DIGITAL COMPASS CREATIVE STUDIOS LIMITED
CONCEPT ART:
HOW & WHY?
Conceptual art is the phase of pre-production where iteration of design ideas, the exploration of mechanisms and the establishment of potential looks occur. Using conceptual art to communicate the creative ideas intended for characters, creatures, vehicles, accessories and environments.
CHARACTERS
Character conceptual art is a crucial step in bringing the final form of your characters to life. Its the early stages of figuring out the story of your characters as expressed by their features, form, expressions and signature poses.
When creating conceptual slides for your characters, try to capture the essence of the character's personality and the message or tone they represent inside of the story.
While the concepts may not be final, it should be the foundation of the character's eventual final rendering.
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Identify the personality of your character. This will inform the overall concept.
The concepts do not need to be in colour, but having some colour to show potential material types, to provide contrast in layering and to give a sense of separation goes a very long way. Concept line art is effective as long as the shapes and lines used in the development process communicates the details of the design appropriately. The weight of the lines (strokes) will also impact the way that the character concept is interpreted. If no colour is visible, use enough organic lines and shapes to define all areas of the concept.
Organic Lines
Organic concepts allows you to create without having to worry about polishing the design.
At this stage, the goal is to iterate and organize the designs as quickly as possible.
Developing character profiles requires a thorough understanding of the personality and traits of the characters. Each personality drives the decisions made around apparel, hairstyle, body type, body language, posture and facial expressions.
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Use expressions to establish the core personality of your character. This will inform the finer details of the overall concept.
Expressions are usually easy to read if communicating through facial expressions. The positioning of just the eyebrows alone can communicate a wide range of emotions and meanings. Far less for the eyes and mouth. This is enhanced however by having the rest of the character's body reflect the energy being pushed by the overall design. Expression through body language can be complimentary to the character or it can be deliberately counter to their profile for the sake of communicating a particular story or message.
Using organic compound shapes can help you with sculpting the expressions and poses through a multilayered process. This allows you to make subtle adjustments to the shapes, strokes and perspectives of the forms being using to create the final character concept.
Using basic shapes as the base form for your character designs is a quick and efficient way of establishing the foundational silhouette of your characters. It acts as the "clay" that you'll be sculpting your characters out of. Here however, the pencil is the sculpting tool.
You can use any base shape or form to establish the character foundation. Though some shapes allow you to develop concepts faster, spending time with unconventional shapes can allow you to discover unique designs and overall interesting results.
Choosing the right shape for your character depends on the age, height, body type, sex, features, ethnicity and the overall role or message that the character embodies in the story. Characters that can be perceived as physically strong may take on an inverted-triangle base shape. This makes the character's body top-heavy with a tapered waist area, contributing to a more muscular and stronger presence. Similarly if a character's base shape is more oval or pear shaped, it can be perceived as being bottom heavy and may result in having the character's personality be tied to the physical make up. In the end, the goal is to use a shape that captures the essence of the character in a story, even when compounded by other organic base shapes.
03
Iterating your character designs gives you perspective on the form. Use various angles to your advantage.
When developing character concepts, its important to understand the role that this phase of production plays in the overall process. This is the production stage that allows you to express and capture the essence of a character through as many iterations of designs as possible. The higher the iteration count, the greater the range of expressions and the greater the possibility of identifying the versions that capture the essence of the characters.
It's not mandatory to have a character turnaround sheet at the concept stage, but creating iterations with a turnaround in mind helps you to make any adjustments to the design that you may not have recognized when locked in a front facing direction. With seeing the design from different angles and utilizing various action poses, you'll be able to get a clear idea of what the final renderings might look like.
Organizing your iterations is key to seeing a flow to the progression in the concepts. While each character concept will vary in details for every iteration, the objective is to create a series of art boards that visually explains the thought process behind the designs. This might showcase how the character stands, the type of clothes they wear and how it fits, the accessories on their bodies and the finer details that sell the overall image.
Accessories and hair are just 2 examples of features that can be iterated and cycled through in order to see what the different options looks like. This does not necessarily mean that every iteration would be considered valid, but you would have explored the potential design ideas through the conceptual development phase. Testing things like scale and positioning is a good idea at this level.
Label and categorize your concepts based on level of completion. Rough concepts should be categorized differently from your cleaner concepts as they would be useful on an internal level. Having an understanding of the early versions of the character will always come in handy. When developing concepts for delivery or for your own productions, grouping finished concepts helps to keep the consistency in all of the designs moving forward.
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When you arrive at an official conceptual design it's important that all of the other characters within that world or story follow a similar design language. Additionally try to remember that character concepts for a project may vary in rendering techniques but must ultimately capture the personality, essence and presence of a written character.
Dragon Concept_Head_Side profile_A
CREATURES
Creature design allows you to experiment with a wider library of anatomies when compared to the character creation process. Taken as a whole, the term “creature” could mean a being with a combination of several body sections, arms, legs, heads, tails, tentacles, wings, eyes, ears etc. Start with a core design (reference animal) and to build out the creature concept around the key physical components of that base creature design. This means to exercise creative freedoms when coming up with the “look”, but ensure that the features allow the creature designs to operate similarly to the reference animals that influence them. The designs need to make sense and must most importantly be functional over flair.
Creative freedom does not necessarily mean that any and every feature can be composited into one creature. Design individuality works best if the creature design itself has a coherent and functional flow.
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Each creature design should be unique. The characteristics of the creature should be represented by the features of the creature, and anatomically based off of a bipedal, quadruped, crawling, aquatic and flying animals.
Dragon Concept_Torso_Side profile_Environment Integration test_B
There are some features that might naturally complement one another, for example if your core animal is a reptile (a lizard) it is easy to modify that design into several other designs, including adding wings, claws and horns which gives us a dragon. While this is common, conceptualization allows you to explore other possibilities and iterating those ideas over the core design will result in a library of concepts to pull from.
Design iteration can take place on the same workspace slide, or across several art boards and pages. It depends on if the concept art is for internal or external use. If it’s for internal use, you have a lot more flexibility and freedom in the layout, but the organization of your iterations should still be a fixed process. Grouping the different “rounds” of development for each creature provides a clear process trail of the final designs and allows you to “deconstruct” your designs in future.
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Keep Scale in mind.
The larger the creature,
the larger the features.
Understand the size of the
design in relation to the
other creatures or characters in the story.
When creating large creatures and monsters, you might be drawn towards making them on the colossal side. When we think about creatures that exist alongside humans, we should consider several factors in order to make the design make sense inside of the story-world.
Form and Function
Consider the shape, make-up and function of the creature. Designs should fit into the world without creating any disconnects with the story. If the creature is too large to appreciate (world scale) there is a 50/50 chance that viewers would fill the blanks around the mystery behind not seeing the entire being. In creature design you
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The Creature Silhouette should also be discernible. While detailing the creature requires a significant amount of thought, the overall silhouette of the creature should be unique and identifiable. Testing this requires gesture sketches of the concept at various angles with the sole intent of being easily recognizable. Though it is impossible to cater for every angle, using some standard angles in a creature turnaround sheet becomes very useful. Front, Side, ¾ and Back are some of the standard viewing angles you can use. Additionally, you can explore other creative angles and poses in order to fully identify what does and doesn’t work for the overall design and its silhouette. The aim should be to arrive at the most complete version of the design with the least amount of steps necessary.
Shapes, Lines, Angles & Edges
The components of your creature designs will vary from concept to concept. Making the designs unique and interesting requires a combination of factors depending on the role the creature plays in the story. Villainous, Evil or “Boss Level” type creatures may take on a sharper or more rigid appearance, even with the presence of organic curves and lines. The visual of using sharper and harder edges, rigid or deadly structures, indicates that the creature may be an agent of danger or death. It can also be used to misdirect the audience away from the true nature of the creature’s personality
Try to work through the designs in these phases, Rough Draft, 1st pass form, 2nd pass detail, 3rd pass Clean lines 1, 4th pass Clean detail 1, 5th pass enhancing effects, 6th pass props/accessories.
Colours and textures can be added in future passes and iterations. The main goal is to build out the full line art, including all of the major and minor details that comprise the final version. With a complete composite of all the areas detailed and cleaned up, the creature design is then ready for colours.
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Use Organic Colours, textures
& Materials
With the line art complete or at least to a level where the line work communicates the design effectively, moving on to the colour, texture and materials phase allows you to elevate the designs giving them depth and even more personality. Developing a colour palette for each design should be the first steps taken before attempting to apply the colours and textures.
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Using colours, patterns, shadows and highlights that fit within the world and the environments allows the design to integrate into the visual storytelling without shifting the weight, attention and focus of the on screen actions out of turn. Only make a creature stand out in terms of colours, textures and design, if the design choice is deliberate and appropriate to the story.
The colours you use should be guided by several factors. Some of these are the environments the creature exists in, how their lifestyle affects their appearance and even more importantly the messaging behind what they represent. Typically, using warm, flesh like or earthy tones communicates a creature that is more organic in appearance. Using browns, oranges, reds and yellows allows me to paint creatures with a pigment based on a measure of realism. Using muted versions of the colours and their values, I am able to layer and blend the different tones and undertones of the entire design.
ACCESSORIES & ITEMS
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Use Iteration & Variations to your advantage, but keep the messaging aligned with the world design.
