Concept Art Help

[Kellerizem]

I am old fashioned I guess, When I do concept art I do ALL hand drawn or colored Art. Now there are many concept artist out there who color their entire piece of art by computer, and quite honestly these concepts kick ass. I was wondering what program you use to do that? what plugins do you use? how hard is it? last but not least, is it time consuming?

 

[Cyanide]

Most people use either Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter for their digital work. Photoshop is the more popular program because of its powerful image editing tools, but for the serious digital artist not much of anything can compete with Painter. Photoshop was designed as an image editing tool, where as Painter is an image creation tool. Having Painter is probalby as close as most of us will ever get to having a complete art studio. It is much better at simulating the behavior of real world art mediums. Photoshop is good for editing existing images (which is why it's usefull for making game textures), and a lot of digital artists will create a piece in Painter and then tweak it to perfection in Photoshop.

As far as the tools you need, it's pretty hard to do any decent digital work without a digital drawing pad. Wacom seems to be the most popular brand, but there are others that are comparable. The price varies quite a bit with the brand name, tablet size, and feature set. Anywhere from over $1000 to less than $100. I'd recommend at least 6x8 for size. It's a comfortable size to draw on and doesn't take up a load of space like a 9x12. Of course, if you have the space, bigger is probably better in this case. I'd also recommend at least 512 levels of pressure sensativity. I've only ever had a wacom, so I can't say what brand is best, but I can say that my wacom is amazing. No batteries to wear out in the wireless pen (uses inductive coupling for power I think), plenty of function buttons on the pen and tablet, and it's very smooth operation all around. The drivers are pretty good too, with lots of ways to customize the pen and tablet buttons, and other functionality. I think it's one of the best investments I've ever made.


As far as how hard it is. I'd say it's not quite as hard as painting something similar with real paint and tools. But you still need to have some knowledge of traditional art to make that "kick ass" stuff. Having Painter and a Wacom won't magicly turn you into an artist. But it sure is a cheaper way to learn than buying lots of paint, canvas, and a bunch of high quality brushes.

I'd say it's not quite as time consuming as traditional art either, since you'll never have to wait for paint to dry and such. Nor do you always have to completely start over if you really screw something up. In general, digital art is more forgiving than traditional art, since there is no undo button in real life.

If you're serious about your art and you like to do game concept art a tablet and Painter or Photoshop is definately something you should look into.

 

[Mechagodzilla]

I use GIMP, which is fairly meh compared to most things - but totally free.
www.gimp.org