roll?

doubleXdragoN – Sweet, thanks! I look forward to seeing your results!

[Chizome]

I got a photograph from the reference section of CA. It wasn't very big though, so I had to improvise. :/ But I rolled "Add an element of Gothic architecture to it"- and unfortunately, the only good example in my book was of flying buttresses. So I added flying buttress designs to it. XD And funky little spike things that I can't remember the name of. >_>

[Chizome]

Alright, finished my cuuuubes! XD I like the hole-y one most. I don't really like the one in the back, though. It's oozing all over the place and it's got boils and pockmarks and giant things growing out of it. Like a zombie.

[Seedling]

Oh, *squeee!* Cookies and beer for you, Chizome, for being the first to take on the cube! Just a couple of quick observations before I scurry off to do my own assignment. It looks like the shadows of the far and left cubes are being cast not precisely from the sun. You can double-check by seeing where the lines converge at the horizon. They should be converging directly under the sun. The other thing I see is that within the shadowed side of the cubes, such as the nearest face of the near cube, the sun seems to be casting shadows even within the shadow. What should be going on is this: if the cubes are the same color as the ground, then all shadows on the cubes should be just about the same value as the shadows on the ground.

But despite the imperfections, good work!