What Makes A Good Piece of Concept Art?

What makes good concept art?

Concept art is an integral stage in the design of assets, environments, characters and locations in movies and video games. Before a character model or level can be created, various amounts of concept art are produced to explore many different designs that, ultimately, may never be used. Concept art allows the team to get an idea for what they're aiming to create, and allow them to specify what parts of the concept work, and what doesn't, allowing the concept artist to make additions until everyone feels they've reached the final design.

For this post I've taken photos from of Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, a 288 page book documenting the designs and development of some of the most well-received and influential video games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike and Valve games that never saw the light of day.

 The main concept artist behind Half-Life 2 was Viktor Antonov, a Bulgarian-born concept artist who played a huge role in driving Half-Life 2's art direction. His various detailed art of locations, vehicles and characters would give the team developing the game the perfect idea of the tone and art direction of the game.

As visible in this piece of concept art, the tone and style of theg ame is established strongly through the dark, depressing atmosphere of the art, as well

 This concept art, depicting one of the first rough ideas for the main enemy soldier in the game, is a perfect representation of the development process of characters. Ultimately the only element of this design that remained through trial and error was the helmet. Through constant design passes and team feedback, the 'Combine Soldier' eventually reached the final design in the game.

Once again this

The Strider, a large, tripedal enemy in the final game also went through various designs. While the overarching concept remained, a tripedal, huge creature with a large weapon, the design of these elements changed significantly across the different concepts.

The 'final' design of the Strider. While the actual appearance of this version of the Strider is 1:1 with what appears in the game, the way it stands and moves uses the outward knee position of the concept at the bottom right of the previous image.

This is a good example of how concept art isn't the end of the design of assets. Things can be, and most of the time are, changed during the modelling or animation stages. In this case the animators may have decided to change it's posture to a more intimidating one.