Post #1

Starting the Honours project in my last year of university gives me a great opportunity to really push my work and achieve a collection of professional work ready to be put in my portfolio and for potential employers to see.

After studying for two years on the games design course at Futureworks working through the different areas of games design from Art, both 2D and 3D, Design, level design and more i have chosen to focus my Honours project on 2D concept art, as this is the position i would like to work in the games industry.  Im aiming for this postion Mainly because i think it is my strongest area and something i find the most enjoyable, so i would like to really push my skills by analysing my processes, workflow and my design capabilities.

So what is the job of a concept artist? 
The role of a Concept artist in a game company is very important, they are not only artists but also designers. The game designers would usually come up with the actual game idea, characters mechanics, weapons, environments and even the main story to the game. Then these ideas are given to Concept artists who will then design the world in 2D, making the game interesting, new and exiting for the player. Concept artists can sometimes specialise into different areas of concept art such as characters or just environments, although because the job of a concept artist is so competitive, great artists will have the skills to do anything the company asks of them making them highly sought after and making it much more easier to get a job in the industry.
So for this reason i have listed all the areas that would need to be designed for most games:

• Environments
• Characters
• Weapons
• Vehicles 
• Creatures
• Props/Assets

These are the main areas a concept artist would have to design.

So what do i intend to do?
For this project i really want to push myself so i will be putting myself in the shoes of concept artist working for a game company. First of all i will need a vast amount of research to establish a game idea including the world and everything that will inhabit this world for the game. Although i would not do this in a game company the  game designers would, but because this is an individual project i will need to do this section in order to progress to the concept art stage. So once i have created a document on the game idea using tons of references i will then be able to start designing the game, i will be covering all the areas mentioned above of what a concept artist does.
Things i need to include:

• Reference images heavily annotated
• Thumbnail sketches and drawings
• Black and white concepts, moving onto different colour ideas
• Final designs

Once i have designed everything for the game idea i will create an art book to showcase all the work i have done.

What next?
The first thing i need to do is research different game genres, films, concept art and even sources from the real world to gather inspiration to create a new game idea that would contain interesting design ideas from a visual point of view. I will also need to gather research to establish an art style and research what style is mostly used within game companies.

Hopefully this research will enable me to start forming a project plan and a time schedule for the rest of the honours project.