Illustration VS Concept – Why do some companies want Sketches and others want paintings? - Videos

This is great info. Thanks!

Tbh metal gear is a very specific case and should not be assume to be that common, the almost everyone had a lot of trouble trying to model and translate his designs, I'm amazed that he made it

Great video Trent! You showed a little bit at the end, but I was wondering what exactly goes into environment concept art. Are you expected to map out an entire level, paint assets, do mood pieces, etc,?

Please tell me you spelled unofficial wrong intentionally

Brilliant and insightful. Thanks.

I gotta say thanks. I am not gonna lie, when I saw the tag line of the video I was curious. I'm going to an art College (specifically for Illustration), and not long after I started there the school opened up a Concept art department and most of the class requirement for Concept Art were the same as Illustration until you got to the end and I wasn't sure why. So for three years now I've been wondering what the difference was, thanks for clarifying that for me.

Thanks for the video
And yah a good concept art
Help 3d modeler to do
His job in a fast rate
Illustration is to showcase
The idea overall , concept art is to
Showcase the idea in detail

Thanks again for your video update and keep on

Hey Trent, Dante here again!
I REALLY enjoyed this episode as well as the interview with Nick Cole!
I’ve wanted to write one of my ideas for a long time now (I have about 20 concepts for stories/worlds) and that episode really inspired me to at least write a short novella to serve as a prologue to one of them.
So thanks to you both for such an insightful episode!

Also I sent you a message on your Instagram along with something else, not sure if it’s okay to message you on there but I did lol.

Thank you, very clear insights.

I think one of the reasons why younger artists outside the industry are so confused and misinformed is because they have a lot of professional artists in the industry they look up to and they use the CURRENT portfolios of those professional artists as a sort of reference for what concept art is and what the industry is looking for. It's very deceiving because those portfolio websites or artstation accounts are just filled with only the prettiest pictures from the projects they've worked on. Concept art has a lot of subcategories too – character, creature, prop, weapon, environment, architecture, vehicle, production painting, etc – and you'll see some professionals keep their current portfolio filled with only a certain subcategory for whatever reason (at least from what I've observed from their online portfolios).

The thing is I'm pretty sure those professionals at some point in their life had an ENTRY portfolio, the portfolio that got their foot in the door… or they knew a friend who knew a friend who got them in (it happens). It's pretty hard to find an entry portfolio of these popular well-known artists because they're most likely embarrassed of their work and removed them from the internet, and I'm not sure if any of them would want to share it either. Even if you go to the "personal work" section of a lot of well-known artists on the web, they're filled with pretty, high polished images that bear no semblance to what concept art is. What ends up happening is a lot of aspiring concept artists and students use these professional portfolios as a reference for what their own portfolio should look like.

This is only a hypothesis though. And I'm sure there are other reasons like youtube videos and such that you mentioned. I'm just an outside observer making my own observations. 🙂

Even though though there are so many resources online nowadays, things like this still isn't very clear or explained very well. Could be because there are so many people with different opinions online which end up making things even more confusing unfortunately.

You need experience to get the job; you need the job to get the experience…

Something's gotta give.

As a beginner artist I struggle with doing final render of my concepts, and often it ends up like I have a lot of good sketches and line designs, but I can't carry them further, details get lost in process of rendering, and final product looks good in its visual part, but it fails in the desing, feels generic and boring. Unfortunately, this makes me very frustrated as I feel like this can't be good enough because as I can see, most employeers want to see final render also.
Sometimes it makes me feel like my understanding of concept art is frong, and doing nice, photorealistic render is now more important than presenting ideas and makenig a lot of different sketches, silhouettes and desing variants. And thats why I'm so glad to see videos like this one. This ensures that the time I've put into developing my desings wasn't just wasted.
Thank you much!

Thank you for this video and I do have questions, does being a Concept Artist require you to draw characters, environments, etc.? or can I just focus one category? Like for example, I want to master concept design for environments only

Only person who offers art school program on YT that I would buy is Cubebrush nowADAYS KNWO AS BRUSHBOOST Mark Brunet. He worked at Blizzard for a few years so he should be solid from what I've seen etc. Ofcourse I am excluding you :). Man I woudl love some artschool program from you which focuses on whole process of game development pipeline. Teaching us skills and knwoledge and helping us to make proper portfolio. Well anyway you already helped out a ton so THANK YOU.

This video helped me a lot. Gotta improve my skills first though before I can try to get somewhere.

what a revealing… another "step of ladder" to put into my target list to become AWESOME ^___,^…..

Finally, now I understand what concept art actually is. I see lots of people on YouTube who seem to think that concept art is just art that's done fast. This always confused me until now. Thanks!

thank you for the knawledge. I'm dissapointed on what you had to say on yoji shinkawa and artists similar to him but I guess thats just the reality of the business.

interesting ^^

that's also a reason why Ruan jia is fucking awesome

He made concept art great, but he wrote "Nidalee" wrong in the final presentation LOL :v

Hi Trent. For people that haven't gotten a "first job" experience in the industry, how should we prepare our portfolio to match the Production Pipeline and how do we even first do that research without knowing where to search/start?

EDIT: Am deciding on crafting my portfolio and just wanted to find out more about the best ways to research the approach. I apologize if my comment has anything that's offensive or makes you angry.