Hello! I've been following your art for a long time and I'm in love with the worldbuilding! Do you work in animation or a similar creative field? I'm trying to get into it myself but have no idea where to start. I've been trying some personal concept art for functional tack for someone riding a big cat, any advice would be appreciated! Thank you for being an inspiration for me!
Hi there!
Glad to have you here on the blog :) Great ask, get ready for a loooong answer lol
TL;DR:
Yep, I do work in an creative field! I worked in animation for several years - at DreamWorks and Warner Brothers doing prop design and production. A few things I worked on: Gabby's Dollhouse, Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham, and Creature Commandos (among others). Now I work at a prop and mascot studio where I do visual development for clients as well as make physical things. So it's a lot of drawing, CG modeling and sewing/crafting with all sorts of wild materials. We're doing Sesame Street Live and Universal: Mario World props and costumes right now. It's a super fun job!
Here are my main points for getting into concept art/visual development areas:
Draw, draw, draw!!
Start with a "guided" personal design project - something small you can complete.
Make a physical item related to your work.
Show off your work in a portfolio online.
Personal design projects are the best way, IMO, to practice concept design and to show that you can create a cohesive art gallery that shows off your skills. There's a lot more about that below the cut.
ok here we go!
Draw! All! The! Time! Draw a ton from life especially. Draw your couch or the tree outside or your dishwasher or the toilet in the bathroom. Literally just get a pen and a cheap sketchbook and DRAW DRAW DRAW. Go to the zoo or local conservatory to draw animals and plants, sit at a coffee shop or park and draw people. Drawing stuff/people/animals from life on paper really helps your brain process and learn what you're seeing. And just burn through those sketchbooks! Go through one a month or more, I really cannot stress enough to draw from life and how much that'll help you down the line with whatever medium you choose to do your projects in.
Completing small projects = big improvements. Pick a small story and design the characters, locations, and paint the important story-beats. Or storyboard sequences. Or turn it into a short children's book and make the illustrations, or turn it into a graphic novel. There's endless options! You can use anything in the public domain - there are LOTS of cool stories to choose from. Doing this is good practice adapting something not written by you, which cuts down on work for you, and it keeps your project scope from becoming too large. I like to choose a story and adapt it to a new genre. Like Call of the Wild, but the dogs are dinosaurs. Changing just that one thing alters EVERYTHING else, and raises some fun design challenges.
But the important part is to adapt a work in a way that's interesting to you.
Do this a few times. Each time you finish a small project, the next one will be easier and you can do more. I like to see how my favorite artists do this - how they lay out their pages, or how they show their characters. I also love looking at animated film art books for that reason as well. What do other artists think is necessary to show or not show for their story? You'll learn SO MUCH and it's fun.
A great example of this is a book called The Skillful Huntsman where a group of students adapted the Grimms fairy tale into a sci-fi epic. Granted, there was a team of 4 artists, and they were under the direction of their professors. So I don't expect a project made by a single person to look like this, but it's still a fun representation of how far you can take something and interpret it a new way.
Design your project for a "product". This might sound odd, but if you decide you want to make a book or a series of posters or a deck of trading cards, etc., that limits and changes what you'll be focusing on to design, down to how large you make your drawings so they fit nicely in whatever format you choose. AND that allows you to research how to get that physical thing made, even if it's printing it at home and stapling a book together or cutting out your cards and laminating them. Having a finished item that encompasses your project that you can hold in your hands feels AMAZING and it's SO worth it and motivating. You don't even have to sell it. Just make a cool thing for yourself!
Now you have pieces for a portfolio! You can create a portfolio on Instagram or even have your own website, but it's good to have your best work in one place with nothing else distracting from it. And now that you've got a project or two (or three!) under your belt, you'll have lots of content like designs and product photos to share with the world (and anyone hiring).
There's so much more I could go into, and I didn't even touch jobs and industries. I hope this helps!!
“YESTERDAY’S X-MEN (thread 1 of 2)
@Marvel @BRIANMBENDIS @RGBSEXONPSDS #stuartimmonen
An essay on one of the many ways in which a story
A short essay (by yours truly) as to what makes All-New X-Men special and also one of the many ways comic book art can be really cool (beyond just the flashy action).
This is fun. I dress up as Harry Potter characters and put on stupid voices to make my mouth move right. I make the GIFs and laugh myself silly at how odd I look with overdrawn lips. I share them on this dumb website and y’all are forced to look at me having fun. Sometimes you reblog it, send asks or just, in general, join in on my dumb antics. Sometimes you don’t. I’m still having fun.
I get to be creative, I get to write and act. I get to play with my camera and fiddle with my lighting and I get to explore these characters that I absolutely adore. I get to headcanon and share my headcanons and even make headcanons with my friends.
I’m making friends in a community that (at least when I started) has so little hate and so much love. I get to see my friends get better at makeup, buy new wigs and best of all laugh. I get to lay on a google hangout and cry with laughter because someone messed up their eyebrows (okay it’s usually me).
The point is, I love it. If I didn’t, I would step back. I came online as Pansy and it was one of the funniest nights I’ve had in such a long time. I don’t care if I don’t look like your headcanon of Pansy. I don’t care if you think I’m ‘too ugly’ or ‘not sassy enough’. It was literally so much fun.
I don’t care if I bring the ‘quality’ of the community down, at least I’m not hating on anyone. I don’t care if I’m not creative enough for you, because I’m not hurting anyone by making dumb memes. I don’t care. We’re all just weirdos in our rooms with a webcam or a phone and we’re all just here to have fun.
If you are not having fun. Please, take a step back. For your own sanity as well as ours. This isn’t a career. I don’t have to ‘get better’ if I don’t want to. I can just make dumb GIFs and have fun with my friends... and so can you.
For the first one, you`ll need a plain white backpack and blue and red Sharpies. And a stick or something to make sure that you draw straight lines. Draw a straight blue lines horizontally across the entire backpack and leave about an inch and a half of space in between. Now take a red Sharpie and draw a long vertical line across the entire backpack. Don`t forget the little top flap if you have a…
