So before I get into my work towards LIAF, I want to take a quick second to cover Preproduction and Concept Art. Specifically looking at one of my favourite concept artists Matt Rhodes.
Firstly looking at his character design. One of the most important parts about a Character Animation course strangly is character. Matt mainly works as a video game concept artists but I think his exploration of shapes and colour is applicable to any media. His work really focuses on details and exploration of characterization, each outfit and drawing seen above tells us something different about the character. The smaller concepts defiantly give off this butch scavenger vibe, which we can see he’s made to look slightly more feminine in the final concept, using blues to really mellow out the over all concept despite still keeping the scavenger vibe.
The first design is way more cult like and completely off for her Character but it’s useful to record the idea for later characters or to see the process of evolution and thought in his art.
All ideas are useful but not all ideas and perfect fit for a certain project.
Now what I always loved so much about Matts style pieces, so how they feel like a snap shot of a story, they really capture an atmosphere. There is a wonderful online Lecture from Matt where he describes his process and says one quote that I love so much and try to implement into my own art.
“Tell stories, make every piece a story”