creative design
polycounter lvl 18
While I was trying to come up with a concept design for my spy drone a question came up for me. What thought process do artist use when they come up with their creature or prop designs before and during their project? I see many unique and cool characters and assets from this site but no one really explains their design thought process. So basically what Im asking for people to post a past or current project and break down the influences of the final product.
Replies
Guess I am just a bad person.
OK serious note... You may want to ask this at conceptart.org Those guys are insane. Some people just start drawing. Some people take shapes and objects that already exist and go off those.
I don't think there is any right answer.
Study some anatomy and evolution and this will help greatly, I had already done a fair bit of this before going to a workshop with an anatomist called Stuart Sumida who has worked on a lot of films, and I filled about half a notepad. Very insightful.
Lupus gave some pretty good advice for characters. Environments is the same in so many ways. Who lives there? What happens every day? What is the weather like? Is it war torn? Peaceful? Poor and under-developed? Rich and populas.
And once i have something nice visually, a good story will pop up along the way, and sometimes this story might affect the final look but i tend to stay with the original "spur" of that visual idea.
... for answering your question that is. Best rundown of the process of visual development for concepts I've ever seen. It's helped me immeasurably.
go to www.conceptart.org and go through the "best of CA" thread, and look at everything there. Try and identify what you like, what strikes your creative sensibility and start collecting any image that really jumps out at you in a folder.
Refer back to it often, and try to analyze what it is that the artist did to create the successful composition. Try to apply the little things you learn to you own drawing/3d. Immerse yourself in it as much as possible.
Sooner or later you will find your own style emerging from all the influences around you. While you're learning, be careful about being too sacred about what you think your style is. It will evolve, and become more your own, but it can be helpful to copy different styles at first to find what fits for you. Just dont steal a style, take from it and make it your own, then move on to something entirely different.
Also, do not dwell too much in one medium. Design circles can become very incestuous, so try something entirely different if you're feeling stumped. One of my favourites is www.style.com for char design. Could be anything though. Automobile assembly manuals etc.
There is definitely a certain language to design, but it's not very easy to convey. You hear things like rhythm, hormony etc and hear the definitions and say, ok, makes sense, but to really "get it" and actually apply it, you just have to keep looking for examples around you until you've built up enough of a dictionary in your head that you can concept on the fly.
Good topic, hope some more people will throw in on their ideas/process because this is something ive been exploring a lot as well.
This is a model from a concept drawing that I dont have any more. This computer is suppose to be set in the future. I just figured that in the future there would be less space and more people and I wanted a very tight work space. I choose the color based on the computers from half life 2. And old computers that I found on the web is what influenced me for the microwave look(some people said it looked like, not what i was shooting for) and the lights on the side was suppose to be an S shape.
Im not good at describing my reasoning but here is my example. I hope more will join in.
Well this usually depends on how much freedom I have for the final product. If I'm just doing something for myself I usually start out with a tiny scribble/silhouette and basically just start picking out shapes while I'm keeping the pencil moving. For instance if some shape starts taking the look of an arm, id go in that direction and keep building it up. I think the most important thing is to keep the pencil moving and just focus on the shapes rather than detailing early on.
Once I've done 10-15 of those I scan the ones I like and blow it up in photoshop for some line and value work. Basically at this point I just make all the large shapes make sense for what its supposed to be. Its a good idea to have a bunch of refs at this point so you can draw what you see rather than what you think something looks like.
If I had to do something more specific I would rely more on real life refs and less on the unique shapes you get with the silhouette.
www.paperblue.net
check it out, these painting are amazing