How actual concept art for characters in movies/games looks like?
Hi evryone, Recently, I realized that I am not actually sure how real concept art looks, so is there anyone here who worked on the game or movie and can solve that mystery for me maybe? 😅 I know the difference between concept art and illustration, but recently I started searching for concept art to do characters based on them, and either I don't know what concept art is or it is not that easy to find it. By listening to many podcasts and watching a lot of videos with industry professionals, I get the impression that concept art should be something like this:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3byxE
Look from a lot of angles, close ups of complicated parts, maybe some image reference to see how materials should look like. But when I search for concept art on ArtStation, DevianArt, ConceptArtWorld... I mostly get stuff like this:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/V1Wk8
Look only from one or two angles, usualy no close ups, no sheets, and insted all that its usualy have painted background and stuff making it look more like ilustration. Dont get me wrong it looks awesom but can I realy use it like concept art? I always hear that I should folow concept because, well, I am not concept artist I am character artist, but if I use stuff from second link for concept, I just can folow that much, I can a lot but I also still have to invent a lot. So my question is, when you work in studio as a character artist, how concept you get actualy look like? More like first or second example? Because from character artists I listened I get the impresion it should be more like first example but I can not realy find a lot of that, but maybe I just dont know where to look or what to search for.
Replies
The first one is a detailed character reference sheet / brief intended to aid someone in modelling the character
The second one is intended to show what the finished character looks like in a representative context
in even the best case scenario where you have lots of both supplied to you by a talented team of concept artists you still have to invent things they haven't resolved fully - it's why we hire artists rather than CAD engineers ;)
Thank you for explanation, I think I get it now, for making character I should look for something more like first one then second one. But still invente something and look for aditional references. If I got it right. Only problem is, there is lot less of that(or I just dont know where/how to search), but I supose its better to have polished piece in portfolio then reference sheet and thats the reason ppl post more of those.
If you want more ref sheets, you can try the major image search engines... Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.
For example
https://www.google.com/search?q=character+reference+sheet&tbm=isch
Its funny how I thought of 10 different ways to search for concept(I tried finding artists in game/movie credites, tried finding good character artists and then looking whos concept theye use etc etc) but I havent actualy though of using just regular image search engine or realy using reference shhet instead of concept art as key word for searching😂, now when I tried it I actualy found many great stuff, thank you man.