Introduction to concept art- How to start?
As the entertainment industry becoming more popular and competitive, concept art- an important stage in game/film production pipeline- also requires artists with more high-quality arts within a tight deadline.
Before we move to the basic knowledge of concept art, let’s go through the definition of it. Concept art brings the inspiration, guideline and the general mood to the game/film production team. Therefore, concept arts should be easy to be read and to convey visually the closest ideas of characters, environments,.. to the final products.
Therefore, as concept artists, we have an open world of ideas and inspiration to create what we love. However, there’re tons of softwares for us to start working with, but what should we choose?
If you are already armed with a good art skillset, maybe you’re familiar with traditional art with pencil on paper, then you can easily get used with a painting software like Photoshop or Paint tools SAI and start building your portfolio with any idea you have in your mind, you might also want to try some 3D modeling as a mixture to be more productive :)
On the other hand, if you have less to almost no experience in art then, trust me, you should spend more time for fundamentals in art instead of learning software skills. You may not want to waste your time creating masterpieces with you undeveloped art skills, as it may become a really bad habit for your work flow. Focus on more specific short exercises, grasp the basics and softwares are just the tools for you to apply your skills!
Art is all about the basics, old masters spent their whole life with all fundamentals in art :perspective, anatomy, forms,.. . These knowledge will save you a lot of time when you design, as it has become your instinct. You cannot create a new design of a machine without knowing the logical function of it, that’s the difference between a good and a bad concept artist.
Knowing that studying the subject is really important, then what should you choose to study first? This is a really interesting question, there’re unlimited subjects out there for us to study, but focusing on a single theme is narrowed enough to start with. Along the way , you can define your style, art theme and especially art fundamentals, that’s killing 2 birds with one stone. Theme choice depends on what you want to create as a concept artist, you want to work for realistic games or cartoony films, that’s what can be decided by you only.
For example, I want to work with Fantasy medieval games so I spend time studying human anatomy to design characters, studying medieval-period clothes for a convincing design. Or to create an environment scene for this theme, I’ll focus more on medieval stone architecture, as well as landscape design.
After choosing your theme, then how do you study? The answer is really simple you just have to practice drawing your subjects as much as possible, try to set a limit time on each piece, and keep asking what is working and what’s not. A really useful exercise is to study from works that you admire of, try to look for the methods that artist created it, keep asking why he did this, not that; you can also try to simplify that art piece with simple shapes and values cause a good painting can be just a pleasant arrangement of shapes and values/colors. There are a lot of other ways that you can practice with such as studying from life, or looking for online tutorials,.. but you are the only one who know how to pick what’s good for your art piece, that’s what create the difference in style for all artists.
I hope this article can help you. Although I’m still a student pursuing art career, these are the knowledge I extracted from my practicing and experiences. Wish you all the best with your art career !