Entertainment 2d(track2)Concept Art 101

So you like drawing characters, and monsters, and swords and guns and space-ships. It has come to your attention that there are people who do this professionally for movies, television, and games. Youve got a sketchbook in your hands, and you are wondering how to get from the sketchbook to the job. What sorts of things should you draw? What sorts of mediums should you learn? Should you draw from photos? From life? From other artists work? From imagination? I can help you with these first steps. My name is Michelle Clay. I work at a company called Turbine, where I make 3D art assets for games, and (more recently) have been working as a designer building game levels. Im not a concept artist, but I work with concept artists, and for a while in college it was my goal to become a concept artist. I graduated from RISDs illustration department in 2000. So, I cant tell you an awful lot about how to get a concept art job once your skills are ready for that, but I can tell you quite a bit about what you need to do to bring your skills up to that level. This thread is a classroom. I will be posting information and assignments. As far as possible, I will assume that all you have at your disposal are a sketchbook and a pencil, but a few will involve color. The assignments wont be any particular order. Feel free to skip to the assignments that will help you the most! If you want to participate, feel free to post your results here. Or post your questions or comments. Or, if you are a professional concept artist, feel free to share your knowledge! For those interested, over in the Employment Discussion forum I have a similar thread on the games industry. The information there is more advanced and specialized, and includes assignments that require 2D and 3D art programs, but some of it is fairly low-tech, too. Okay, here we go. . . Table of Contents What is Concept Art? Concept art is a subset of illustration. What is illustration? Dictionary.com says this of the word illustrate: 1. to furnish (a book, magazine, etc.) with drawings, pictures, or other artwork intended for explanation, elucidation, or adornment 2. to make clear or intelligible, as by examples or analogies; exemplify 3. 3. Archaic. to enlighten 4. to clarify one's words, writings, etc., with examples: To prevent misunderstandings, let me illustrate. So, an illustration is art that communicates something. There is much of fine art that falls into the category of illustration. Any imagine that tells a story or represents an object is illustrative, whether it is communicating something as complex as a scene from the Lord of the Rings, or as simple a thing as a horse or a man. What makes concept art different from illustration is that the audience isnt the person who reads a book, plays a game, or watches a movie. The primary audience of concept art is other artists, and other people involved in the making of the final product. Concept art is the blueprint that is used to make more art. It is also used to communicate with the holder of the intellectual property rights involved in a project, and it can also be the leverage that is used to get funding for a project.

If you want a formal education that will prepare you for being a concept artist, then study illustration. From Life to Imagination

So youve got your sketchbook. Youve been having fun drawing Spider Man, and youve had some folks tell you that you should draw from life, but dang it, still lifes are dull! Why bother with them? How is a drawing of a shoe supposed to help you to draw better superheroes? These assignments should help you to answer those questions. *********Assignment #1: From Still-Life to Imagination************ Pick a real-life object to draw. It can be a shoe, a car, a tree anything that is available to you for direct observation. Take your sketchbook to it and draw it. Leave space on the same page or a facing page for the second part of the assignment. Using that first drawing as a guide, draw the same object from the same position but change it somehow. Add an imagined element. If its a car, you could change the curves of the lines to make it look like it belongs in a science-fiction movie. Or turn it into a hovercraft. Or give it a crazy flame paint job and fins and monster truck wheels. Or make it steam-punk, or aquatic, or turn it into a thousand-year-old rusted wreck. By doing this in two steps, you have both the benefit of direct observation, and you get the challenge of coming up with something from imagination and communicating that thing. Assignment #2: From Self Portrait to Imagination Self portraits are hard! They are also the best way to prepare yourself for drawing one of the most difficult and yet ubiquitous subjects that every illustrator must draw: the human. If you want to be an illustrator of any stripe, then you must learn to draw people. Dont be afraid of messing up; just try it and keep trying it until your results dont stink. For this assignment, set up a mirror and draw yourself. No, don't use a photograph, use a mirror. All drawn? Great! Now add some invented element to your drawing. It could be a crazy hat, or a plate-mail shirt, or a crazy facial tattoo. You can turn yourself into a Klingon, or add faerie wings. Whatever you add, the challenge will be to make the imagined elements look like they belong in the drawing. It should look like the entire image was drawn from observation.

*********Assignment #3: Half-Imagined Environment*********** This assignment is just like the Self Portrait assignment, except instead of drawing yourself, draw a landscape or interior space. Add in an element from imagination. For instance, you could draw a hallway in your home, but draw in a giant crack across the floor filled with lava. Or draw the buildings along your street, but give them turrets and towers and cannons. Or draw a field with trees, and add a herd of invented animals. Once again, the challenge will be to make the imagined elements look like they were observed along with the observed elements.

The Use of Photography in Illustration

The Use of Photography in Illustration

There are four ways in which photography can be useful to illustrators: direct copy, inspiration, reference, and inclusion. There is a lot of talk on conceptart.org about using photographs as reference when what is actually meant is direct copy. Since the invention of the camera, many famous artists have made museumquality art by copying directly from photographs. But what gets overlooked by novice artists is that A. these artists took the photographs themselves, B. these artists already knew how to successfully paint the subject, and C. these artists were in most cases not concept artists. Copying photographs is a shortcut for illustrators who have already mastered a subject and who need to hurry. For a novice, a habit of copying photographs is a crutch that will hinder your progress. But this does not mean you should never go near a photograph. On the contrary, it is through photographs that we are allowed to see parts of the world that would never be visible to us otherwise. Use photographs for inspiration liberally! By inclusion I mean using a photograph directly in your art. This applies to collage, and also applies to making photorealistic textures for 3D models. Inclusion isnt useful to you if you are trying to learn the basic skills necessary to a concept artist. And what about that abused word reference? Reference doesnt mean copying. It means using the information contained in an image to better understand a subject. For instance, if you are going to draw a manatee, and you dont happen to have either a live manatee or model of a manatee on hand. The next thing to do would be to find photographs of manatees, and use those images to gain an understanding of the shape of a manatee in 3D. Using that 3D mental image, you can then draw a manatee from any angle, in any pose. *******Assignment #4: Concept Art from Found Photographs**************** Pick a subject, such as a llama, or an antique car, or a preying mantis. Use either the library or the internet to find photographs of that subject from different angles. Study the subject until you feel that you have a good understanding of it. Then, draw the object from a perspective not used in any of your reference photographs. Refer back to the photos at any time for information you might need, such as the shape of a preying mantis leg joints, or the proportions of the cars wheels to the cars length. ********Assignment #4: Concept Art from Your Own Photographs************* For this, you will need a camera. Hunt down an interesting subject and photograph it from several angles. Repeat the previous assignment using these photographs that you took yourself. If you ever intend to use photographs as a part of your art-making process, then you need to get in the habit of taking your own pictures. The internet is full of pictures of the darndest things, but the quality is often awful and you do not own the rights to those images. So get yourself a camera and learn the basics of photography.

Art Direction There are many myths about art. One of them is that art is a noble solitary endeavor. It is only sometimes noble, and in the context of illustration its rarely solitary. Many artists emerge from their education without ever really having confronted the idea that as an illustrator you have to work with other people who will be telling you what to do. The result is an uncomfortable clash of egos, disillusionment for the illustrator, and a headache for the art director. So instead of waiting for your first experience with art direction to be an upsetting one, you can try it out now, as a game.

Draw something from imagination. It can be any subject whatsoever. Dont spend any more than about an hour on the drawing. This is about getting an idea down on paper and then iterating on it. Got it drawn? Good. Now, you will need a D-20. Or, for those of you not acquainted any of the wonderful geeky games that require 20-sided dice, instead write the numbers one through twenty on scraps of paper and drop them into a hat. Now roll the die or draw a number from the hat. Look up that number on the chart below. On a fresh sheet of paper, draw the same subject again. But alter it according to the directions below according to the number you picked. Dont spend any more than an hour on the drawing. Do some research before you start if you do not know what the directions are asking for or if you need to get your thoughts in order. Go! 1. Make it creepy. 2. Make it in the style of Art Nouveau. 3. Reduce it to utter simplicity. 4. Double the number of interesting details. 5. Redraw it in the style of a Chinese ink painting. 6. Add foliage. 7. Add horns, spikes, or other pointy bits. 8. Replace one of the major elements with something cute. 9. Replace part with an element of Japanese architecture or culture. 10. Replace part with an element of African architecture or culture. 11. Add an element of Gothic architecture. 12. Draw it again, as if it has been destroyed by something. 13. Add defensive elements. 14. Remove the item or character of primary focus, and focus on the secondary elements. 15. Pick one of the items or characters involved and redraw only that, in detail. 16. Draw the same subject from a different perspective. 17. Make it high-tech. 18. Make it low-tech. 19. Add a character or creature that interacts with the main object of focus. 20. Re-arrange the elements of the picture, or draw it in a different pose. Try doing another iteration or two on your subject. Or pick a new subject. Or, have a friend write up a

new list of twenty instructions for you to test yourself with. Have fun with this. Art direction can either be an annoying limitation, or it can be a challenge that gives you opportunity to flex your creative muscles, demonstrate your versatility, and have a bit of fun. The difference between those two states is your attitude. Perspective, From the Beginning Youve probably tried some basic perspective by now you started with a cube, and perhaps you went from there to a street scene or a castle. And at least one person has told you that youve got the perspective wrong. Its hard. How do you get from a basic understanding of perspective to the point where you can sketch out a complex scene with accuracy and ease? Lets go back to that cube and do it a step at a time. (Need to learn the basics of perspective? Try Perspective 101.)

***********Assignment #6: Cube Contortionism************* Draw two or three cubes sitting on a plane. Each cube should use two-point perspective, and just to keep things fun, none of those cubes should use the perspective point used by another cube. In other words, whoever left these cubes lying on the living-room floor didnt line them up neatly. Dont do any shading just yet. Focus on getting the perspective points at the right distances from one-another to make your cubes look like proper cubes, and not like funky rectangles. Once your cubes look like cubes, subtract rectangular pieces from one of them. Make it look like the Borgs version of Swiss cheese. Make sure every hole is drawn properly in perspective. To the second cube, try adding rectangular extensions. To the third, try whatever you like. Then draw a sun into the sky and use it to cast shadows from your abused cubes. See if you can get the shapes of the shadows on the ground to be shaped accurately. No blob shadows allowed. I know, its not as exciting as a full city-scape with flying cars, but youll get there. . .

***********Assignment #7: Cube in 3D************* Draw another cube using two- or three- point perspective. Add some rectangular holes and extensions to it. Keep it simple, and dont fuss with shading. Now, on the same page, draw the same cube again, but rotated around to another position. Are you familiar with 3D modeling programs? The way they work is that in the center of the 3D space is your model. The virtual camera that you look through to see the model gets rotated around, so that you can see the model from all sides. With this exercise, I want you to do the same thing in your head. Build a mental image of your cubeshape. Understand how it exists, not in two dimensions, but three. Then, use your sketchbook to

capture what you imagine. The drawing isnt the important part of this process. The important part is holding a 3D image in your mind, and using your paper and pencil to communicate that shape. This is what concept artists do when drawing characters, environments, and other things destined to exist in 3D.
Attached Images

Atmospheric Perspective Atmospheric perspective is one of several ways to give your paintings and drawings depth. If you are unfamilliar with the term, it means that the farther away a subject gets from the camera, the more gas you are looking through to see them. So, the farther away the subject is, the more it becomes the color of the atmosphere. It is easier to understand atmosphere if you think of a thick fog. In a thick fog, your hand looks perfectly normal one or two feet in front of you. The highlights are still bright, the shadows are still dark.

Look at someones arm twenty feet away, and the values and colors are all going to be a little closer to the value and the color of the fog. Farther away still, and that arm will be just a silowette that is the color of fog, but a little darker and a little bit skin-colored. Atmospheric perspective occurs on even the clearest of days, which is why distant mountains become blue or purple. The color they become is the color of the sky, darkened by the color of the mountains. You dont need to work in color to practice atmospheric perspective. ***********Assignment #8: Atmospheric Perspective Still-Life************* Find two objects of the same variety: two forks, two bishops from a chess-board, etc. Set them up on a table-top so that one of them is as close to you as possible, and the other is as far as possible. Then arrange yourself so that you have an eye-level view of the table-top. You will want to be able to see those objects as close to overlapping as possible. Now, unless you are living on Jupitor or are on top of a mountain in a cloud, youre not going to really see any atmospheric perspective to draw. Youre going to have to make it up as you go along. Hint: sketch in both objects lightly. Then darken the closer object. You dont have to get into crazy shading to do this assignment, but some shading is a bonus. There are two ways to handle the shading: either assume that the paper is the color of the fog, and darken all shadows down from there accordingly; or assume that the paper is the color of the highlights, and shade the empty spaces down to the level of the fog. (Or work on toned paper, using a dark meduim and a light medium.) The goal is to make the second object appear to be properly far away, rather than looking like a smaller version of the same object.

******Assignment #9: Atmospheric Perspective From Imagination******** Try assignment #8 again. But this time, draw two characters from your imagination, or two robots, or two dragons, or. . . you get the idea. Perspective from Life Q: How do you make that jump from cubes, in perspective, drawn from imagination, to items observed in the real world, drawn from perspective? A: Loosely sketch the basic shape of the object as you see it, without worrying about vanishing points or whatnot. Once that is established, get out the ruler, and start laying in lines until your squiggly drawing meets all the requirements of perspective. Then, once your observed object has been cajoled into being a tidy set of lines, start working in the details. The first few times you try this are likely to be sloppy, tedious, and perhaps disastrous. Turn the page and try again.

Well, honestly, this may work better on big loose sheets of paper than in your sketchbook, what with the unwieldiness of a ruler bonking into the sketchbook binding. But work with what youve got. For more on perspective, try Perspective 101. ***********Assignment #10: Furniture from Observation************** Furniture is ubiquitous, and generally boxy, so find yourself a chair or dresser or shelf. Draw it from at least two angles. You dont have to get into crazy shading just focus on getting the proportions correct in proper perspective. Then, based on what you observed, draw a similar piece of furniture, from imagination, from at least two angles. So, if the first time you drew a Mission-style dresser, maybe the second time around make it a dilapidated and defaced dresser made by Orcs. If its a school desk, you could turn it into an elegant Elvish writing desk complete with inkwell and calligraphy set. ************Assignment #11: the Back of the Building************** Pick a building in your neighborhood that you can only see from one side. Draw it. Good. Now, imagine what the back of the building looks like. It could have a simple porch that matches the style of the front of the building. Or, it could have a third-story loading dock for dragons. Make it so! Advanced Perspective 1Do 10 pages of 3 insects each in perspective using centerline. 2Do 10 pages of 3 cars each in perspective using centerline 3Do 5 industrial design renderings based off Scott Robertson gnomon vid 4Do 5 matte paintings in real cities with perspective grids, random characters Color

Color Assignments To learn to draw a thing, the best way to go about it is to draw it from direct observation. But theres no good way to paint a moonlit landscape from observation, because its too dark to see what you are drawing. Lets say you want to paint a scene with a ninja on a rooftop at night. . .

******** Assignment #12: Night and Day from Observation********* Set up a still-life lit by a strong direct light-source. Sunlight is preferable, but a lamp will do in a pinch. Paint it or draw it in color, doing your best to capture the colors accurately. Remember, this is a sketch, so dont spend more than about an hour on it. Once that is done, start a new image. Paint your still-life a second time. This time, dont use accurate colors. Use the same value information in your image, but substitute blues and greens for the original colors. Turn that sunlight into moonlight.

If you are using PhotoShop, you can do this quickly by fiddling with the colorsof the original painting; but for a better understanding of the colors I recommend starting from scratch. This can be repeated with any subject from observation. ******** Assignment #13: Night and Day from Imagination********* Repeat assignment 12, but instead of working from a still-life, draw something from imagination such as a ninja on a rooftop. Paint the subject first lit with sunlight, and then lit with moonlight. Use what you Attached Images learned about colors from assignment

Skin Tones

Skin Tones
The big secret to painting skin is that there is no single skin tone. Skin is made up of different colors depending on the setting. Whether skin looks correct has more to do with the values then with the hues. ********Assignment #14: Self Portrait in Arbitrary Colors******** Set up a mirror and a light-source so that you have a view of yourself with one part of your face lit, and one part in shadow. Then, pick two colors, one warm, and one cool. One of those colors is going to be your shadow color, and the other will be your brightly-lit color. Adjust the values accordingly lighten the brightly-lit color and darken the shadow color. Add a little of another color to one or both of those, if necessary I find I almost always need to add a bit of yellow. Then, use the two resulting colors to start painting a two-color sketch of yourself. Once you have what is essentially a full monochromatic sketch, then you can try adding in little bits of other colors, such as red for the lips and ears. But dont forget: this is just a sketch. Dont get caught up in painting details. The goal is to get the colors to work as skin tones. As you work, think up different possible scenarios in which such a color scheme might be useful. Red shadow and blue highlights? Thats a figure standing on the rim of a smoldering pit of lava at night, lit by the sharp glow of a crystal ball. Green shadow, red highlights? Hes in a jungle, lit by the setting sun. And so forth.

This assignment is best if repeated three or four times with different sets of colors. It is also a wonderful opportunity to practice sketching crazy expressions Drawing Humans People are hard to draw. They are also the most common subject matter in representational art. Between those two things, it is a good idea to practice drawing people. The following is by no means a comprehensive list of exercises for learning to draw humans. Its just a few things to try that maybe you havent thought of yet, in an order that may or may not be useful. ********Assignment #15: Researching Anatomy******** There are a number of books out there that teach methods for drawing humans from imagination. These methods often involve sketching limbs as basic shapes, or starting from some sort of simplified skeleton. Theres no one right method. Try one for a while, then try another, or invent your own. Keep in mind, however, that in order to get the most out of these exercises, you also need to spend time drawing humans from observation, and you need to spend time studying muscles and bones also from observation, if at all possible. It does no good to sketch a human from the skeleton up if you dont have a basic understanding of the human skeleton. Cadavers arent a dime a dozen, so medical models make a good substitute. Medical models arent cheap or easy to come by, either. So, you need to get creative. Does your school own a plastic skeleton? See if you can schedule some time to draw it. One skeleton can provide hours and hours of sketching fun. Draw the skull, draw the rib-cage, draw the limbs, draw the whole thing. If you ask very nicely, the school might even let you take the skeleton off of its hook and lay it on a table or set it in a chair. You can also do some research on plastic models of skeletons and skulls. With a little searching, you might find some that are reasonably priced. You could ask for some bones for Christmas. . . Then there are textbooks. Grays Anatomy is a classic, but there are others, meant either for artists or physicians. Do some research, ask other artists for suggestions. Diagrams on paper arent as good as models, but they are better than nothing. Study those muscles; copy them into your sketchbook so that you can build a virtual model in your head of the complex shape that makes up a human being.

********Assignment #16: Adding Bones to a Mastercopy******** This is based on an assignment that I did in college. Pick out a piece of art with a human in it. The more anatomically correct, the better; and also, the more foreshortened or contorted the position, the more fun the assignment. You can use comic-book figures or you can use a Michelangelo its up to you. First, draw the figure in your sketchbook. Focus on keeping the proportions correct. Then you have three choices: use tracing paper, draw right on top of your drawing, or do a second

drawing. If you use tracing paper, then tape it to your page or paper-clip it down. Then draw the skeleton onto the figure. (Or next to the figure, if you use the third option.) Use whatever reference you have available to you. See if you can make the bones work correctly in space. The funniest version of this assignment that I ever saw was Hello Kitty turned into a skeleton. Okay, it was an awesome drawing, but if you wish to really learn anatomy, stick to a realistic figure. ********Assignment #17: Constructing Humans from Spare Parts******** So, about those techniques for drawing humans from imagination by starting with basic shapes of some sort. Great! Leap right in and give it a try. To really give your brain a workout, try this: draw a human from imagination sitting in a chair. Dont get too worried about details just yet. Focus on proportions; focus on getting the basic building blocks into place. Good. Now, draw the same figure, in the same position, from the side. And then try again from the top. Focus on understanding the figure in 3D. Dont forget: there are about a thousand ways for a human to sit in a chair, and there are a thousand types of chair. This doesnt have to be boring. NEXT: draw 5 skeletons and muscles over models NEXT:read figure invention from start to finish, do all the exercises Still More about Drawing People ********Assignment #18: Sniping******** Take your sketchbook to a public place with lots of people, such as the food court at a shopping mall, or a sporting event. Find a strategic place to snipe-draw, and start attempting to catch heads or whole poses on paper. You may want to start by sketching people who are holding still and absorbed in some task that doesnt involve much movement. But the really fun part is trying to capture people in motion. For that, try to catch a mental snapshot of someone in action. Then, blot everything else out of your mind, and try to get that snapshot down on paper. One trick to this is to draw until your mind runs out of real, remembered details. Then use that scribble you did manage to capture as the starting point for a character that is made up by your imagination. Itll be very clumsy for a while. Youll get lots of scribbles and wasted paper. But dont worry about that its all part of training yourself. The paper can be thrown away, and you will improve. ********Assignment #19: Figure Drawing Class******** It is unavoidable: the best way to learn to draw people is to lock yourself in a room with a naked sample. Check your local community colleges, continuing-ed courses, adult courses, art centers, art leagues, etc. Somewhere near you is an opportunity to draw from a nude model. If you are underage, they

very well may take you if they get your parents permission, even if they dont specify that in the class info so call them up and ask. Do everything that you can to get into one of these courses or open-drawing studios. Life drawings are the best possible thing to have in your college application portfolio. ********Assignment #20: After Figure Drawing Class: Costumes******** Once you have access to a figure-drawing class, you will find yourself with piles of sketches of naked people. Now for something a little more fun! Copy those figures, and add costumes. Go crazy! Historical dress, armor, fantasy chain-mail silliness, stylish fashion drawings, mech exoskeletons, superhero costumes, grafted-on animal parts; whatever floats your boat. ********Assignment #21: After Figure Drawing Class: Spare Parts******** Take one of your nude drawings and copy it over only this time, use your spare parts technique to rebuild the pose. Use this to reverse-engineer the spare-parts technique. Where does the technique work? Where does it over-generalize? How can you change the process to build a better human from scratch? Try to come up with a technique that works best for you. Dont stick so slavishly to someone elses instructions that you are limited. Some Ideas for Still-Lifes If you find that the objects around your house or your room arent all that interesting to draw, then go on a scavenger hunt. Go outside, and look for discarded junk or natural objects. Or, rummage in the fridge. An egg or an orange or a leftover drum-stick are all good subjects to draw either as-is, or bit/broken/sliced/cooked. (If its particularly perishable, be sure to throw it away when you are done.) Lower-end antique stores can be good sources of inexpensive and interesting junk. Many have boxes of old keys and other miscellaneous odds and ends that can be bought for under a dollar. And even better are yard sales. The last yard sale I visited yielded two baskets and two antique glass bottles, all for a couple of dollars. Know somebody who owns an interesting object? Ask if you can borrow it. If all else fails, make something! Fold some origami. Crumple up some paper. Use cardboard scraps and a glue-gun to construct a castle model. As they say in Katamari Damacy The world is full of many things! Power-Leveling for the Busy Artist Composition Not a lot of people are in a position to devote eight or more hours a day to grinding their way to professional level skills. For most of us, if you want to develop your skills, youve got to shoehorn the practice into your already busy schedule. Think of art-making as music-making. Anyone who has learned an instrument will tell you that you have to devote daily practice to it over the course of years. There are a lot of repeated, technical exercises to go through scales, chords, fingerings stuff with an almost complete lack of creativity involved (at first glance). It can be downright boring. From day-to-day it is hard to see any improvement in your skills. All it takes is one look at a better player and you can find yourself in a

funk your motivation smashed, you can go from slow progress to no progress. So right off the bat, you have to prepare yourself for the slow pace and the danger of losing your momentum. If looking at the work of better artists is going to smash your confidence, then spend less time looking at the work of better artists. (This is something that I have to do myself.) If you are likely to get distracted by, say, television or games or the internet (as I am currently being distracted right at this moment) then do what you can to avoid the temptation. And at the heart of it all: get yourself on a practice schedule. The most progress that I ever made at the piano was when my teacher had me practice for an hour a day, every day, with no days off. I now apply this to my oil-painting habit. And as with the piano-practicing, much of what I do with the paints is technical. I have been focusing on color, value, manipulation of paint, and so on. I have found that a particular time of day works best for me: first thing in the morning. I get my hour of painting done, and then afterwards I go to work, run errands, exercise, and play. Different schedules are going to be optimal for different people. Maybe youre more productive before going to bed. Maybe three hours every other day suits you better. Maybe youve got a bus schedule that gives you fifteen-minute increments twice a day that you can use to draw. Thats great! Figure out when your power hour is, and stick to it. Keep a log of the time you invest itll help you get regular and turn the activity into a habit. If you want to get even more specific with your practice time, then try this: pick a weekly goal. For example, this week I am doing self-portraits, or this week I am doing color studies of light as observed on real objects, or this week I am drawing robots using perspective. Put your goal in writing. Put your daily hour or equivalent towards reaching this goal. And if you want to do any additional art above and beyond the drill, then you can do that after you have done your daily hour. I would think up some catch way to conclude this, but I really need to get my own butt downstairs to do my daily painting. Happy art-making!

More About Composition ********Assignment #23 Finding Compositions Within Compositions******** This assignment requires glue, scissors, and a magazine. Within every composition are a dozen other compositions. Find a full-page advertisement. Cut out a postage-stamp-sized rectangle from the advertisement, and see if you can make what is on that tiny rectangle be a complete and interesting composition on its own. Glue it in your sketchbook Fill two pages of your sketchbook with these tiny found compositions. On one page, glue images that contain recognizable features, such as an eye, a tree, or a word. On the other, glue only compositions that are more unrecognizable perhaps the folds in a shirt and a bit of skin and a bit of some other color. Try for a range from minimalist to details-galore. Try rectangles with different aspect ratios, from square to tall and thin to short and wide. Take notes on what works compositionally and what doesnt, and why. ********Assignment #24 - Non-Representational Composition ********

Say youve got a hankering to draw a lone figure rappelling down a vast cliff. Or a group of ninjas fleeing across an intergalactic garbage dump. Or, a giant ramshackle space-station. Each one of these things consists of patterns and marks that almost dont represent anything at all. Aside from the challenge of making a cliff-face look recognizably like a cliff-face, how do you make the pattern of it look interesting, and how do you make it compositionally nifty? Use a ruler to draw a series of tidy rectangles on a page or two of your sketchbook. The size is up to you maybe two to a page suits you best, or maybe a dozen thumb-nails. Each of those rectangles is going to be a complete composition. Using your medium of choice, start filling those rectangles with marks. The only rule is this: dont draw any recognizable images. This is an exercise in nonrepresentational art.* That means that marks and colors themselves need to look good, without the added burden of also having to look like something else. Use line, value, pattern, hue (if working in color), shape, and anything else you can think of to make these rectangles into interesting things to look at. Use this to explore what works and what doesnt which of these rectangles would you want to pin to a bulletin board to look at again later? Which would you want to throw away? And why? Use this to find out what your favorite medium is capable of, while youre at it, because chances are youve never fully explored the range of uses for that pencil or those water-colors. You can use PhotoShop for this, but dont use any funky filters for now. If you want to get really methodical about this, then do a longer series. Do a batch of images that focus on value, then another that focuses on line, etc. Try to identify which element you are the least comfortable with and then try to improve at that one thing. Oh yes and dont agonize over any of these. They should be fast and fun. Spend exactly as much time on each as you feel you need to, and no more. The next time you want to try speed-painting an intergalactic garbage-dump, you can use this approach to build an interesting composition before agonizing over what sort of garbage such a dump would be made up of.

* I am avoiding the word abstract here because abstract implies starting with a recognizable object and then simplifying or changing it.

********Assignment #25 - Build a Composition with Perspective from Life******** Say you have to draw a building in perspective and you also have to make a good composition out of it. Thats two large technical hurdles to overcome at once! How do you do it? Start with a chair, or cardboard box, matchbox, lunchbox, or some other object that is made up of basic rectangles. Toss it in the middle of the room, and sketch it. For now, stick to pencil outlines but do use a straight-edge and your knowledge of multiple-point perspective to get it as accurate as possible. Then, once you have a correct image of your object, use your straight-edge to draw a rectangle

around it. Study the relationship between the object and the rectangle does it make a stronger composition in the lower portion of a square, or the left of a horizontal rectangle? What happens compositionally when the rectangle slices right through the object, cropping it is the composition improved by showing only part of the chair? Has the negative space, the space around your object, become as interesting as the object? If so, thats good! Repeat this quickly a few times, drawing the object from different angles and then bounding it with different rectangles. ******Assignment #26 - Build a Composition with Perspective from Imagination***** Repeat exercise 25, but using an imagined subject. Start with something as simple as the object that you drew from life, such as a pirates chest, a throne, or a simple building. ******Assignment #27 - Build a Composition with a Character from Imagination***** Repeat exercise 25, but with a character from your imagination. Bend and twist and pose and crop your character to make the negative space interesting. A well-designed character is great, but a welldesigned character in an eye-catching composition is even better. Communication

Communication
Communication thats the whole point of illustration. Some examples of communication in illustration: this is a guy with a sword, this book contains medieval romance, this dragons wings could conceivably bear its weight in flight, this is George Bush, this is a sleek new car design, this is a landscape that invokes sadness. Communication in images includes everything from conveying the idea of a material (grass, stone, flesh, etc.) to acting, to conveying a mood through non-representational marks. ******Assignment #28 Mood, Non-Representational***** Pick a simple emotional state happiness, sadness, anger, etc. Without using any representational or symbolic imagery (meaning no pictures *of* anything) try to convey this mood. Use color, shape, line, value whatever you want. For best effect, do at least two, so that you can compare one to the other. There is no right answer to this assignment. And if you feel intimidated by the idea of just drawing marks and shapes dont be. There are artists who have made a career of making marks and shapes, who would be intimidated by the idea of drawing a superhero; and there are illustrators who would shy away of drawing non-representational art. But the most versatile artists are the ones who can do both. If you can do both, then you can use the marks and colors and shapes to reinforce the mood that the superhero is in. ******Assignment #29 Mood, Representational***** Set up a still-life, draw a landscape from observation, or draw something else from direct observation. But before you start, pick a mood to convey. Perhaps you are drawing a pear, or your

shoe. Make it a sad pear, or an angry shoe. Dont add anything from imagination to this one no sad faces or angry rusty spikes. Use changes in color or shape or mark-making to communicate the mood. Perhaps the pear slumps a little more in your image than in reality; perhaps the colors have shifted to moody blues and grays. Perhaps the shoe is rendered in reds with jagged strokes. If you have done assignment 28, you can try applying the same mood and technique to this representational image. For instance, if you drew sadness using soft swatches of shades of blue, then draw your sad pear using the same colors and types of marks. ******Assignment #29 Acting, Facial Expression***** When you include a person in your image, that person doesnt just sit there like a piece of fruit. That person becomes an actor. You are the director, and it is up to you to tell that person what they should be communicating, and how. Pull up a mirror. Imagine yourself in a fantastic setting where something dramatic is happening. You are being abducted by aliens! You are leading a charge across a battlefield! You have just won the lottery! You are about to see the fruit of years of malicious planning! Got a good facial expression? Good. Have you got it lit dramatically? Light from below can add creepiness. A bright, sharp warm light, with a weak blue secondary light can mimic sunlight. Draw what you see. Then show it to your friends and have them guess at what is going on in the image. Write down their reactions in your sketchbook for later, like a journal entry. ******Assignment #30 Acting, Body Language***** For this assignment, you will need a buddy. You will be drawing one-another. No, you dont have to take off your clothes. Start by writing down a list of dramatic scene ideas. For instance, you have just stepped in a pit full of snakes! You have defeated your nemesis in battle! You have lost your wallet! You have just failed to save the world from a terrible doom! Keep these ideas handy, because if you have never posed as a model before, it is easy to get embarrassed, or get a case of the giggles, or otherwise wonder what the heck am I doing here? Now, take turns sketching each other. For the model: make big, dramatic poses! Use every part of your body. If you can only hold a pose for thirty seconds, then tell your friend to sketch quickly! For the one drawing: dont bother drawing facial features, and dont get hung up trying to render details of clothing or hair. Try to capture the whole body arms, legs, torso, head, hands, and feet. Try for something that is more substantial than a stick-figure, but if all you can manage are generalized shapes, thats s good place to start. Hands can be simplified to mittens; the direction of the face can be indicated with some quick marks for the location of eyes or jaw-line or nose. Dont forget the really fun poses flying! The model can get into crazy horizontal or upside-down poses using a chair or by lying on the floor. Draw outside on the grass if there is a danger that your pose may result in falling. And use props if you want a broom-handle makes a wonderful sword, cane, tree-branch, light saber, pool cue, baseball bat, etc. Be sure to try drawing foreshortened poses that means draw with a view looking down at the top of

the models head or up at his feet, instead of drawing from just the side. Have fun! More on Perspective Game Art: GM1 #Do 5 props in an art style for an existing game(guild wars,blizzard etc) GM2 # (Do 20 thumbnails go design the environments ,and 20 silhouettes to design the turnarounds) GM3 #Do 5 turnarounds in an art style for an existing game GM4 #Do 5 environment concepts in the art style of an existing game Setting Goals for Yourself You know that feeling you get when you look at a picture made by your favorite artist, and you love the image, but it seems like what they have done is impossibly far away from your own skill level, and you have no idea how to achieve similar results? Every artist, even the best ones, have felt the same way about their heroes. Dont let it get you down or discourage you from looking at the art you love. Whether you are attending a fancy art school, or you are picking up art skills on your own, you will need to set goals for yourself, figure out how to achieve those goals, and then do the hard work necessary to get there. The art that you love can help you to figure out what you need to study ******Assignment #31 Analyzing Art ***** Pick out one of those pieces of art that inspires you to be an artist. You can paste a copy of it into your sketchbook, or doodle a quick version of it. Then, make a list of all the things that the artist needed to know in order to make that image. You can even draw arrows pointing to those things on the image if you want. Attached to this post is one of the images that inspired me. It is an illustration from James Gurneys book Dinotopia. Here is my list, and an explanation of each thing. Human anatomy. You have to know how humans are put together in order to portray them. From the research Ive done, I know that Gurney takes photographs of friends and family to use as reference for his illustrations. But I also suspect that many of the figures in here are from his imagination. That means he had to know the human body well enough that he has a detailed model of it in his mind he can draw from when live humans arent available. Dinosaur Anatomy. Gurney had to do a lot of research in order to paint the most accurate possible dinosaurs. He didnt just Google dinosaur images he studied up on dinosaur skeletons, reconstructions, scientific illustrations, and he even used dinosaur toys as references. Acting. A story is being told here. Each of the humans and dinosaurs is an actor in the story. Gurney used body language and facial expressions to tell us what is going on. Even those blowing flags are actors of a sort. They are telling us that its a windy day out there. Botany/Landscape. Although trees and grass play a minor role in this image, if Gurney hadnt

thought about the way that grass is trampled on a race-track, then the ground wouldnt have been as successful. Those bits of greenery tell us everything we need to know about what sort of environment this race takes place in. Perspective. Those tents were all carefully drawn in proper perspective before they became a part of this image. Atmospheric Perspective. The far images recede beautifully into the dust. This requires a knowledge of how to use color and value to represent particles in the air. Light. Every shadow in the image is consistent. The shadows on the tents were first drawn in proper perspective, before color and value was even a consideration. Value. Shadows are darker than sunlit areas. Once the shape of a shadow is established, value comes next. Gurney paints his images first in sepia tones. That is, he uses a range of browns to sketch in the values before he gets to the colors. Color. Color is the combination of the surface color of objects, and the light hitting those surfaces. In order to paint a shadow cast on a colorful tent, Gurney had to know what the color in the shadow would be compared to the color in the sunlight. Cloth. Gurney had to know how to make cloth look properly wrinkled in order to paint realistic flags and clothing. Costume/architecture/prop design. Gurney had to come up with all of those hats and saddles and tents. Many inexperienced artists think concept art is nothing but coming up with new ideas, but the truth is that design is just one of many necessary steps in successfully communicating through an image. Composition. All of the above elements had to be arranged in a way that draws the eye to the important parts, and that looks good as an abstract arrangement of shapes. Media. The final thing necessary to create an image is a knowledge of how to use a particular media. In this case, the image was made in oil paint.

Its a long list and it is full of tough subjects, but now that I have broken down this bogglingly complex painting into individual academic skills, I can study each of these things independent of the rest. My final goal may be to paint like James Gurney, but in order to achieve that frighteningly lofty goal, I now have a list of smaller goals that are more easily within reach.
Attached Images

What Should I Include in my College Portfolio?

TAD:concept art,projects(eragon) chow,cow,etc indy game &freelance work Value

Value
If I were organizing this class-thing properly, then I would have put the following assignments back at the beginning. Oops. Value is the amount of light or dark in an image. A black and white photograph is all values and no colors. I rather assumed this was common knowledge until just this past weekend, when I found myself attempting to explain the concept of value to a woman who had no experience with art. Value is black, white, and all of the shades of gray in between. It is shading. The following assignments should be done small and quickly! Im serious: dont agonize over these. They are intended to get you thinking about values and then quickly moving on with a new skill in your pocket. If you take too long on them, theyll get boring; if they get boring, you wont finish them, and if you dont finish them, the assignments wont help you as much. So, put on your sprinting shoes, and GO! ******Assignment #32 Many Ways to Render Value***** Go through your house and find a hand-full of small, white objects. Look for simple shapes like a matchbox, or the lid of a tube of toothpaste, a q-tip. Set the items on a white sheet of paper, and point a strong light at them. Now, what are you drawing with? How many ways can you think to shade with that tool? Chance are youve got either a pencil or a pen. With a pen, you can shade by hatching (making parallel lines), cross-hatching (parallel lines crossing over parallel lines), scribbling, stippling, or making other funky little marks. This can all be done with or without outlining the subject. A pencil can do everything a pen can do. And additionally, a pencil can be gently rubbed across the surface of the paper in a manner that doesnt leave lines. It can be removed with an eraser. It can be smudged somewhat using a paper stump, too, but dont be tempted to rub it around with your fingers, because fingers are oily, and the oil will stain the paper and interfere with the particles of graphite. Use a scrap of paper to keep your hand from smudging up your drawing if necessary. So, you have your drawing tool, and you have your collection of very simple objects. Draw each object (and the shadow it casts) using a different shading technique. Be fast and loose! If you are using a pen, try this exercise without first doing any drawing with a pencil. Try methods that youve never used before. Try methods that seem absurd, like filling up space with little squiggles. Draw with clouds of cross-hatches just vaguely in the right place, disregarding edges. See if you can find a technique thats quick and fun and that captures a decent range of values. ******Assignment #33 Making Value Decisions***** When a photographer prints a black-and-white photograph, they make a very important decision: how much of the photograph, if any, is going to be the white of the paper, and how much of it, if any, is going to be the blackest possible black. When you work with values, you get to make the same

decision. You can choose to make a drawing range from the white of the paper down to just a pale gray. You can choose to coat most of the paper in compressed charcoal one of the darkest (and messiest) drawing materials and leave only a few highlights. An image that ranges from white to gray is considered to be high key. An image that ranges from gray to black is low key. A neutral gray is right in the middle between black and white. Contrast refers to the difference in the image between its lights and its darks. An image that has both strong whites and strong blacks has high contrast. An image made of subtle grays, that avoids black and white, is low contrast. Pick another item from your collection of white objects. Draw it twice. The first time, draw it high key meaning leave most of it white, with just some gentle grays for the shadows, and maybe one or two subtle dark spots in the darkest shadows. The second time, go for a lower key. Make the dark parts of the image massively dark, and make everything gray, except for the highlights, which should remain the white of the paper. OR draw the item first with high contrast, then with low contrast. There is no one right way to accurately draw value there is only what you prefer to do. Which did you prefer? ******Assignment #34 Shading Non-White Objects***** The point of drawing white objects is that A. there is no color to confuse the issue, and B. its really easy to see what the light does on the surface of a white object. But not everything in the world is conveniently white. So, take another trip around your house. Round up a black item and a gray item. Set these on your white sheet of paper under the strong light, along with one of your white items. And draw. ******Assignment #35 Fun With Value***** You must be sick of all those dice and buttons by now! Time for some fun: invent a creature or a robot that has black segments and white segments. Think of killer whales and police cars as examples. And, using what you have learned. . . draw it!

Final Assignments: Scott Robertson 150 perspective shapes with centerline(watch video 250 hovercraft ideas(watch video) 350 car ideas(watch video) 450 airplanes(watch video) 510 industrial design renderings(watch video) Anatomy: Watch marshall vandruff class. Take notes Figure Invention: -Read and study first 40 pages of Figure Invention (breaks can do speedpaintings,thumbs,Chow,etc) -Read and study next 40 pages of Figure Invention

-Read and study next 40 pages of Figure Invention -Read and study first 40 pages of Figure Invention -Read and study first 40 pages of Figure Invention

-Read and study first 40 pages of Figure Invention

Study Loomis.^same as above for successful drawing. Extra:vilpu,loomis fig.drawing,animal anatomy book.

Last edited by Seedling; July 10th, 20