Concept art process

Hey guys,

today I wanted to share one of the many processes there are for doing concept art. I didn't invent it, I picked it up during the last years teaching me this stuff. I like it, because it is really simple and cost efficient. To make this whole post a bit more relevant I use an example from today's work for Base Conflict, the game I am working on with 3 more guys.

Currently I am concepting the green faction, which is a nature-race (meaning they are all some tree/plant-creatures).

The briefing for the concept said: it is a tower, it has Armor/Damage-Aura, it throws rocks

In my opinion the hardest part is that blank feeling inside your head, when you have to design something new. For me it helps to do thumbnails. What I mean are really small scribbles. It takes discipline to stay small, so I shoot for a size that is literally as big as my thumbnail. I do a lot of those and just let my mind and eye look for interesting shapes. In this case I did only a small amount, but I kinda liked what I had.

This could look something like this:

After that I pick two or three thumbnails and do silhouettes in photoshop. The main goal is to balance shapes and get some interesting rythms in the concept. Surface detail is of no interest, I try to repeat shapes to create unity and than introduce contrasting shapes to create interest. I like the 3rd one in the top row so I took it.

It had some magic going on, which was shown by the floating orb, it could throw a stone with its grabby-hand and shoulder pads are always good to say "royal" "high rank" so I guess this helps with the "aura".

Now is where it gets personal. Personal as in, personal technique. Over the time every artist develops their own way of working I supposed. So my approach here way to encrease the size of the silhouette, add a gradient to it to get some light in there, define the simple shapes with a soft brush and then just sculpt the inner forms into the silhouette. As I said before this is simple, but it isn't easy. In a couple of years I will loke back an decide differently on the lighting choices I did today, but for now, this is what I came up with.

After that I decided on a color sheme, added the colors with a multiplay layer, put a copy of the greyscale above the multiply layer and set it on overlay. I adjusted opacity until I felt it was a good start and then just painted. In the end I did another version where I used a photo-overlay on which I painted.

I didn't change the silhoutte I established much during the whole process. So yeah, I hope this helps a bit, feel free to ask questions and see you soon.