Concept Art Research

Concept art is a form of art wherein the aim is to show a decent representation a concept of a future design or idea before they're developed as a final product. Concept art is a very necessary step in the development of any major media project.

Bungie

Bungie have a large number of artists working for them to create a mass amount of concept drawings for every aspect of their games, below are two such examples. The top is a sketch of a grunt, a base level enemy. It shows two possible designs of such grunts and shows well how you could use a default model and add to it to change subtle aspects of a model. The bottom drawing is that of a room in the game Halo. It shows well how you can start with a theme and build from the ground up.

Izzy Medrano

Izzy Medrano is a concept artist who worked on the God of War series, an incredibly graphically pleasing title. When looking at his work below you can see how his drawings would help the concept process along. The top image contains lots of possible character models from varying angles to help convey how he wants the models to be portrayed. The lower shows lots of different concepts from one angle. This would be an ideal method to use when finding out which variation an audience prefers.

Chris Metzen

Chris Metzen is a concept artist who's most known for his work for Blizzard Entertainment. The below images show a poster for Diablo and a general sketch of multiple characters and creatures. The top poster is a good way of putting across the general feel and theme of a game whilst keeping a minimal theme, I imagine this would be a very early concept piece but even still it shows a lot of ideas for the future game. The bottom piece seems to be a quick concept sketch for a project. It seems to contain a lot of possible characters and costumes as well as a small scene. These examples could be a decent scope for finding out how your target audience feels about a concept or style.

Dan Paladin

Dan Paladin is an artist behind the Behemoth games franchise, containing Alien Homonid, Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theatre. He has a unique style to his art which can be plainly seen below.

The top image is a concept piece for a game that was never completed but already shows a lot of information about how the game is intended to look and how it's intended to play. It can't have taken too long to make but contains a lot of potential information about the game and as a result is a very decent piece of concept art. The bottom image is a quick sketch of a character in Dan Paladin's arsenal. It shows how the character could possibly look if it was rendered in 3D as apposed to the normal 2D.