Concept Artists

What is a concept artist?

A concept artist is a person who creates a graphic design for an item, character, or area that does not yet exist. This consists of, but is not restricted to, films, animation and more recently video games. A concept artist may be necessary for nothing more than preliminary artwork, or may be required to be part of an imaginative team until an assignment reaches completion. While it is essential to have the skills of a good artist, a concept artist must also be able to work to strict time limits in the capacity of a graphic designer. Some concept artists may start as fine artists, industrial designers, animators, or even special effects artists. Interpretation of ideas and how they are realized is where the concept artist's distinct creativity is most evident, as topic matter is often outside their own control.

Different media’s used

Although allot of the time it’s mainly fan art, movies use concept art allot of the time as well. Not only that when a super hero movie, for example, uses concept art before the movie has even put in to production the team are sometimes uncertain on how the protagonist should look as well the outfit should look, so they design some conceptual designs on the characters as well as landscapes that would be later redesigned and generated into 3d on a green screen.

Concept art is also used in animation for the same reasons as well as using it to divide out scene points for the animators to know what part of the film they are animating, but tend to be a lot more comical or less realistic because they are cartoons or animated using clay or just generally used for a rough sketch. The designs are usually purely for advertisements purposes otherwise.

For video games concept art is generally used in everything ,for example a sketch could be made ,then the image is put into greater detail .after that is done the image would be made into a basic recreation using programs like 3ds max, then edited into more detail ready to be animated or modelled properly. Most of the time when a production team is just spit balling ideas they will draw up some concept ideas of potential characters, landscapes, interior designs or weapons for a games to be designed. The ideas that go forward to be used them Have to be made into more detail so the designer can a get a basic idea of how the image would look like in real of life.

Styles, detail and importance

A concept artist in any industry is very important because they create the basis of the outlook of the of the idea as well as set marker points for the story and gives other members of the team some inspiration to work with and maybe some idea on how they can work with the character and landscapes are designed. The amount of detail put into a concept artists work can vary depending on what kind of concept artist they are /.very often concept artists will be asked only to make a really rough sketch for someone else to work on and interpret into their own design, and sometimes they will be asked to design a fully detailed and realistic looking poster for the project advertising. In landscapes the detail can also make the viewer think more what’s beyond the image and opens up their imagination all by just using extra detail in an image. Different styles are needed for different projects; take Pixar for example, their concept art would be quite cartoonish where as something like Capcom would use quite realistic designs for their style of concept.