Early this year I had what could be considered as an emo phase in my attitude towards art and design. Ok, despite this incipt sounding like a hippy’s mental fart, I’ll leave it exactly as it is.

This so called emo phase stemmed from the realization that, after a few decades spent drawing pretty much the same subject matters, I suddenly realized there was little or no room left in my head for real innovation.

Which, for a concept artist, is a big problem.

After ten thousands briefs, regardless of the amount of imagination under which they were conceived, a wizard is still a wizard, an elf is an elf, a dwarf is a dwarf. You can always come up with an original look, but there’s so much crazy you can add to an iconic image before it becomes unrecognizable for what it’s supposed to be.

This rant is not entirely about art. There is (and, alas, there always will be) a lot of room for improvement in my drawing skills. However, for a concept artist, those are just the tools of the trade. What really matters for our employers (and ourselves) is that the artwork we produce is indeed some sort of original design. Design is what we really do, and when you can’t think of anything really original to show people then something isn’t working.

So, I moaned about this with my friend and colleague, mostly during our ping-pong sessions (we have very few breaks, but when we do, it’s when I crush him at the ping pong table*).

I think the real problem lies within the visual design of well-established archetypes.

If it’s Fantasy, things must be designed in a certain way for them to be recognizable as “fantasy”. If it happens in Space, then things must be readable and understandable for the function they have.

So, a dwarf must be stocky, grumpy and wear a beard; a spaceship must have exhausts, cockpits and possibly a few cannons.

To be honest I might have been biased at the time I made these considerations, mostly by the vast amount of the (yet amazing) artwork found on Concept Art websites depicting space helmets, elves shooting arrows, warriors hacking orcs and things like that.

I got to the point when I felt I had already seen a similar version of pretty much everything. Hell, I can say the same of my own portfolio.

So, to cut a long story short, at the height of my emo phase I was wondering whether there’s a way to do things slightly differently, and possibly improve my portfolio accordingly.

The short answer is “probably not”.

I was watching one of Feng Zhu’s videos a few days ago, and he said something that struck a chord.

I won’t quote his own words because I can’t be asked:) The gist of it was: we HAVE to do things the way we do. We could, for example, decide to put more science in our Sci-fi designs, and make aliens as bizarre as they would likely be. If you think of all the life forms on our planet, and how weird and peculiar some of them are, you can imagine how far from our experience a creature from another planet could be.

I mean, just look at these.

Think of what would happen on a planet with a different gravity, a different level of radiations, different environments.
As a matter of fact, we can’t go “too crazy” with our designs: in a commercial product like a movie, or even in a concept made for fun, a subject matter designed with no regard for readability would be unintelligible for most of the viewers, save a very limited amount of very happy nerds. So, well, spaceships will have to look like spaceships, aliens have better have fangs and claws. Or at least a head with a couple of eyes.

Helpful (I’m not being sarcastic), but what shall I do about the repetitiveness of what I happen to work on?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the elements we consider as defining of two major genres of fiction (Fantasy and Sci-fi) were shuffled a bit, played with and maybe mixed together?

In order to do so I started thinking of a setting where a story could take place. Nothing fancy, just to have some consistency to base a few designs on.

I wrote down some ideas, I spoke about them with my friend while I was crushing him at ping-pong, and the idea got bigger and more defined.

As it turns out, it’s not a never-seen-before setting, but if offers the chance for some nice designs, so I think it could work.

I’m writing this down just because these conversations happened quite a while ago now, and I haven’t done much about it. So well, at least I’m getting the ball rolling.

Since this is becoming a big wall of text I’ll write about it in another post, maybe with the couple of sketches I’ve made so far.

*dude, if you disagree about my recollection of my ping pong skills write your own post about it!

by Paolo Puggioni