Half of the things I struggle with in terms of my art are the stupidest most obvious things that I despise myself for not understanding earlier! But CONCEPT ART (yeah that thing I've wanted to do for years) has finally been understood (I hope) by Hazel's little brain.

This is what I called 'concept art' technically okay yeah it is.. but do I have any development of this piece? Any sketches of the character? Any composition experiments? Nope.

Another 'concept art' piece.. made up as I went along with a few references for rocks.

Because I just wanted to paint paint paint (and hopefully get better at it) I would just paint any random idea I had and call it concept art. I wanted finished pieces for my concept art and I started those finished pieces without any development up to the finished piece- just using the first idea that popped into my head so I could paint it.

If you've seen my previous post about studies you'll know that I watched an eye opening video which helped me understand my own studies and why they weren't working.. same situation here.


Here's another fantastic video called 'The importance of thumbnails' which practically spelt out the importance of thumbnails (funnily enough) in concept art. WHY I couldn't understand this/work it out for myself is beyond me. But hey, its definitely worth a watch, even if you do actually understand what concept art is!

So embarrassing lack of understanding aside (thank god I worked that out before uni) I've started to change the way I do things!

First things first I saw this picture of Rihanna and Lupita Nyong'o (beautiful ladies) and wanted to do something kinda sci-fi and funky with these two (or similar characters) working a crime business together.

So as a standard of my own I went straight into this clothing design:

'Concept art' aka lemme just doodle and see how it comes out.. yeah I'll go with that design.

So I figured I just needed to do one more of these for the other character then I could paint up the final, right?! Nope. This design was sloppy and lacked any real DESIGN. As mentioned in the video I watched, concept artists need to put on their design hat first and only once they have done their job as a designer can they put on their artist hat. It just clicked with me and made sense of things that I just (for goodness knows what reason) get my head around.

So, I stopped myself in my tracks and told myself I need to be a designer for now- who wants a concept artist that can paint reasonably well but has no new ideas to bring to the table?

Thumbnails! Well kinda, slightly different as its clothing design but look at all these things I did!

You can quite easily see my development of ideas (starting top left) and they get more interesting as they go along with less cliches. I still need to develop these ideas further but I feel like this is a new route (that I should have been doing for a long time before this) that will make my work a lot more successful!