The art of the concept
Added 2018-02-13 01:00:01 +0000 UTCThe image above is a concept piece for Pink, covering the different face, ear and eye shapes for him. People are often tricked into believing that concept art looks like those impossibly beautiful renders we see of AAA games, the reality is that those images we see for the popular expensive games are almost always promotional pieces mis-categorised as concepts.
Why do I say that? Because a concept is necessarily an exploration of multiple ideas, not the full realisation of one particular idea. Plus you need to do a lot of concept art to settle on a single subject, meaning that if all concepts were as exquisite as the work you find on conceptartempire.com, it would be prohibitively expensive and publishers wouldn't bother.
No, concept is more like the work above where we're exploring what Pink would look finally like (we already had his uniform sorted). We eventually settled on the hair and ears from #1 with the face and earring from #4. That's another thing about concept art I have discovered: it will typically end up exploring many things simultaneously and you will end up having to do a mash-up of concepts to get what you want. It took only a few hours for Jonas to do these sketches, but we agonised for ages over the correct combination of characteristics.
Getting an artist to do concepts for you can be very hard: artists by their nature don't want to let you into their messy creative process, so they will often want to complete the colouring, do the final lines, or even complete whole scenes when all you want to do is focus on a single thing.
The trick I find is to be very clear about what you want to explore and repeat to them many times that you want a rough sketch.
