Fantasy Art Journey 01 - From Concept Art to Illustration

l2dpaint.art (25)in #art • 5 years ago

Fantasy Art Journey 01 - Prehistoric Necromancer

Hello, fellow steemians. Let me introduce myself first. I'm @l2dpaint.art a fantasy illustrator and I want to share with you my process in creating fantasy illustrations from scratch.

In this post I will cover the following:

Concept Art: When you don't know the looks of a product, IP (intellectual property), character, weapons, etc, artists start concepting to find out such looks.
Character Design: Once you know the overall look you do iterations to refine such concept. Do iterations to find the best color scheme. Draw the concept in a front, profile , and back pose for better understanding.
Illustration: Take the already designed product and draw it in a scene or an action pose and render it.

Character design sometimes is done by Concept artists too.

Job	Used On
Concept Art	It is mostly and heavily used in the video game industry, although in can be used anywhere
Character Design	It is mostly used in the animation industry for TV shows and movies, but concept artists use it in the video game industry but it's simply called concept art
Illustration	It is mostly known as Splash Art due to Blizzard's World of Warcraft and Riot's League of Legends popularization, but can be used anywhere: movie posters, comic book covers, book covers, splash art, trading game cards, board game's box art, post cards, prints, canvas prints, etc.

First, a sneak peek of the final fantasy Illustration:

Concept Art

I planned to create a concept for Mermay 2018 (an art challenge that happens every May of every year), further develop that concept and design a character with the ultimate goal of creating an illustration. I needed a prompt list that would keep me within boundaries.

Prompt list/guidelines:

Class: Necromancer
Distinguishing Elements: Spots
Species: Merpeople
Genre: Fantasy
Motif: Curve
Time: Prehistoric
Gender: Male

Usually I go and look for reference images of the subject matter in order to get inspired. This time I skipped this step and started drawing little thumbnails just to find interesting shapes.

Right after, I chose my body thumbnail. I started to concept the head. I wanted something familiar, two eyes, nose, mouth etc.

Then, I just attached the head to the body.

Character Design

Know that I new the overall design I started looking for reference image to make this character more believable. Then I draw my character in a front , profile , and side pose. After all, I didn't know how I wanted to pose my final illustration.

Knowing how your character looks from all angles helps a lot.

I played with the color scheme to find the best color palette.

Finally, I started to render the Merman.

Also I create some quick poses using images I took using a pose doll.

Illustration

First, I wanted to know what kind of pose was the best to depict this Prehistoric Necromancer epicness. So I went and drew some thumbnails to find this pose.