Tales of a Concept Artist

One problem I've had for the longest time was coming up with something original when it came to my art. I could think of cool ideas, but they were always based off of something else. I just didn't seem to be able to think up original concepts on my own. All that changed recently thanks to this program. Since we had to come up with our own stories, characters, and locations, we had to draw to provide concepts in order to get our stories pushed through. Since I was forced to start coming up with original ideas, I began to find it easier to think up things as time went on. At one point, when our team was still trying to get selected, I was providing the bulk of the concept art for character designs. While I would by no means say I'm a fantastic concept artist, I do think that over this past year I have slowly started to get the hang of it.

Recently we had to come up with some concepts addressing two major issues in our film: what type of wings our main character had and how did he go about creating planets. Using the character concept my friend Jackie Malvin came up with, I started to get to work. In my mind I had always had a very clear image as to how our main character, Gan, created planets. I saw his hands swirling around bits of rock, cloud, and crystal as they began to form a planet (think Avatar: the Last Airbender). I did a few sketches to try and figure out how best to convey that. The wings, on the other hand, was something I didn't know how to approach at first. Originally Gan had these huge angelic wings, which I had always been against as I felt that they created several issues in our film. However the faculty loved the idea of wings, so we had to find a way to incorporate them into our film. One day while meeting, a few of us came up with the idea of making his wings out of energy, rather than traditional wings. I really liked that idea a lot, as I had hated the traditional wing design. While trying to concept what these wings looked like, I came up with the idea of incorporating his wings into the planet making process. After sketching out a few different poses, I finally came up with the one I liked.

While I don't know if my idea will ultimately be selected, I am very happy with is, as it's one of the first pieces of concept art that I feel truly conveys what I was going for. I know that I still have a lot of art if I ever want to seriously consider doing concept art, but I feel that for the first time ever I'm finally on the right track. One thing I'm incredibly grateful for, that has resulted from this program, is that I'm finding a lot more things about this field that intrest me.

Enjoy!

~Josh