Ideation Process: Part 2

Now, up to this point, we’ve been think­ing of the sketches as a per­sonal tool, that is, an exter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a myr­iad of inter­nal ideas in an attempt to organ­ise free flow­ing thoughts into a struc­tured pat­tern for our own per­sonal use.

We have part of the design in our minds and this can often cause us to stop short of cre­at­ing sketches that mean any­thing to any­one but ourselves.

This sit­u­a­tion would be fine if the work we are doing is only for our­selves, how­ever, most often the art we doing isn’t just for fun, it’s because some­one is pay­ing us to deliver.

These peo­ple need to under­stand what we are think­ing at every step of the process to reduce the like­li­hood of going in the wrong direc­tion down the line — it saves them time (and money) and it saves you the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing to do major rework.

So this is a very impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion to keep in mind (impor­tant enough that I am reit­er­at­ing it) — as com­mer­cial artists, we NEVER oper­ate in a vac­uum, our work is gen­er­ally part of a greater whole, in edi­to­r­ial enhanc­ing the writ­ing or as con­cept art which pre­cedes the asset build­ing phase of game or film development.

In short, we need to share our ideas effec­tively with other peo­ple, and most often with peo­ple who are not artists.

Clean­ing Up

In the above exam­ple, I chose to clean up this design because I felt the char­ac­ter had a cer­tain amount of poten­tial for exper­i­men­ta­tion – it was also the least devel­oped and would demon­strate the process between a rather abstract image built of large shapes and how you would begin to add in the design ele­ments gradually.

In this case, I also increased the res­o­lu­tion to 1221px by 657px so that I would be com­fort­able while adding the details. I’d also like to men­tion that in most of the con­cept art posi­tions I have worked, the bulk of this kind of work is done as a rough guide for the 3D artists who tend to work with dual mon­i­tor set ups, so print ver­sions were not really required. If how­ever, you need to gen­er­ally print off your work, stick to work­ing on at least A4, this will allow you suf­fi­cient detail to print off on A4 sheets.

Sil­hou­ettes

Like every­thing else in art, ideation is a fluid process that does not always take the same route. Indeed I would even go as far as to encour­age you to con­stantly ven­ture upon the path less trav­elled in order to derive new processes, new styles and new ways of thinking.

Cre­at­ing sil­hou­ettes are sim­ply another form of visual short­hand, a tool that can be used as a fore-runner to a fully fledged design besides line and tonal sketches.

As you can see from the above exam­ple, cre­at­ing a sil­hou­ette is design­ing the char­ac­ter from the out­side in, you are deter­min­ing the fea­tures that directly influ­ence the extents of the char­ac­ter and blanks the rest leav­ing your imag­i­na­tion to fill in the details.

In the exam­ple, you can again see the use of dupli­cates, allow­ing me to fill a page of sil­hou­ettes very quickly by the copy-paste method. This will free up your time to work on mak­ing sure that each sil­hou­ette receives your atten­tion regard­ing their indi­vid­u­al­ity and unique qualities.

Adher­ing to the prin­ci­ples of cre­at­ing sil­hou­ettes is impor­tant for a num­ber of reasons:

1. Removes the temp­ta­tion of spend­ing too long on the minu­tia: not being able to put­ter away end­lessly on infi­nitely small details expe­dites the process and forces you to think of the big picture.
2. Enhances the amount of thought given to an object’s recog­nis­abil­ity from a dis­tance: so a char­ac­ter is eas­ily recog­nised from far away.
3. It lets you con­cen­trate on one aspect of design at a time: you don’t need to worry about any­thing else other than the over­all shape of the sil­hou­ette, the emo­tional response from the viewer and whether that response is the desired effect based on the design requirements.

Of course, once the exter­nal shape of the char­ac­ter is agreed upon, it’s time to fill in the inter­nal details, this involves the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of exter­nal shapes, with asso­ci­ated inter­nal objects which also serve a func­tional pur­pose for the char­ac­ter in question.

Below is a video I recorded of myself doing some silhouettes.

There’s no real ‘right’ way to go about this, but a good rule I try to keep is to con­cen­trate on the larger shapes before going into the minute details, it’s a very fluid nat­ural pro­gres­sion when you think about it.

So here is an exam­ple of how a character’s sil­hou­ette is taken from an abstract sil­hou­ette to a cleaned up con­cept sketch, show­ing form and some design.

I chose this par­tic­u­lar pose because I liked it’s dynamic nature, I felt it had a lot of pos­si­bil­i­ties to explore and so I increased the res­o­lu­tion and began by work­ing in the large shapes roughly using the same basic brush that I began with.

When I was happy with the over­all shapes, I began using a soft edged air brush in order to give the shapes form and round­ness and envi­sioned the light source from a frontal raised posi­tion.  Pick­ing out your light source will answer many ques­tions regard­ing form so always keep this in mind early on in the ren­der­ing process.

Below is another video I used to show how to define form after the sil­hou­ettes are created:

Vari­a­tions

The advent of dig­i­tal art mak­ing has many boons; the abil­ity to revert to a prior state; the effi­ciency of automa­tion; the abil­ity to paint full colour pic­tures with­out wait­ing for paint to dry nor hav­ing to inhale fumes from solvents.

In the field of con­cept art, a very time effi­cient advan­tage is the abil­ity to non-destructively cre­ate numer­ous ver­sions based on the same idea, as I have eluded to in the ear­lier parts of this article.

You can see from above that the base image is the same, how­ever, because I have dupli­cated the image twice, I negate the require­ment to think of new poses and the pro­por­tions of the fig­ure have already been taken into account with the first char­ac­ter on the left. This means for the two char­ac­ters on the right of the orig­i­nal, there is less to think about, and more effort can be put into things such as the accou­trements of each.

As you could imag­ine, the advan­tages are huge and very eco­nom­i­cal if you want to cre­ate a large num­ber of vari­a­tions based on a sin­gle sil­hou­ette or body type.  All that is required is the dupli­ca­tion of the image layer you want to work with and sim­ply paint­ing over the top of it.

Men­tal­ity

I’ve always been one to insist that what goes on in the head of the art maker is equally, if not more impor­tant than what hap­pens at the busi­ness end of a pencil.

While I’ve alluded in var­i­ous places dur­ing the tuto­r­ial what I am think­ing, here, are some of my thoughts on what you should try to keep in mind while you are explor­ing your ideas on paper:

1. You are cre­at­ing many tiny incon­se­quen­tial pieces of art, the more you cre­ate, the higher the like­li­hood that you will have within those draw­ings the ele­ments of the final design.
2. You are unbi­ased towards any one design because murphy’s law will almost always guar­an­tee that the design that least excites you will be cho­sen by the art director.
3. Every sin­gle sketch, thumb­nail, sil­hou­ette or scrib­ble is valu­able, don’t erase them.
4. Any idea is a good idea, within each sketch holds a key that could open another door which may even­tu­ally lead to the final design.

So here you are at the end of my write up, I’m sure you’re itch­ing to get to some thumb­nails under­way if you haven’t already.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my tuto­r­ial and hope­fully picked up one or two point­ers. If you have any ques­tions or com­ments please feel free to reply in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Keep artin’

Daz