What role(s) does a concept artist fill in the game development process?

As someone inspiring to become one, I have my own idea of what a concept artist does, as I learned from reading material, listening to my college professors (who have had former student who became concept artist) and by speaking with, and having my portfolio reviewed, by working concept artist.

From a thread I opened in the help wanted sub forum, I got the feeling that some people may have a different idea of what a concept artist does.

Share your thoughts.

A concept artist comes up with an idea for how something should look, then they draw it. Once your design is approved, a 3D modeller or spriter will create the ingame artwork based off of your concept art.

A concept artist comes up with an idea for how something should look, then they draw it. Once your design is approved, a 3D modeller or spriter will create the ingame artwork based off of your concept art.

Isn't that kind of misleading. They are given an idea by the director/produce/whoever and made to express it in a 2d piece of art, totaly different really. Thats what I would pay a concept artist to do.

[quote name='Jethro_T' timestamp='1309993422' post='4832010']
A concept artist comes up with an idea for how something should look, then they draw it. Once your design is approved, a 3D modeller or spriter will create the ingame artwork based off of your concept art.

Isn't that kind of misleading. They are given an idea by the director/produce/whoever and made to express it in a 2d piece of art, totaly different really. Thats what I would pay a concept artist to do.
[/quote]

I would say there's a bit of both. A concept artist would need to give visual expression to ideas from other people, but would also be able to give his own creative input and ideas into the mix.

Usually they'll be briefed/directed (on theme, function, purpose, space, style, mood, form, etc...) by a game designer, an art director, a creative director, and/or another concept artist.


Sometimes these briefs will be the result of earlier concept work.. e.g. a concept artist might do a sketch of a setting, and then be asked to colour that sketch for a dozen different moods. The results of this work (when reviewed by whoever's directing things) might form part of the brief for the next collection of work.

Maybe sometimes you will design an interesting character, and it might even get approval from your art director. But then maybe the CEO will step in and tell you to start again and make something marketable

A concept artist visualize the vision of the game(design) which is one of the first steps in the game development. I think that there's some degree of creative freedom, but on the other hand there will be limitations ( giving the hero some wings because it looks so much cooler would be against the game design [they don't wanna have a game with a flying hero], but adding some scar to make him more grim in a dark mooded game could be ok).

Take a look at some published games which although show off some conecept art to get hang of what influence concept art has on the final game. Although take a look over here.

Listening to a few concept artists talk about their craft, they seem to think that conceptart.org and Massive Black gives a false image of what concept artists really do.

The work posted on that website is far more fine art and gallery oriented, while the work in the game industry is more about making hundreds of iterations to try to nail that character/weapon/environment.

I say it's a bit of both. My brother and I are the creative masterminds behind our world, which will hopefully be in a game sometime in the future, and we've done a lot of crappy concepts by hand. Our friend does some concept work for us, and by that we mean... He takes our shitty drawing and turns it into a masterpiece, and alters it until it's what my brother and I invisioned (or as close to). I believe the other point is valid too. On one of the crappy drawings we gave him, he returned with a concept that had a lot of changes to it... we liked the changes. It's nice for a concept artist to provide ideas for the group as well as just the designers. Although I see how this may not work in a big development studio.