Art direction

There are many different ways to be an art director. It’s a wide and open field where, depending on person, project, and team-size the responsibilities differ. Ultimately, art direction is about art. Your primary responsibility is making things look good. It is a privilege to be an art director.

It’s difficult to learn or teach art direction, as it’s mostly a process and not a deliverable. This is in line with Darren Bartley’s advice about concept art:

Technique is easy to teach, thought process isn't. And its the thought process stuff that will lead to better, more interesting solutions.

Lessons learned from other art directors

Daniel Dociu (ArenaNet)

Daniel Dociu - This talk is quite painful to listen to but has a large amount of fundamental knowledge about art, things that are important to an art director when directing a game. The Q&A has some good bits too. Take-aways:

Guild Wars: The Artists' Vision

Digital Arts and Entertainment - Words of advice by Daniel Dociu

• Cohesion is important but should not go to monotony.
• Stylistic purity vs stylistic integrity; purity is costly to achieve, having an airtight and flawless style is very expensive, requires close policing and is slow-moving. Integrity is more loose and allows for more creative freedom. Is it believable, does it hold up? If it falls apart, throw more glue at it. No one plans on letting things slide and slip through the cracks stylistically but it does happen.
• There are no sexy shaders, sexy vfx, sexy textures. The only thing that matters is what you do with it.

Digging through the older sections of my portfolio I found a a piece which I can't remember to save my life what it was initially intended for. One of those that went nowhere, for sure. I reworked it quite heavily, as it had some parts worth salvaging, I thought. As I always say, my concepts are never blueprints, but rather conversation starters. We concept artists shouldn't be expected to be Mind Readers in the service of rather in-eloquent wannabe creators, but rather Mind Openers.

Arnold Tsang/William Petras (Blizzard, Overwatch)

Blizzard's Arnold Tsang and William Petras walk through the process for creating an artistic direction for the world of Overwatch. This is especially interesting when they talk about fitting Overwatch into the Blizzard universe style of games. Take-aways:

The Art of Overwatch: Evolving a Legacy

• See the Overwatch art style develop into something that fits in Blizzard’s portfolio of games.
• How far you can push a concept and then surprisingly even much further.
• Identify a strong use-case to test your style. Blizz used Torbjorn as a test-case to check environment concepts against; if Torbjorn fits into the environment, it’s good. If he don’t, something needs to change. Detail levels, stylization of shapes, etc.

Shaddy Safadi (One Pixel Brush)

Shaddy Safadi argues that what AAA games need now are not concept artists but concept designers with a refined sensibility for storytelling, shape design and cinematic lighting. Take-aways:

Concept Art is Dead

• Concept artists (designers) are uniquely positioned with their skills to take over large amounts of the creative process, owning parts like concept to final mesh creation, in-engine implementation, world creation (not level design necessarily),