The Concept Art Painting Gallery
Landscape Concept Art / Character Concept Art / Game Design Art / Cover Art
(for games, books, CDs, cards, card games, board games)
In these galleries here you can find Concept Art and Environmental / Scenery Art Paintings I did mostly for
TopWare Interactive AG.
They are the developer of games like Two Worlds, Battle vs Chess, Vendetta – Curse of Raven’s Cry and Dream Pinball.
Many of the digital concept art paintings here have appeared on video game covers, GamesCom publisher stands, booklet covers and also as a conceptual foundation of characters or environments in video games.
I was working together hand in hand with the leading Concept Art Designers for many years, and this role has often also been given to me.
► And at the bottom of this page
I have some great advises for you on how to do Concept Art!
After watching this Concept Art Painting Gallery, you might also be interested in reading my new tutorial about How to Paint a Digital Landscape Painting (free!).
How To Do Concept Art Paintings?
Concept Art paintings are pure creativity – they seem to be like free floating fantasies, but in truth even Concept Art has a form of realism, and knowing this will bring you so many steps further in your concept art journey.
In my experience this few lines here contain the most important and valuable advice for any beginner Concept Artist – it’s that what makes the difference!
Look at this example here. It’s a painting I’ve created with the MA-Brushes (which you also can find on my website here). This is just a concept art painting I did in my free time – nothing to special, nothing too much conceptual in this one so far, but..
See how every element in this image exist in real live – now from here you can add your new concepts and ideas. For example add big bridges, flying elephants, big skyscrapers and so on. Realize the connection of concept art with real world elements, and always know this when you are seeing great concept art. It’s not so much about the elephant in the sky, it’s about the painting of the beautiful sky and the beautiful elephant in it..
Learn The Basics First For Concept Art
Remind yourself while doing concept art, that by being good in environmental art you will have a big bonus for concept art, and the same of course is the case for portrait painting and conceptual character design. Be a master in painting the real things first, in other words the basics, and then start to fly – oh, and same applies for the musicians: First learn the standard playing, all the notes, chords, all the keys and scales to play them on your instrument without looking and even without thinking, and then start to fly and create your own creation. That’s the whole thing behind concept art painting.
Can you also see that most beginners want to jump directly into the real thing, but they miss out the important things that really matters first.
Of course, you can go full in right from the start (hey, I did it that way!), but know, that whatever you are doing, you will always go back to the roots, and you’ll want to understand things more and more from the deeper point of view and gather much knowledge. So it’s like you are learning backwards all the elements you need to know for this art. There is a feeling of not being complete and a feeling of lacking know-how, which will bring you always back, and it doesn’t feel so right. You can not go to many shortcuts – you want to be a master in things you do, that’s our inner soul loving all the details of life!
I myself had this experience not just for concept art painting but also with learning the guitar. At the start we jump immediately into all the songs and play them, but over time we come back to learning all those little tiny details about notes, techniques, music theories and so on – it’s fascinating and also satisfying. And then from there you can then go as far as you wish. But how to go far without basic knowledge? No, that’s not what we want.
How Far Can You Go In Concept Art?
I’ve got some more points to mention about Concept Art, and that’s about the other side of creating – the so-called borders and limitations. In fact, they somehow exist for Concept Art, too. You will have a hard time trying to go too far behind standard definitions of a landscape painting or a portrait painting.
If a Concept Artist starts to paint some strange and weird things he/she could go too far. Then the composition can be too hard to be recognized/understood by the brains of the poor observers. That’s because we are bound on some degree to the proper composition rules to understand what’s going on. If we don’t understand it, we are confused and that’s not something desired. We want to fascinate and inspire, not to confuse!
Concept Art Paintings Must Inspire And Not Just Confuse
You can not paint floating mountains looking upside down, a sky at the button in green colors and trees coming from the right side that look like a wash machine. The eye of the observer will start to be so confused by not being able to put things in order and place – not understanding at all the idea.
You see that on the one hand a concept artist has to be creative, but on the other he/she must take care, that the painting will not explode into surrealism. Because by definition – that’s surrealism. And that’s really not the goal of the Concept Artist. Don’t fly to high Icarus!
So, Concept Art has to relate quite much to the real life to be let’s say recognizable. Yes, we can hardly escape real life, and that’s good. We can see how perfect this world is made and remember it every time we see it consciously.
And by the way, a Concept Artist working for the Game Industry still is often a very normal, classic Painter, like a traditional Landscape Painter or a Portrait Painter (if you’re doing Character Concept Art).
Once again, I invite you to read my Article about How to paint a digital Landscape Painting.
THANKS FOR READING!
– Michael Adamidis
Give my new blog about digital portrait painting a read! Don’t miss it.
See great and affordable digital painting tablets by xpen here.
And here are also great digital painting tablets by Huion.