Concept art (or concept design, or visual development) is a tool that game developers employ to communicate ideas effectively. It is the expression of an idea. I will refer to it as concept art throughout this page.
<aside> 💡 Concept art is not art for art’s sake. More applicable is the word craft, as in craftsmanship. A commercial concept artist is a craftsperson.
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A concept artist generally balances three categories when working. There is the idea, the design, and the technique. Those three categories are wrapped up in the tone, which then composes the final image. For all of this to work, the artist also has to grasp the fundamentals of image-making.
The ground-truth intellectual read. The “what are you making?” A dangerous vigilante billionaire? A superclass destroyer used to project power for the Empire? The apartment of a bio-hacker gone rogue?
Everything related to the problem being solved, the mechanical workings, the narrative, the proportions. This has overlap with what we call “art style” (see On style chapter).
How you choose you go about presenting your idea. 3D, loosely painted, high-key, there are no limits here. Generally the technique is influenced by time constraints and the type of work you’re doing, eg idea generating vs postcard illustration.
Horia Dociu
These three categories feed into the tone of the image. Ideally your idea, design and techique all feed into the tone and the tone feeds into them. If you’re designing a dangerous vigilante billionaire, there’s probably a camera angle that expresses that idea better than some others.
Perspective, value, form, anatomy, composition. These skills are of the utmost importance to a concept artist, as without them they cannot express their ideas to the fullest extent. I write more on fundamentals in the Fundamentals of art chapter.
If it is the purpose of the image to express an idea, it is the role of a concept artist to come up with many ideas, good and bad. In a commercial setting the concept artist is the first point of failure for ideas. Their duty is to show the rest of the team if an idea “vibes” with the project. It is their job to explore, ideate, visualize or come up with solutions for problems. There is no value judgement on the quality of the ideas; sometimes proving something is a bad idea is more useful than having a good idea.
Concept artists are deeply embedded team players, intergral to the development of a game and helping directors align people with their vision. Watch Matt Rhodes talk about it here.
Matt Rhodes Artist Talk: The World of Concept Art (November 2016)
Depending on the phase of the project and type of request, a concept artist does different things. Generally, bluesky is about idea generation and inspiring the team. Pre-production is about finding solutions and establishing a style. Production is about developing and populating the world and executing on the vision established during pre-prod. Marketing is about generating hype for the project, and is only tangentially related to concept art.
The work of a concept artist can be very loose and gestural, or extremely detailed and prescriptive. This really depends on the team you’re working in. Adam Adamowicz is an loose idea cannon https://www.flickr.com/photos/47857688@N08/collections/72157629320914591/ while this work by Bryan is very prescriptive https://www.artstation.com/artwork/B3YKG4.
The work of a concept artist can stop at any point in the process and so they should always be ready to present something clearly.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Bluesky concept is work entirely meant to kickstart the imagination and get people hyped. Daniel Dociu here makes the best in the entire business.