The concept art for games is one of the first steps in the games development. It is also one of the most important stages as this is where some of the base ideas for the games characters, environments, objects and other visual aspects are designed. It is crucial that the concept artists depict the games designers initial explanation and description of the character so they can draw it perfectly and so the art shows the character for what it is, for example if a concept artist read a description of a powerful, strong human then the concept artist would want to draw the character big stocky and scary looking rather than small and scrawny.
This is some of the work of Samwise Didier; he is a concept artist for Blizzard and has worked on World of Warcraft, Warcraft and Starcraft. His style of drawing tends to be very detailed specifically on the armour and weapons of the characters; this makes the characters very unique.
Some of his other work like this dwarf has dark and light blue colours well blended into each other, and as you can see the detail of the shading on the gun makes it stand out also the colours of the gun also contrast with the rest of the picture.
When the artists are designing the characters they have bare in mind the target audience for the game for example, if a description was of a women that is attractive, and the target audience for the game is 5-10 year olds, then the artists have to make sure that they draw the character acceptable for the age range of the target audience.
A lot of art makes people feel different emotions, also the colours and images in some pieces of artwork can portray different thins e.g. good and evil.
As you can see the two images above portray different emotions the image on the left shows a dark evil figure that shows a lot of evil, also the fact that it is in black and white which makes the figure look scary and mysterious. The image on right is much more colourful and portrays completely different emotions, this piece of artwork is a very peaceful and happy image, and the colours are fairly bright also the colours make it look warm as they are light orange and dark orange. This picture not only contrasts with the other piece of artwork but with itself as it shows a panda, people think of pandas as being peaceful and cute, however in this picture the panda is a warrior as you can see from the sword on his back.
All of the artwork above is from a fantasy background there is a very big variety just by looking at the different pieces you can see the artist likes using bright colours when he does use them, however he prefers to do more black and white pieces, which have a big affect on emotion. A historical piece of artwork would be an image from something like Call of Duty: World at War, you can tell from this concept art that it is historical as the buildings look old and there are tanks, also peoples clothing are suited to that point in time. Other aspects of this photo that portrays it as a historical photo are the colours, they are very dull and nearly black and white, it’s not very bright and the only bits of colour is from the fire on the buildings and from the tanks.
Contemporary artwork in games would be for casual games such as Super Mario or Sonic the hedgehog.
As you can see from the two images above that the contemporary artwork for games is very colourful and bright, this attracts younger people and casual gamers.
Futuristic artwork in games would be included in such genres like, sci-fi and some third and first person shooters.
The image above is a piece of the concept art from Star Wars: Force Unleashed. You can tell that this piece of art is futuristic as it does not have traditional weapons such as swords and shields, and the colours are also contrasting as it has light colours towards the centre and as you get further out it becomes slightly darker.
