Concept Art

          I have always wanted to improve my drawing abilities ever since I was a kid. I usually drew straight objects like swords. They were just the easiest thing for me to create. Sometimes I would even draw Pokemon. Anytime there was a drawing class offering in school, I would sign up for it. Despite my desire to be a good artist, I see fantastic images done by other people and I feel inept. How did they make something that grand!? It seemed to me that something like concept art would be out of the question if I have to be that skilled to make anything. Here’s the thing though: concept art isn’t about illustration… it’s about idea generation and making something unreal become reality.

          If you view the average concept artist’s portfolio, they have maybe 10-20 images of things they have created. They all look amazing, but not all of them are imaginative. They showcase excellent drawing and digital painting skills, but very few actually take a concept farther than a generic creature or some spiky armor or an undead ghoul that lacks life. I’m hardly convinced that they are real. So what makes the ones that stand out so good? I believe it is because concept art isn’t necessarily about creating an illustration, but rather being able to make concepts from several gathered ideas.

          After hearing a concept artist speak about his profession, one of the things he mentioned was that he did well over one hundred thumbnails for any idea. That seems absurdly high, but when you need to come up with an imaginative idea, creating tons of iterations in a short amount of time is essential to being a good concept artist.

          When I first learned concept art, I had to make at least ten thumbnails for a character. It started to get higher as the ideas became more complicated. Twenty thumbs, thirty thumbs, forty thumbs… it seemed daunting, but a thumbnail is simply a vague idea of what you want. Say you need to design a pet that incorporates one of the four elements of Alchemy. You decide to go with the element of Earth. That narrows it down, but what next? You pick out what kind of pet. Is it a pet dog? Cat? Bird? Let’s say it’s a pet bird. Now you get your references for various types of birds since you have narrowed down the concept to something more manageable. You start thumbnailing things like shape of the body, plumage, eye shape, beak shape, and so on. Thinking of those little details helps you solidify your idea into something you like.

          Now that you’ve gone through many thumbnails of each part of this concept, you start making a few rough sketches. These are just to test out linework and don’t need any shading or detail. Roughs are kind of like more elaborate thumbnails in which they combine all those little vague ideas into a single entity. When you have your roughs, you convert them into silhouettes to see how they read. This narrows it down to one with a likeable, distinct shape and now you’ve got your concept. You lay in those colors and maybe some shading. You don’t have to make it incredibly detailed just yet as you will be getting feedback from your peers. Once you show it to them, they might make some suggestions such as changing proportions or trying a different color scheme. You might want to try a range of color schemes where you keep the same pose, but only change the colors. There’s also some room for implementing any new thumbnails into the concept, but don’t stray too far from the guidelines. It still has to be a pet that corresponds to one of the four elements of Alchemy. If you feel that Earth doesn’t quite work with your design, you can reimagine it as Wind. It might look very different than before.

          Finally the concept is all figured out. You went with an Air design and it looks so much better now. If the concept gets approved, all that’s left is to illustrate it with all the nice details that make it an astounding piece to display in your portfolio. That’s how the concept artist works: they are given a concept idea with limitations to that concept, they thumbnail ideas and make several iterations, they receive feedback and improve based on that, and they make it presentable to the world. It took numerous ideas and drawings, but it was all necessary to get that one perfect piece.

          I know it can be daunting seeing that it requires lots of drawings and when compared to professionals you might see your work as inferior, but with practice you can improve your abilities. Don’t focus so much on what you can’t do yet; focus more on what you can do now and you will see a marked significance in skill level change in the future.