Anyone who likes design should check out Matt Rhodes blog post about his designs for Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I’m a big fan of Bioware’s visual language, of their games and while I’ve only spoken to Matt once and briefly, he too seemed like an awful nice guy; his character designs are one of the most sophisticated and classiest in the business and I can’t wait to see what they have been cooking up next.
His blog-post is very personal to me, being a concept artist and all. It’s often difficult to explain what it means to be one and what is required of you. Every company and every team is different, and while you can always find the default recruitment posts that say: “Concept artist needs to work with the Art director/lead and follow game design documents. Work multiple styles and know a lot of shit”. In essence it’s all that – but I find it to be a lot more complicated most days.
Most of the time in my career I haven’t had a game brief or a location brief and certainly not a story brief. All of those things are usually improvised to fit what ever you are building. Be it an ovesright in the development process or not, it’s still the daily reality of game development and being the first in line on the production side, we have to figure out how to move on without these materials. The role of an in-house concept artist is not to sit down and just draw from orders, it’s to dream, dream, dream and to push out a gazillion ideas. And then get most of them rejected, and that’s okay, because it’s our job to not take it personally and just come up with more ideas.
Most of the time in my career, I haven’t had an art director either, so the rejection/approval side of things has always been a little messy in my experience. By default, concept artists are the hands and legs of an AD and jump on all the vague ideas he or she wants to see or change. In the lack of one, we can either procrastinate or mature into mini-AD’s to keep the ball rolling. Nothing is worse than losing momentum and morale; I’ve seen confusion break people faster than torture.
For the past two and half years I’ve been working on the upcoming game Ryse, together with Kaija. It’s scheduled to release later this year on the new Xbox One and it’s been a very interesting journey, and I can’t express how gratifying it is to see how much I’ve learned and grown in that time. I’ve had the utmost pleasure of working with a really talented concept team and I won’t forget them ever. Check out concept art superstars Ramon Contini’s and Darren Bartley’s portfolios, and if you never seen Kaija’s concept art work, she has few images up here. My older concept art portfolio can be found here.
I’m hoping to make a similar post as Matt Rhodes did after Ryse gets released. Before that, here are two concept art pieces that I painted (of a gazillion million), released in an online article by Polygon.
Can’t wait to show you guys more. :)
Love,
Silver