Concept Art Sketches from the Edge

Concept Art is always pushing the edges. The edge of what? Well, honestly I m going to go with sanity. Your goal in doing concept art sketches, whether it be a creature or a building is to create something never before imagined. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that is ultimately the goal.

Often you find that you are influenced by those things you find beautiful or interesting. This helps define your personal style, but it can also lead you to copying, conscious or not, those things. I find myself going down that path often enough. The trick then is to move away from those influences, to look for new experiences.

The Role of Concept Art

So here is the basic conundrum of creating concept art, nothing truly unique, with no basis on reality will be believable, but nothing based entirely on observation will be unique. The role then is to create a believable world from both observation and imagination. Adding details that hint to the real, but not simply combining attributes of the real. Then you end up with an elephant with a giraffe neck, and that is not unique at all.

My goals for creating unique concept art are not based around any particular genre or theme. And I have a long way to go from these sketch sessions to anything presentable. In fact I don’t see them as part of the actual process at all, they are simply a warm up to get my brain and hand flowing. So in that sense they are part of the overall concept art process, just not the main track. At some point I will start doing the ConceptArt.org creature of the week, Character of the Week and Environment of the Week contests again. They will give me a define-able end goal. For now though I am just seeing how far I can push my imagination. The actual finished Concept Art is coming, in due course.

Concept Art Resources:

ConceptArt.org
TheGnomonWorkshop.com
CreatureSpot.com
My CA Sketchbook
My Concept Art Sketches here
I am creating more Concept Art sketches every day.

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Psychedelic Squirrels is a paintball comic strip I originally started back in 1994. It was an on again off again product for YEARS. But over those years, I lost most of the finished strips. Here and there I would come across many of the sketch pages, or even the inked frames, but never the final product.

I found my Old Paintball Comic Strip!

So, I was digging through my old archive disks (most are zip 100′s but a few are cd rom) and found a directory called Cold Coffee. This was good news, as my original comic strip was called Cold Coffee, and when I first started the Squirrels they went by the same name. Well, long story short, I found a stash of old Paintball Comic Strips.

I have taken to posting them at both The Funniez and my Paintball Gun blog.

Rather than breaking this up into a hundred separate posts I will drop a few here in order, but you can go to either of the other sites to see them as I release them.

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Concept Art – Creature Design sketches

If you read my posts often you know I love to do Concept Art, specifically creature design. This page from my sketchbook is a Werewolf, tick, bat and cuddlefish… well not really.  This is another page from my nightly sketch sessions, and is the last of creatures that I will do for a while. I need to spend more time doing the same type of practice with hard objects rather than the squishy ones.

Professional Concept Art

I’m not there yet, but some day I would love to create concept art and get paid for it. Ever since I was a child watching the original Star Wars trilogy, I knew what I wanted to do. I have watched every making of, or behind the scenes video made for every sci fi movie I can find. In fact I often like them more than the movies themselves. There is something very compelling about creating Concept Art for a world completely pulled from imagination.

It would more than likely have to be contract or freelance work as I cannot move from my Portland Oregon location, and there are very few VFX or game companies in this town. There is of course LAIKA and a few others…

Concept Art on the Web

Concept Art Forums – The biggest community of Concept Artists online. I attended a big event they held up in Seattle and it was the most valuable instruction I ever attained in regards to creating art.

Concept Artist List – I want on this list, it will mean I have attained the quality of concept art that puts me in the elite. I know I am a ways away from that at this time, but it is my goal.

Massive Black – This studio is full of amazing concept artists, and they put on great events.

Steambot Studios – Another fantastic studio of Concept Artists.

Brom – Brom is more of a cover artist or illustrator, but it is Brom and he has to be on this list.

Derek Thompson – Love Derek’s work.

Concept Art Sketches from me

These are just a few of the lists and resources crowded with people who create concept art, and with whom I would like to work

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Concept Art – Creature Sketches

For all future concept art sketch pages I will also be adding them to the my sketchbook thread over at Concept Art .org. It is another venue to show people the concept art sketches I create on a regular basis and obviously that is never a bad thing.

Pages like this one come from my nightly concept art sketching sessions, where I try very hard not to have any concept of the creatures I will be drawing, at least not from the beginning. Once a sketch is in progress then I definitely need to have an idea of where it is going. My goal is to eliminate a need for reference in the sketching and idea-tion stage, and to allow my mind to flow more creatively. I would hate for any of my concept art to look exactly like someone else’s work, trying to create unique concepts is the whole idea, after all.

Concept Art Process

I am teaching myself to do concept art, and as such I need a process to get the best results from myself. My process for creating concept art is stolen directly from my time in architecture school. I will start with these types of sketches. This just allows the mind to freely roam around and take bits and pieces of observed reality and throw it all into something new. These sketches are not meant to in any way be related to the actual concept art product, they are just a way of warming up.

The next step, for me at least, is to start finding references for the style, topic, theme etc, related to the concept art I am to create. It might be a series of costume images, or texture, or colors, animal photos, what-ever it takes to understand the design direction of the project.

With all of this reference material around I start to play with silhouettes. sharpie or digital it does not matter, just create interesting shapes.  These small dark blobs will then be blown up, and detail added. More than likely I will do this in Alias Sketchbook, as I like the interface for rapid drawing, sketching etc. Many copies of each cool silhouette with nothing more than black and white added to give a sens of the details.

Then of course it is time to blow up these now gray-scale concept art thumbnails and play with color, adding smaller details etc. Refine and define further.

There are many directions the concept art can go from this point, in many cases I would imagine the character, environment, creature or prop is done, but why stop with that?  I like to create finished paintings, so might as well play with this new concept in a finished piece…

Some Great Concept Art Resources

ConceptArt.org All around the biggest resource for the wanna be concept artist.

Gnomon Workshop Best videos money can by from the best of the best artists in the industry. I own some 50 of these videos and love them all. They also have great contests (How I came by half of my videos).

Creature Spot A blog posted to by some of the best creature designers in the world.

My Concept Art Sketchbook The one here on c-hammer.com

Concept Art Creature Sketches

This is a page of creature concept art sketches from my nightly sketch sessions. This page like many that came before it, contains a few creatures with no basis on reality. I have used these free drawing occasions to experimentation with ideas and to break my long held reliance on observable data. The hope from all of these long hours spent sketching nonsense is to develop my own unique concept art style.

The creatures contained on this page are nothing special but in my efforts to post everything I create, they must be seen.I was explaining to a friend of mine last night why I post absolutely everything, even the worst crap. I feel it is important for two parts. I can look back and see my own progress over time and be reminded on bad days that they occur. And to encourage other people to create and share their experiences.

So there you have it, my motives for displaying even the worst pages from my sketchbook. This is not one of the worst, but clearly not one of the best pages of concept art sketches I have created.

Concept Art – Creature Sketches

Creating these concept art creature sketches is sometimes very rewarding. This page from my sketchbook is one of my favorites. One of those rare times when several of the characters portrayed are interesting and worth expanding upon. For whatever reason things were clicking well the night I created these characters. I really wish I could capture that capacity and unleash it at will. But creating interesting concept art is… well an art, not a science.

Two of the characters I really enjoy. The guy top left with the feather head-dress and the one middle right. I feel that they might be characters who I could build a story around.

I am coming to the end of my use of the samurai sketch sessions. I have learned from them what I hoped for and I am finding little challenge in the efforts. This is good, it means I can move on to the next challenge, which I have already set for myself. I am going to start creating locations, landscapes, props and machines without reference. Time to move from the abstract soft to the imagine hard.

Concept Art as a Career

As a child I was enthralled by the original Star Wars trilogy. Watching the movies over and over, and the making of videos. I have probably seen every single making of, behind the scenes video for every sci-fi motion picture of note. Oh and the books, so many books. All of this lead me to believe that the ultimate career is to create concept art professionally, to be a concept artist.

For whatever reason, this has been pushed into my brain as a dream that is unattainable. By the time I was in Junior High School I was no longer thinking of concept art as a career, but instead was looking to become an architect. Oddly this path, becoming an architect, is a great one for the aspiring concept artist. You learn great design, technique, the ideation process. You become an expert in design, flow and color. Thankfully my time at university in the architecture program also taught me some of the tools of the trade, such as Maya.

My Path to Concept Art

By the time I graduated university I had moved majors to Fine Arts and had 4 years professional experience in graphic design. Graduating from university in the late nineties with a Fine Arts degree lead you down one of two paths, web design or flipping burgers I chose the one with a dental plan. Right in the middle of the dot com storm I jumped into the maelstrom. Concept Art would be a hobby at best.

After graduating my wife and I moved to Portland, our home town, both growing up here. My long held belief that Portland was a artist wasteland, was not diminished by going down the technical career path. over time I moved further away from design and more towards the tech. By 2002 I was a full on back-end programmer. In 2004, one morning I woke up, looked at myself in the mirror and could not determine how I arrived at the place I then was. How does someone with a Fine Arts degree in digital imaging end up a programmer working on huge government systems?

Opportunity Costs

It is often odd how opportunity comes at the seemingly darkest hour. My employer was doing a lay-off and I was one of the lucky ones (Getting the pink slip). It was time to re-evaluate my career path.

I landed a new job doing multimedia for a start-up of sorts. They were looking for a designer who could code. they knew I could do the tech thing from my resume, it was the design side they were unsure of. So they gave me a test, creating a shot animation. I knocked it out of the park and got the job. This new direction cost me quite a bit, the new role paid half what the prior one had, but it was fun and worth the price.

My friends are great, and being the people they are I was introduced to the fabulous Lee Moyer. Lee is a great illustrator, painter and artist. He is also the most well connected artist I have ever met and the founder of the Illustrators Open. Growing up in a town gives you certain preconceived notions of your city. In mine Portland was a artist’s wasteland. When I had left for university there were no major studios, no comic industry giants, no major ad agencies and Nike had not become the dominant brand it is today. By the time I graduated and came home, all of those things were here, but I did not see it. Lee opened my eyes to what my hometown had become.

Doing Multimedia was fun, and gave me a broad range of experience. I was doing web design, graphic design, 3d modeling, animation, medical illustration, interface design and game development. Over time the company grew and changed, and the wide freedoms I had enjoyed narrowed as more people were added and the overall need expanded. Every good thing must come to and end and it was time for me to move on.

I went back to my roots, starting a company and running it. I also started making a deliberate effort to make myself a better artist, and that is how I get to today.

Concept Art, My Future

Every night that I can, I sketch. I try to only work on things I find myself struggling with. Most of these creature sketches have been done because I was not good at drawing anything without reference and I like drawing creatures. Having done medical illustration for 4 years, I am tired of drawing things inside out. This page represents the last, for a while at least, of creatures. There is more to concept art than creatures. Next up, environments, with character design to follow.

I am not worried about landing concept art work today, if I can, I will be excited and throw every bit of my being into it,. However I am concerned with improving my craft and abilities. For most of my life art, drawing and design was the province of raw talent, not of practice and work. I look at the wider world and see that I am not the best, not even in the top 1000, maybe not the top 100,000 artists… it is time to get to work.

Concept Art resources:

ConceptArt.org
TheGnomonWorkshop.com
CreatureSpot.com
My CA Sketchbook
My Concept Art Sketchbook here

I will some day create concept art as a profession.

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Concept Art Sketches

This page comes from my nightly concept art sketch session on April 1st 2010. Some days the only way I can get to sleep is to sit down and sketch first. Consequently it has become standard practice to spend the last waking hours with a pencil, a 30% gray marker and a white colored pencil filling a recycled paper notebook with creatures pulled directly from my imagination. More than a sleeping aid it is all part of breaking my need for reference material which I had become too dependent on.

This page is nothing special, just one of many from these nightly sessions and not a particularly good page at that. So what? It is not about creating great concept art in these sessions, it is about letting the mind freely flow and run wild. These sketching sessions are for me to break free and loosen up. if it was not for this blog, nobody would ever see them, as they are not meant for mass consumption and by no means represent an end product.

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Yes I do Comic Art

See I do create comic art on occasion. This drawing is based on the Meredith character that my friend Macavite created. This is not a representation of her directly, but stems from that idea. She is Merideth grown.

Merideth is the living incarnation of death. Her touch is lethal, and from the time of her birth she has had to avoid any contact. She is deeply empathetic, and tries to help those suffering end their pain. So she tends to frequent places where people tend to commit suicide. She is also fond of the macabre.

I very intentionally staged her as if from a scene from Hamlet. It just made sense to me. It is rare that I will actually create any form of comic art, which I should rectify as I enjoy the freedom to exaggerate and accentuate forms. Merideth here was really fun to draw and she just kind of happened.

Comic Art and Concept Art

In my opinion the most interesting thing in creating comic art is the idea stage, creating concepts. Character design and environments. this would be the fun part. Even the initial penciling of the pages, but mostly I would enjoy doing covers.

And here I live in one of the great Comic Art cities, Portland, with friends in most of the studios. It is not my strength, by any means, and as much as I enjoy doing these occasional drawings, it is not something I excel at.

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So this sheet has head-shots and a few poses as well as a wide variety of airsoft props. This makes it easier to create strips fast. It also helps me get to know the characters a little bit.

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