Up until now we've mostly discussed concept art in the context of personal work - we've not really looked at external input from colleagues, clients and leads, and a lot of our discussions have been more about personal work. Now that we've built up an understanding of the process of researching, designing and presenting concepts though, I'd like to take a step back and try to think about the role of concept art in its proper, collaborative context. Of course, when working on your portfolio, you'll be working towards your own briefs and coming up with your own ideas, but this isn't going to be the case in a professional setting.
The Concept Artist as a Collaborator
As can be said for many professional roles, both in this industry and others, a concept artist is first and foremost, one part of a greater team. This means that a concept artist must be able to communicate well with others, which entails both taking on board what others are saying, and conveying their own thoughts successfully to others, whether that be verbally, or through their drawings. On that first point, it's important to remember that when starting out you aren't going to instantly be the 'rockstar' of a team, so having an ego just isn't going to do you any good, either in terms of making friends, or developing your skill. As a concept artist, you should expect to regularly receive feedback and constructive criticism, and look to respond to this by implementing the suggestions of your peers going forward. If your art director or lead is telling you something to change, chances are it's because they know better. Likewise, if a client wants you to change something, it's because that's what they are looking for, and that's what ultimately counts. I guess what I'm trying to say is, remember that you aren't a one man army, you're a member of a team - and don't lose sight of that.
Receiving Briefs
According to professionals currently working in the industry, 'blue sky' periods where they are allowed complete freedom with their creativity account for only a small part of the production cycles they have experienced, with most of their work coming in as briefs, which of course vary in strictness. These briefs can come in various forms, whether that be a writing/design document or mood board with accompanying notes, but the outcome is the same: The artist is provided a direction, and must try to explore possibilities within that direction to find a solution that satisfies the client or lead.
So how should we try to tackle client briefs? Well to answer this question, we're going to be looking at a new practical project today, which I have been working on in collaboration with a friend that specialises in 3D environment art. Elliot approached me with an idea of creating a Far Eastern-style temple environment featuring frog iconography, asking if I would be interested in providing concepts for him to work from. I was interested in both the concept and working with him, so we decided to make a collaborative project out of it. Since he had brought the idea forward, I decided I would treat it as though I was working for a client, for the purpose of demonstrating the approach in this post. My goal for today is to show how beneficial it can be to work closely with your clients/colleagues throughout your concept process, so that you remain on track and achieve a strong result through good communication.
Approaching A Client Brief
So let's get started by taking a look at Elliot's brief. He sent over a selection of mood imagery that he had gathered, along with a written summary of his idea, all of which I have compiled into a mood board here:
Altogether, the brief gave me a decent idea of what Elliot, our 'client', was looking for. However, the most important thing when working with others is to communicate and ensure that you are all on the same wavelength, so we also had a chat to figure out a direction, based on the briefed content. As a result of this discussion, we decided we'd begin our project by designing a central frog statue/altar for the temple, which would serve as a focal point for the environment. Remembering what we spoke about in a previous post, designing with focal points in mind can be useful for anchoring the rest of your work, which is why we agreed to begin here. The collaborative design process for this statue will be our focus for today, and in the next post we'll be looking at both the final concept and finished model.
Room For Experimentation Within A Brief?
Following our chat I decided to get started by gathering some more references exploring possible ideas for the frog statue:
We've already discussed the process of research/reference gathering on this blog, but today I want to approach the subject more from the angle of collaboration. When you have received a brief and are about to start working on it, it's important to remember that your job should be to stick to it, rather than go off in a completely different direction of your choosing. However, there is a middle ground by which you can stick to a brief, while also providing options for the idea to be taken elsewhere, should the client like what they see. This is where a method used by Rob Brown, a concept artist currently working at Riot Games, comes in. When working for clients, he recommends using a -1, 0, +1 system. What this means is that for any explorational work you do (referencing, composition thumbnails, other sketches), you can organise the content into three categories:
- -1 corresponds to anything that follows the brief closely and doesn't do anything crazy.
- 0 pushes the boat out a bit, introducing some new ideas, while still responding to the brief relatively closely
- +1 is reserved for ideas that experiment by pushing the boat out quite far from the original plan
In my reference sheet above I've labelled some of the ideas with the -1, 0, +1 system to show you a simple example of the theory. Originally, Elliot wanted a frog statue very similar to the image of the stone frog that he sent me, and he simply wanted me to visualise that kind of thing but from different angles, for him to model. As you can see, I've placed that image at -1 on my reference sheet, as it quite literally is the brief. However, I also had a few ideas that I wanted to bounce off him, including a more anthropomorphic prayer pose (0), and on the +1 end of the spectrum, a more psychic themed frog statue featuring a third eye motif, or even quite literally a big eye encased in the statue, if we wanted to get real weird with it. I also thought it would be interesting to introduce some clothing elements to the statue, to add some visual interest.
Before getting started on some concepting, I presented this second spread of reference images to Elliot to discuss the ideas with him, because again, more communication can't be a bad thing. The key here is that I didn't only provide the whackier ideas like the psychic frog, which would have just been neglecting the brief - I presented Elliot with that idea, alongside the more reserved options, and allowed him to choose. As it turns out, he was actually very open to all of the ideas, and so we decided we would nail down a direction after I had carried out some sketching exploring my reference options.
Here you can see a first round of sketching, exploring the options covered in my referencing. Again, the main thing I want to touch on here is the communication aspect of things, since we've already covered the design process itself in previous posts. I brought this page of sketches to Elliot to discuss the direction for the design. We both agreed that having an actual eye (the '+1' sketches at the top of the sheet) was a little too much, and would be more suitable to a disturbing/creepy environment, rather than the peaceful one we were aiming to create here. We did however, agree that we definitely wanted the eye motif to be brought forward in some way, and decided that we should have it as a symbol painted onto the statue, as some of my sketches show. After this conversation, I continued with the sketching, and by discussing some eye symbol iterations, we reached a final design:
As you can probably guess from looking at this sheet, I showed Elliot the first round of eye symbols (A-J), and he ended up really liking E, for its distinctly oriental feel. I continued with that design, creating a handful of iterations (E1-5), before combining the best of them to create the final symbol after another quick discussion. I then created a final design sketch for the statue, incorporating our symbol alongside features such as the prayer beads, which we both really liked.
Unexpected Fruits of Discussion
As a bit of a tangent to finish off our discussion for the day, I want to quickly talk more about the progression of the eye symbol, and well, the fact that it admittedly looks nothing like an eye by the final design. While the initial idea was for it to be a third eye design, it came to be more of an abstract emblem through the iteration process - remember that changes like these will happen and they aren't an issue, as long as the client/lead is happy with the outcome. In the case of this eye pattern to emblem transition, we were able to reach an outcome that, while quite different from the initial idea, we were really happy with, by frequently checking in and discussing progress. In fact, while chatting about the final design, Elliot pointed out that it looked a little like a courtyard with buildings at the top and bottom. This led to us deciding that we could base our temple's layout on it. We already knew that we wanted our eventual temple to contain a lake to go with the frog/tranquility themes, so what had originally been an eye in the emblem simply became the lake. This was both a fun idea, and one that came about completely naturally through our chats. Here's a concept sheet I made showing the temple's layout, based on the emblem design:
This process definitely happened backwards compared to how you'd normally expect it to happen with the layout coming first and the emblem created based on it, but the outcome works just as well, so I'd say it's fair game.
Summary
This post was quite a long one, but hopefully it was at least useful or interesting. We started off with a general discussion of how a concept artist fits into a larger team, before moving into a discussion of client briefs and how to approach them. We then looked at an example of a collaborative project that I am currently working on, to see how it developed through frequent discussions between concept artist and 'client'. Hopefully this post has shown how much good communication can benefit your work, and has encouraged you to seek someone out to collaborate with on something, if you're in a position to do so. Opportunities to work with others will really help you as a beginner concept artist, because it will build your communication skills and experience of working as part of a team, which are essential to the role in a professional setting. If there's a project you've been talking about doing with a friend for a while but never got round to, take this as a nudge to get going on it!
Our next post should hopefully be a shorter one, I promise... We'll be continuing with our frog statue, this time looking at our final concept sheet and the resulting 3D model. Our focus for discussion will be on providing concepts that facilitate production by making life easier for the rest of the team.
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