Creature Concept Art Tutorial

Please keep in mind, this tutorial is not to teach anyone how to draw. It is simply a tutorial on the workflow of the creative process.

The First thing that we want to do in making some concept art is to start with an idea.. a shadow of the image you want to create. This will help you in the creation process even if you don't have a clear picture of what it is you want. Profiles work best.

Once you have a nice profile that you want to work with, start detailing out the head. I find that the head is what bakes in the look of the character. The personality. The  feel.  If you don’t like how you have the head  detailed, then the rest of the body will follow suit.

From this point start blocking in the body/muscular shape that you want the creature to have. This does not have to be perfect and I recommend working loosely to encourage happy accidents. A lot of times, when you are creating and you do not have a specific image in mind, these happy accidents can really bring the sparkle of life to the image. (If you have not noticed by now, when creating the grayscale portion of the concept image, I live by the dodge and burn tool… and yes, all of this is being done digitally in Photoshop. )

Now you can put in your final grayscale detail , remembering the key and secondary light sources.

 

From this point on, think about your color scheme. I am working with a deep sea creature  concept for a game by Brainiac Studios.  So I will color it accordingly. It helps if you have a color swatch pallet to work from so that  you can maintain the consistency in the colors. At this point your are pretty much just blocking in the colors that you want to work with. I am using a lower opacity brush set to multiply.

 

Time to finish up… remember, the colors will be effected by the lights source. Meaning, depending on the light source, the colors may be (de)saturated, so be certain on the setting. If you are doing like I am here and just placing a generic  colored background with painted light source, there will not be so much of the problem. Once the color is all laid out, choose the Photoshop blend  layer that captures the look you are looking for.  Something else to remember.. once you have the colors blocked in ( as in the previous step) use various filters for  subtle texture variations… filter>noise>reduce noise is a nice one.. and filters>artistic>watercolor is a good one as well. Just be certain to play with the settings.

 

I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial and that it made enough sense in its simplicity.