Concept Art Report

Video games, just like any other media format need to start from somewhere. In video game, artist will be given a game title or a theme and they will start to developing ideas for the theme they been given. Artist will need to express what's going inside their heads, the ideas and to do that there is nothing better than concept art. Concept art is probably the most valuable and the most important aspect for any video games. Concept art has been around in video games ever since the establishment of the industry. In video games everything is sketched out with concept art before putting it into the game, for example weapons, characters, landscapes and vehicles. All these aspect will be sketched out with concept art in many different ideas and then the head of the concept art department of a game company will choose the best design idea and take it into future production. Artist make use of concept art in many areas, environment, character design, architecture, general object production, these elements, large or small, has an impact on the final product. The artwork that is produced by the artists, the idea always begins on paper, then the artists will scan the concept art in to computer software do further improvements, like colouring and shading using software like Photoshop.

Vehicle concept art design in the movie 'Tron Legacy'

Map concept art design from League of Legends

Not only in game development that uses concept art. There are other media also uses concept art. For example Films, films like Avatar, the concept art was used to created creatures in the film also the environment. The concept artist that did the bugs, characters and animals design is Scott Patton, a character and creatures designer. The way Scott design the characters in the movie is that he looked into different animals and basically turn them into human looking creature. With the creatures and bugs that are in the movie, he also did the same, but this time is combining animals together, like the eye of the creature he designed, he took the idea from birds and the head from snake etc. He also uses Z-Brush or similar software to help himself out when he gets stuck while producing ideas. Using these software to build up clay 3D models to help himself.

Avatar design in Z-Brush

Creature from the film Avatar

With all concept art is complete, you can almost see the whole game, how will the game be like. There are lots of different concept artists out there for different media, concept art for games, movies and TV shows. This inevitably means that there are lots of different concept artist with different styles and areas that these artist work in, to show this I will compare two different artists.

The first concept artist is really like is Michael Maurino, a senior concept artist for Riot Game. Michael's job is to design champions with concept art. By the looking of his work, he's style is mainly like anime, but some of his work looks very realistic too. Belows are some examples of Michael's concept art work that he did for Riot Game. Not all of the concept art made it to the end, which is develop the idea into the game. Some of the concept he very like, but it's not what the client wanted and sometime he did force to change the idea of the character he designed. He's job is basically designing characters on paper, if the client likes the idea then will be taking over to another concept artist which will do further improvements, like colouring. With the finish concept art the digital artist will show the work to the original designer which is Michael, if he likes the outcome then it will be release into the game, if not it will need to rework on it, until he gets the outcome he likes.

Michael Maurino's champion Quinn concept art
 (didn't make it into the game)

League of Legends champion Diana concept art

Diana Final Concept art

Quinn reworked concept art

The second artist is Lorin Wood, a concept artist who worked on both the game Borderland and Borderlands 2. The style compare to Michael Maurino is very different. First Lorin doesn't design character like Michael do. What Lorin mainly design is vehicle. The style of the vehicle are all very high quality and realistic unlike Michael which have like anime style of drawing characters. Lorin likes to product idea that they all look like futuristic, very advance. Compare to Michael, Michael character base on more fantasy, armor all that looks like in middle age, like in Lord of the Ring. Here are some vehicle and robot concept art work that Lorin did for Borderland.

Robot concept art design

Helicopter concept art design

Spaceship concept art design
 (I think is a spaceship, never play the game before)