Here are 3 simple guides that will help you on your journey to become a concept artist.

The Signs

Perhaps one of the most overlooked thing is not knowing what you really want. If you are just at your first step, here are some signs that will help to tell whether you have the natural mindset to become a concept artist.

1. You are curious about the things around you, science, architecture, history, fashion, etc. Although it would be nice to be curious of every possible topics, two or three would be sufficient sign for a start.
2. You have the tendency to create and invent new things, whether it’s a theory, mechanism or story. When you let you your imagination go wild, you feel good, that’s a good healthy sign.
3. You are a visual person. You don’t really like to write, you can visualize things better than memorizing text words by words. You enjoy looking at pictures, scenery and paintings that amaze you.
4. You are relying much on intuition to judge certain things rather than logic. But if you have experienced betraying your own intuition for some logical explanation, and found out that you are right if you were to only trust your own intuition. That’s a big plus for any artist as well.

The Skills

You can practically start with little skills, but it is essential to know what general skills you’ll be needing to become a good concept artist. You may want visit the tutorials page, in which links have already been neatly categorized from beginners to advanced for you convenience.

Alternatively, I recommend you to read the Hints and Hacks For Doing Conceptual Art in the Video Game Industry by Paul Richards, found in the tutorials page.

The list below are the typical subjects we learn and study, the orders are nothing but if you start from the top to bottom or somewhere along that line, it should ease up your learning curve in my opinion.

• Anatomy
• Perspective
• Life/Still-Life Drawing
• Drawing & Painting w/ Reference
• Color Theory
• Light Theory
• Drawing & Painting from Imagination

The Options

Going either these two ways is fine, they both have their pros and cons. It’s important to know what choices you may have to attain whatever goals you want. I recommend you to check out the introduction part of the beginner section in the tutorials page for more opinions about these options.

1. School
   PROS: Being in school will put you in the same group of people, I believe in synergy happening in like minded place. I don’t think it’s competition, but it can push you to be better. At the same time, you will have access to their utility. My school has tons of book collection, I visit the library often to make use of the money I paid for the school. Some lecturers can guide you when you are in trouble, the best part is, you can try to sneak in to some classes off your course, and learn what they learn.

   CONS: You could possible be stuck in a competitive mindset, which is bad if you compare your standard only within your school. You need to aim for the industry standard to make it through. You’ll also be tempted to get good result in school, but often the portfolio you have from school isn’t enough to get you off the ground in the industry, they don’t want just student level. Cause when you start fighting for the marks, you know that you don’t have time to do your own studies.

2. Self-taught
   PROS: Able to teach yourself is about your learning skill. If you have great learning ability, you can go further than anyone that needs to be led. You will know how to identify your problems and find solutions. Because you are on your own, and without influence from any formal art education, your mind set can easily fit to the real industry standard. You’ll learn to get and receive feedback from real pros, and possibly gain more online exposure for the amount of time your spend in any community like conceptart.org or cghub.

   CONS: You will always have this doubt whether you are on the right path or not especially for beginners. At times you feel that you just want to give up or losing motivation, but that’s what we are here for.

Remember, there is no book that can inspire or motivate everyone, it’s the person who reads it. It all depends on you, and what you choose to define yourself. That’s as much advice as I can give to make up your mind. So go forth and choose to be great!

Concept Art usually represents the art in the development process of games or movies, in which will ultimately define the final look before going for final production. Therefore, concept art takes place in what the industry is calling, pre-production phase. This phase, is also the initial investment for the production, is to ensure the direction and plan is solidify before entering the next phase of investment. In any case the pre-production is deemed not projecting to where the producer or director is going, the project may be cancelled or re-evaluate.

To clear some misconception about concept art, a good piece of concept art doesn’t necessarily need to be a nice illustration. Concept art consists of two major elements, the ‘concept’ in which the idea or back-story of specific subject that might relates to the world of the story. And the ‘art’, which depicts the ‘concept’ with aesthetic design that will appeal to the production’s target audience, however still maintaining and supporting its underlying ‘concept’. Therefore, good concept art is when both ‘concept’ and ‘art’ can provide the highest entertainment value to the final production.

Skill Set in Concept Art:

These required skill set in general helps to complete a task in concept art, but the strength of each skill may vary from one artist to another and it’s what uniquely define each concept artist.

• Concept Idea
  Communicating concept can be done literally, verbally or visually. Sometimes a rough concept will be given, and concept artists are responsible to refine and developed the concept further. This often requires an in depth understanding of the specific subject, in order to achieve believable concept to the audience. Concept artists normally should have good general knowledge of everything especially science and history, therefore artists who have great curiosity about our world can surely create good concept .e.g. A car that only levitates on water by using anti H2O (water) molecules.

           
  _{Concept art by Daniel Dociu} 

• Design
  Designs come from the artists’ visual vocabulary, and it needs to match the concept perfectly. Because lines, shapes, colors and other elements of design are able to give a certain feel and mood to the audience, concept artists need to bring out the right mood with the right elements of design, and at the same time still conveys its underlying concept. Sometimes the purpose of design can be pure aesthetic, however this kind of design usually can lack of its functionality and believability, hence may often look out of place. e.g. The design of a special radio that was invented by a scientist whom is heavily influenced by art deco in the 1920′s will have an art deco feel to it rather than the look of our modern radio.
  

           
  _{Concept art by Mathias Verhasselt}

• Sketching
  The skill is used to visualize certain concept quickly especially in the earlier stages and where the concept is in exploration phase, concept needs to be solidified as quickly as possible before going for more refine designs to prevent the development of the project from going backwards. Which can usually be solved by increasing the quantity of concept exploration.  Concept artists could utilize any type of medium like pencil or pen drawing, marker sketches, digital speedpainting or mixed media so long as the concept can be explored and communicated in the most effective manner with the shortest or specific time frame. e.g. Enemy spaceship that comes from another galaxy could be refined to enemy massive battle fleet that comes from another galaxy with insectoid creature being the dominating species of its world.
  

           
  _{Concept art by Mikko Kinnunen}

• Presentation
  Artist do not usually present their art like corporate people, since painting by itself should speak for itself. Also when the design can work without much explanation, it will add a lot of value to the narrative part of the production. Therefore, concept artists need to rely on their drawing and painting skills which includes the understanding of form, light, personality and other nuances, to bring the art where it can be presented, intrigue and convince the art director. Depending on the time given to the concept artists, the level of presentation varies but often more time was given for the finals as the art can be used for marketing and prints purposes. e.g. Rendering the final character, dark warlord, designed for a dark genre game in colorful and flat toon tone won’t help the directors to fit it in their mind, even if the design and concept is good. In the end, some else will be assigned to continue the development of that concept as the final.

           
  _{Concept art by John Wallin Liberto}

Subsets of Concept Art:
As general, concept art consists of these subsets. Each can be a specialization because the knowledge required of each subset is too broad and can be very different from one another. Large studios generally tend to have concept artists specializing in each of these subsets, so the artists may focus and have the time to do their niche researches in order to strengthen and provide unique concept art to their targeted audience.

• Character/Creature Design
  Anatomy, fashion, culture history, personality, the animal kingdoms, habits, lifestyle… All comes in handy for a character and creature designer.

           
  _{Concept art by Cole Eastburn}
  

• Environment Design
  Artist who does the environment concept art have slightly different knowledge than the others subsets, for example culture history, weather effects, environment condition and its effect, general science, advanced understanding of light…

           
  _{Concept art by James Paick}

• Key Art
  Illustration that conveys a specific shot or frame of the production for its lighting, mood, colors and angle. Therefore the artist has to have good illustration skills and sometimes speed, understanding of cinematography, photography, light setup, stagging and composition…

           
  _{Concept art by Maciej Kuciara}

• Props/Vehicle Design
  Sometimes  complex prop and vehicle may have transformation or conversion. In order to explain the mechanical movement frame by frame for the animators to understand how it moves, the artist has to be able to visualize real mechanical function which requires some knowledge about the industrial parts. And whether the object is animate or inanimate, designing an inorganic object requires much different aesthetic sense, the artist has to study and draw substantial amount of inorganic stuffs to grasp the beauty of inorganic shapes. Industrial design in short is a close subject to this subset.

           
  _{Concept art by Feng Zhu}
  

I’d like to write the history of concept art soon. If you find this article is useful, you can subscribe to receive the updates.

There are a lot of websites for artist. I’d like to take two out of the most popular one. For artists who have both tumblr and deviantart account, you probably don’t need me to tell you the difference about the feature, there really are differences. But if you are looking for marketing, getting exposure and spreading your art, there’s a whole lot to them than just uploading your art. In short, this article is about which site can give you more exposure, so than you can build contacts and network in long term goal.

Here’s a graph from alexa. Tumblr vs DeviantArt:

By just looking at the graph, you can see that tumblr is growing more and more and deviantart is… It’s sad to see this, as I first started out with deviantart, I naturally hope that it will have substantial growth for artists. But it ISN’T HAPPENING guys!

The good thing about DeviantArt is that it offers artists who do art to share and discuss about their art, for this very reason, the site got a good startup and people just wanna join the community. However things get more complicated as they try to add more features which confuse new user about the purpose of being in deviantart. First, it’s not comfortable to have an account as an art appreciator, or one who does not produce art, since you have a gallery, and empty gallery could mean you are being viewed as someone unimportant. Secondly, the site doesn’t have a good featuring system. Honestly speaking groups helps a bit, but it’s far from their integrated system, I still see many good arts are being buried by the massive art. The daily deviation system is just limited, and I’m quite disappointed to look at them sometimes, even some art featured by some member is better than what I can find in the daily deviation. Bottom line is, it’s hard to get noticed in deviantart.

Now Tumblr on the other hand, is not an art site to begin with. But I’ve noticed there is a paradigm shift within that site, more and more artist have gone to tumblr because it can be a very good micro blogging platform for artist, and easier to gain more exposure. Before I go on to that, let’s take a look at the top 10 tags in tumblr as today’s date. And if you just look at it everyday, you will notice that about 80% of the popular tags are related to art. I think you get the picture.

And if you are someone who only appreciate art, do you want to join deviantart or tumblr, which one would be more comfortable for you? And if you looking for some exposure, tumblr can provide you more exposure to larger demographic, not just artists. If people like you work, they will reblog or like it, and it will spread like wildfire. Your work in deviantart however, will only get noticed if you have substantial watchers, and appears in someone’s fav. In tumblr, you don’t have daily features, but result can be more transparent and less biased, that’s what I like about it!

If you are convinced by the statistics data here, I strongly urge you to start an account in tumblr. You can still keep you deviantart account, but know that it’s capping your potential in getting more exposure.

I’ve just started at tumblr too, check me out at randize.tumblr.com Shoot me if you have any question in tumblr or deviantart or any comments, if you have created new account do tell me so I can follow you.

These are the best anatomy books that works for me in different ways and I’d definitely recommend for any artist or beginners. I hope it can help you narrowing down your choice for your first book, even though I think you should have all for the different advantages you can gain from each book.

1. Atlas of Human Anatomy by Stephen Roger Peck

   Stephen loves to compare the details of each structure, like how long is the humerus versus radius, how big is the pelvis versus skull. Which helps us artists a lot in remembering these fine but important details. There really isn’t much reference in poses or different angle of specific structures, but the text where it explain how all these structures works, and how certain structures accentuate the final look, poingting out the landmarks etc, are invaluable information that other books don’t offer. These underlying principles could help you remember and understand so much more. And if you are a fan of golden ratio, in this book, you’ll get to know more about how it relates so much to our anatomy.

   _{Click the image below to purchase it.}
   

2. Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth

   If you love the original Spawn comics by Todd McFarlane, then you’ll definitely gonna love this book, he was a direct apprentice of Burne Hogarth. However this might not be your kinda book if you are looking for direct reference to copy for actual use. The primarily usage of this book is to embed those muscles structures into your head, because all that exaggerated forms and colorful muscles helps you to remember and memorize the muscles easily than any other book. After studying this book, I could literally see through human muscles, no kidding. But be aware that your anatomy style will look similar to Hogarth’s after studying it for awhile, not a bad thing actually if you like the style. The style will gradually shift to your own, but the knowledge remains in you.

   _{Click the image below to purchase it.}
   

3. The Best of Bridgman

   It includes Bridgman’s Life Drawing, The book of a Hundred Hands and Heads, Features and Faces. All three for the price of one, is that worth it or what? Now what’s special about Bridgman is that he emphasizes the anatomy structures in basic forms. When we learn to grasp complex forms (muscles for example) in basic forms, it’s easy to manipulate that forms in different angle and reproduce it from imagination. This basic principles of seeing things in simplifying manners also allows you to understand how light affects the shading on the forms. Hence helps you a lot, in shading and painting.

   _{Click the image below to purchase it.}
   

If you did purchase any of these books or you already have it, remember that studying is not copying, one must analyze the things that are being studied and make use of whatever that was gain. It doesn’t help you at all if you have copied it for 10 or 100 times but still don’t know what you are going to do with it.

[Level: Beginner]

Your light source is one of the major things needed to be considered before laying down your brush on your canvas. Without virtually setting up the light source, it’s easy to make major mistakes in rendering believable and readable form. Here are 3 sources of light you can choose immediately for your painting subject.

1. Window Light

   Light entering from ‘window’ often is soft and cool, as contrast, has warm shadows. It’s one of the easy light setup because of its simplifying effect and consistency.

   
   by Carl Bork

2. Candlelight and firelight

   The temperature coming out from candle, fire and such lights are all yellow-orange in color. Because they are not like sun light, the light is generally weak and cannot travel far, which tends to have only small area of light and strong shadow (if there’s no secondary light around), but it creates an instant focus to your subject. Very easy to use, and can be dramatic as well.

   
   by David Zolan
   

3. Hidden Light Sources

   This isn’t back light or kick light, but sources of light that comes from outside your canvas. A lot of a time, we can forget things that we can’t see outside of our canvas, keeping this in mind, we can still put in some light that’s not in, but “in-effect”. (e.g. The old Sci-fi movies tends to use a lot of this light setup) The important thing is not to limit the potential of your painting, which can be greater if we just explore beyond the norm sometimes.

   
   You can see at the bottom right, light source is warm, where the whole should have been cool. Nice light-warm contrast isn’t it?

[Level: Beginner]

Of course we can choose to play games, watch youtube or facebook to ‘kill’ some time, but if you really want to ‘save’ some time, why not improve your drawing skills!

Here are the 3 things that you can quickly do.

1. Gesture Drawing

   Pixelovely’s Figure and Animal Drawing Training Tool
   You need a both good instinct and memory to be able to draw quick gesture drawing. At the same time drawing quickly allows you to draw more, this means you’ll get to be exposed to a lot of images that will automatically become your visual vocabulary as you draw, especially when your artistic instinct is well attuned to your need, you brain will easily absorb them. Very useful if you want to improve you drawing from imagination. The link above allows you quickly draw something, you don’t get to choose which to draw, but it’s better because it’ll force you to just draw.

2. Life Drawing

   Whether it’s life or still, just draw anything you can see. You can draw your own hands, own feet, people, objects…  The advantage in drawing life is that you get to see your subject in different dimension, studies have prove that your memory retention improves when you observe from life than on paper or 2 dimensional view. Only rule is not to be picky and just draw. The more you think, the less time you have, the less likely you’ll want to draw. Do a random blindfold pick, and draw it! The principle above still applies too, except that you won’t necessarily be in front of  computer, and that doesn’t stop you from drawing.

3. Chaos Drawing

   If you are feeling like designing something, try scribbling some shapes or line and make something out of it. Just like guessing the shapes of the clouds in the sky, you can do the same with your scribbles or doodle. Don’t try to make out what you have in mind, instead make something that you see, there’s a difference there. This exercise can be really hard for some people, most probably because the lack visual vocabulary to guess. Let me explain that further, you can’t see an emu if you haven’t seen one before, this is why visual vocabulary is important. So the wider your visual library is, the more things your can see.

The point is to stop looking around and just do it! Make use of what you can find immediately, this is also one of the best way to kill procrastination. And more importantly, the more you draw, the more you grow.

[Level: Intermediate]

I used to believe that one first needs to be a master before thinking about popularity, so I literally locked myself from outside and just do what I want. When I learnt about marketing, my whole perception about this changed!

Do you know there are more moderate quality product out there that are equally or more demanding than the best product in its category? Think about a more famous product, you can almost guarantee to find a higher quality, similar product, yet it is less known.

So will the best quality product triumph in the end? The answer should be obvious.

I’ve conducted personality test against artists, and the results unanimously show most artists to have introverted personality. This is the gift, as well as the curse of an artist. We are connected more through our work, but less through people in which makes artists naturally bad at marketing themselves. While all these famous product that we know, market themselves like no tomorrow.

No, I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t do your best in art. But if you were like me, you might want to rethink about how you should build up your name. Which is essential in building your career, as what we usually hear, it’s not how many people you know that matter, it’s how many people know you!

Here are some common mistakes that we artists like to do but preventing us from marketing ourselves naturally:

1. Don’t Like to Socialize

   No one will know remember who you are and what you do, even if you are just a moderate artist, talking and connecting with people will increase the chances of people knowing you. Go to events, get out from your comfort zone and talk with people, if you don’t know what to talk, focus on what you can help for others. Every first few steps are not easy, but you can begin to ‘run’ after a few trial and error.

2. Love to Compare Our Quality

   We often think we are the best, when we see other artist can be potentially better than us, we’ll try our best to find mistakes. Just to prove that if we are able to find some mistakes, we are better. It’s ridiculous to do such thing, it not only jeopardizes our opportunity to connect with other artists, it really brings you no benefit other than self gratification. Let’s learn to support, motivate and congratulate each other.

3. Not Good at Expressing

   As artists, we cannot escape from getting opinions, critiques and reactions from others. Learn to be patient, and respect their opinions, doesn’t mean that you have do what they say. So learn when to take things seriously and when not. If you can connect well with your audiences without letting your ego take over your emotion, you will get better impression from them. Chances are people will talk about how good you are, words of mouth can be your the best marketing media, you don’t want to blow those chances.

Whether you are a concept artist, illustrator, newbie or someone who wants to learn art, I’ve collected some tutorials from the net hoping that it could help us artist to easily find what we need. Even thou the list is kinda small now, but will continue updating it. I’ll make sure that the list is as quality as it can get so you won’t waste any time clicking one.

Click here to go to the page.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

[Level: Beginner]

I used to brag how fast is better, while it is certainly is true for some reason, but it doesn’t mean that being slow and enjoying every moment you can spend in art is worse. In order to gain speed, sometimes you have to sacrifice something. Or, you simply have to be better! Below are some common exercises that can help you become faster at painting.

1. Learn to Use Limited Value to Convey Structures

   Every form can be simplified into the basic values, you can work with 3 – 5 tones to show the structure convincingly. If you can, try to avoid smudging and blending. The purpose of this exercise is to prevent yourself from going back to the color picker and brush setting, so you can better focus on painting the structure and really understand how light effects on it. Once you get the hang of it, you simply do not need to guess how to render the object, you’ll be painting believable structure naturally.

   
   By Craig Mullins

2. Learn to Use Color Palette

   Personally I’m not a fan of color palette, but for exercises purpose, it not only helps you to understand which color scheme to use, but also helps you to memorize the colors. Study paintings with great colors to build your own set of palette ‘vocabulary’. After doing it much, you could just pick any colors you want, and will know what colors suit and look the best. No more guessing and making the wrong choice.

   

3. Smart Layering Usage

   I often heard people suggest to use as much layering as possible. While it offers huge advantage in flexibility, the more layers you have the harder for you to control, since you would have to click the layers you want to paint every time to make that changes in that particular layer. Versus just a single or few layers, you don’t have to be bothered doing that as much, it’s a trade off really.

   For practices and personal art, I tend to use the single layer painting concept, which emulates the traditional way of painting. But for professional work, I’ll keep the layer as few as possible and organize them by naming. If you do that, and if you are using Photoshop, you can use the Move Tool and right click the element you want to paint and select the layer you want from the menu. Especially useful when you have tones of layers. You can group layers too once you find that the list is too long.

   

4. Use textures

   Texturing is known to add details to your painting. However use it wisely, take care of the perspective especially and use the right texture. You can easily find texture at Google Image but don’t forget other site like Picassa, Flickr and other textures site. Download and keep those you use regularly too, to save the time surfing for the same image. Note that texturing can only make your painting more detail, doesn’t necessarily gives you the best painting, but saves your time to paint it. Use it to your advantage, even a painting can be use as an overlaying texture.

   

5. Use custom brushes

   The function of custom brushes is almost similar to textures. Generally our painting subject doesn’t go far beyond to what we usually paint, so I’m not particularly fond of huge collection of brushes, although I must admit I do tend to have quite a number of brushes. But the point is, if you do not know how to use all the brush, it can only hinder your progress in picking and choosing the brush you want to use. Bottom line in this is, build your own set of brush that you can really be familiar with. If you have the right brush set for you painting, it can really save you the time to look for the right texture since painting manually does offer you a whole lot control.

   

6. Customize Your Workspace

   Set shortcut keys as well as how you workspace looks like. Don’t let something distract you from painting. When I learn digital painting, my workstation was a 15″ laptop, and in order me to get the highest possible surface to paint, I set shortcuts to photoshop Navigator, Layers, Color picker and Brush Setting. That way I can hide and show them whenever I want. If you can get a second monitor get it, it saves your effort to switch between windows just to looks at some reference. You don’t have to follow what others do with their workspace, the most important thing is it works better for you.

   

7. Use references

   As much as I don’t encourage myself to use reference in practices, because it blinds my weakness and covering my armature, yet I can’t stress it enough with the right reference, you can be so much accurate and more faster at painting. Just don’t let it control your art, which means if you have to fit your art to conform to the reference you have, the reference is controlling you. You can study the reference for it’s anatomy, lighting, structure, wrinkles or anything, but don’t copy it exactly. It’s not wrong but if you think about the long run, just how many references can you find to make the art that you want, exactly? Do yourself a favor, and build the right foundation.

   
   * Obviously not a painting, but shows you some idea to use reference to create the art you want.

These are a combination of good armature plus tool mastery, if you haven’t yet known about the 2 stepping stones that stopping you from creating the art that you feel you want, I highly recommend you reading ‘The Secret of Drawing from Imagination‘.

* This tutorial is specially dedicated to LiewJJ!

[Level: Beginner]

This article will be a lot deeper than those you can find online, but if you want to understand why sometimes we can’t achieve what we want, it will explains you the two stepping stones that you will need to leap over in order to create whatever art that you desire, successfully. No matter it’s a painting, drawing, sculpture, you name it.

Let’s give a quick glance at the diagram, this is a general process of making an art. It mostly starts from any idea or concept generated from our brain which then manifest itself to the final result through execution, painting, drawing or any form of art. For example, when you want to draw a pink elephant, you visualize it and then draw it on paper.

The red parts in the diagram are the two things that preventing you from making the exact result that you want. Namely:

1.  Armature -The base that holds your vague visual to be more tangible
   You can also call this the skeleton of you work, like animals, their skeletons are the main frame that holds the structure together; In portrait, the grid is its armature or skeleton; In environment drawing, the perspective lines are its armature; In another words, it’s the knowledge or template that simplify the complex image in your mind, so that you can easily transfer and translate that thought onto paper or your choice of media.

   Our memory doesn’t allow us to take so much information in one visual. This is our workaround to this problem, simplify it so you can reconstruct it. How to simplify it? With the right armature of course.

2. Tool Mastery – Skills that you need to control your tool the way that you want
   This is self explanatory, the only thing that I want you to understand is, there is a difference between what shape you want, versus how to make the shape you want. The previous being the armature, and the later being the tool mastery. So long you understand the difference between then it’s fine, you may skip the example below.

   For some concrete example to make it more clearer, using color pencil and crayon gives you two different feel and look, however if you can make the gradient or the color that you want, it makes no difference what medium you choose. This is your tool mastery, using the tool you want to the way you want. I used to hear people saying, become one with the tool, I hope you now understand what it really means.

To make the art that you have in mind, or from imagination, you must first conquer these two obstacles. For more information on how to identify your missing armature, stay tune for the next updates or you’ll see the related post below when I’ve written and posted it.

Merry Christmas everyone, God bless and prosper!

* This tutorial is specially dedicated to TazAndMe!