My Specialist Study: Concept Art?:

What is ‘Concept Art’?:

Concept art is a series of sketches (simple, detailed and coloured with or without basic shading.)

Proposal:

With the proposal for my specialist study project, I wanted a chance to explore concept art in a fun and exciting way by having the opportunity to design characters and weapons. When I did my concept art proposal presentation, However, I didn’t know exactly what I had planned.

Pre-Production:

For Pre-production, the main ideas that I wanted to block out were what animals did I want to design, How many did I want to design and finally what roles/jobs they would have. Unfortunately, I did have plans to give the characters clothing but I never got round to it since a few of the designs took longer than expected then I decided to try and make a different weapon design for each animal.

Production:

With the actual process of sketching, colouring and shading the character’s designs, it was pretty simple and straightforward. The main difficulties that I had faced were to keep coming up with more and more unique ideas.

Concept Art Essay:

With my specialist study, I decided to choose concept art. The main reason why I chose to study concept art in more depth was that I have a passion for the process that concept artists go through and I want to potentially have a job in the concept art or game art field. With this specialist study, I have been able to learn more about the process of what goes into designing characters and other items such as potential weapon designs. This wasn’t all I learned, I learned how to make a group of character designs have their own differences but for them to also work together and be consistent in the art style and overall ideas for each character.

The game that inspired me to create concept art would be Super Mario Odyssey.

Kenta Motokura (2017) Super Mario Odyssey. [Cartridge] Nintendo Switch. Nintendo.

Process of creating characters before creating characters:

With the process of creating a character in a game, there isn’t just one simple sketch that defines the character. First, the concept art team will discuss ideas for the character based on the brief or information they have been given. This information is usually given to them by the art director or the director of the game’s production. With the process of designing the actual character they have a series of mock-up sketches, usually, they will all be drastically different. This technique of different ideas is used to help the team understand the team’s vision as they will emphasize on a certain option chosen. For example, I wanted to give one of my characters, a calico cat named Fifi an accessory on her head but I didn’t know exactly what would work. The process that I chose was to draw different options for accessories and to have others decide on which they liked the most. This meant that I could create a further set of designs for the option chosen rather than doing multiple options for a design that never made it past the first round of concepts.

What’s the difference between characters and assets?:

However, when it comes to asset designs, The process is very similar. An example would be to create potions for an upcoming RPG game. The whole process of creating assets is to make sure that there is clear visual communication from the asset to the player to let them know the differences between different types of items. For example, a strength potion might be purple while a health potion is red. You wouldn’t have a black health potion next to another type of potion of the same colour. It just makes the player confused and their enjoyment of the game won’t be as substantial.

The inspiration behind this process was influenced by Xabio Arts from Youtube.

Concept Art Class Ep 1: Potions, 2019. [Youtube] Xabio Arts. December 10 2019. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrv52iY50RM [Accessed February 13th 2020].

What did I set out to do?:

What I had set out to do in this project was to be able to create character designs for potential use and further development for any future projects. This was also an opportunity to improve my skills within traditional and digital art for creating characters and assets for video games. These skills include shading, skeletal meshes, sketching more effectively and being able to show improvements but to also make the designs fit together.

Planning before putting the pencil to the paper:

With the actual process, I went through before even designing the characters was to first decide exactly what I was going to make. With deciding what I wanted before putting pen to paper was a better idea in the long run because it kept me having a clear vision and helped me understand and decide on what animals I wanted to decide to create designs for. The reason why I chose animals that wouldn’t usually go together was to not only make the choice more interesting but to also bring on new challenges relating to the animals chosen. For example, one of the animals that I chose was a Canadian Lynx. The reasons why I chose this animal was because of a personal liking towards the small big cat but also because I had also chosen a Lion, meaning I was able to make the Lynx look more innocent and the lion more fierce and dominant, To have the opportunity to play on the idea of the lion being considered ‘the king of the animal kingdom’. However, The lion was never given the concept of being a king. The reasons why I did this was to stay away from common stereotypes of what a lion should and shouldn’t be but to also give myself a further challenge of what I think a lion should be in this world that I have created.

Why is an art style important?: Characters:

For the actual art style, I decided to go for a very chibi style with some added plush toy elements. The reason why I wanted to go for this style was to make it unique but also interesting for others to look at. The main advice that a concept artist will give is to develop your own art style to make all your work truly unique and your own. Another reason why I chose this art style was that I wanted to have the opportunity to draw different things in my style. For example, If you were to compare my style to what a wolf actually looks like in real life you would be able to say that it looks like a wolf, but its an original design for the animal.

Why is an art style important?: Weapons:

For the art style of the weapons, on the other hand, I wanted to use the same style but have more of a cute but deadly tone to the designs. This was because most of the animals that I had chosen were predators, but I hadn’t given them any fangs or claws to make them look more like a predator. Instead, I gave each animal a weapon or two. An example of this is that I gave the fox a small sword, to emphasize on them being a predator but also a trained fighter. The actual weapon’s theme was to have it relate to the cute but deadly theme was to make the weapons sweet/candy themed.

What have I learned from this project?:

The best way to explain what I have learned from this project is to put it into 3 categories. Skills, Knowledge and What to take into future projects. This is a general personal overview of what I think I have learned and what skills I have gained to then be able to take into the next upcoming project and into anything, I do in the future that involves concept art or games art. I have also learned that to make a character original it doesn’t always have to be completely original, I could have made my lion character a king and still put my own spin onto the idea. However, I want to keep my ideas mostly original and unique to show my characters can fit well together in different situations and groups, even if at first glance they might not go together at all.

Skills:

The valuable skills that I have learned were to be able to show off the developed art style I have been able to create. This is not all however as I have also gained knowledge and practical skills on how to shade and highlight my drawings. Another skill that I have also learned was that I know how to draw more effectively to give my designs more mass and make it look better overall. With the software (Sketchbook) that I used to sketch, colour and shade my artwork pieces I learned how to do so with the software.

Knowledge:

With the knowledge that I have gained throughout this project, I know how to effectively use the program Sketchbook to shade my drawings but I also know how to effectively design characters with concepts and to use concepts before concept art. I also learned that with creating items or assets for a game, you need to have differences to make it easy for the player to be able to tell what item is what. However, if you have different stages of an item they need to have a similar design but small differences to be able to effectively tell them apart.

What to take into future projects:

With the skills and knowledge that I have learned from this project I know that I can take both of these into the future projects that I come across because having developed skills in games art, character design and concept art as a whole means that I have a much wider skill set to aid me in future employment. These skills have given me a starting place to be able to continue to learn more skills and to further improve along the way.