JamesLedgerConcepts

Having acquired a decade of skills in the fields of concept art and graphic design, I couldn't resist putting myself to the ultimate test of creating an entire world inspired by my own imagination. It's every kid's dream, right?

After a few months of extremely careful and realistic calculations, I decided that the time had come for me to unleash some magic and get my very first art book underway, with the intention of kicking off a series of art books to follow. "Worldview" is going to be released as a 100+ page physical book. No plans to release in PDF or ebook formats.



My goal is to complete all of the art and have the book ready to print by mid 2019. My first book is intended to inspire and provoke imagination to all who get their hands on it; other artists, film makers, writers, or those who simply enjoy escaping into the world of science fiction.



Who am I?
I'm a well-established concept artist who's been working as a freelancer in the entertainment industry for over 10 years. You can see samples of my previous work here - Port Folio

Follow me on Facebook to receive daily updates and sneak previews on the creation of "WORLDVIEW".

A lot of people ask me what skills are required to become a professional game concept artist. So, I will try to answer that question here.

Firstly, there is actually very little demand for pretty, colorful paintings like you see in my gallery for instance. Smaller companies often see these 'mood paintings' as an expensive luxury. Larger companies often have very little use for 'mood paintings' and scenes.
In fact, in the 2 years since I have been doing concept art I have never been required to do any 'mood paintings' at all.

Generally, pretty scenes are only necessary for promotional marketing purposes and they are usually very tight, not loose. I have been lucky in the fact that I have been able to do plenty of tight marketing images from scratch, designing the entire image from my own imagination. However, most of the marketing art you see on commercial game packaging, posters and so on is probably done by an illustrator or graphic designer, using photographic references, 3d renders or screenshots to paint over or simply colorize. Rarely are these images created from scratch by the artist as there is no point spending unnecessary time on an image when there are assets ready to stitch/merge together.

The real demand is with line drawings. Even with environments there is usually no requirement to do any 'concepts' or 'loose mood paintings' first, except for occasional fast 10 minute thumbnail sketches. Companies have tight schedules to keep and would rather have accurate 45 degree perspective line work created straight off so that the 3d modelers can get to work modeling your design asap. By skipping the 'pretty-image' stage more time is saved. So, rather than creating an entire image of a scene which may look cool, companies would rather have the individual elements of the environment broken down into tight line work. Color and even shading is rarely desired as it just gets in the way. Line work only.

Another skill which is always in demand is character design. However, it is becoming more and more essential for character designers to use 3d software such as Z Brush, rather than to sketch out a character using line work. Again, this saves time and Z Brush can create flawless renders in much less time than it takes to sketch by hand. And of course, the 3d model can be viewed at any angle and in any pose imaginable, with the anatomy and form remaining perfectly accurate. Almost all 3d character designing is done using Z brush in the larger professional gaming companies.

In the not-so-distant future I am sure all concepts will be created using 3D software once computers have become fast enough at rendering the designs. Also, by creating the concepts in 3D the modelers can just import the 3D file to polish the design, saving more time.

Personally, I see the art of free hand drawing (traditional and digital) being phased out completely in the entertainment industry, though the demand for human imagination will be around for a while of course. I also create orchestral music using sophisticated sampling tools that utilize real orchestral samples. The quality of these samples are very convincing and very editable in real time. Already the entertainment industry uses this technology to replicate a real orchestra and save huge amounts of time and money by not actually requiring a real orchestra.

So, for the mean time it's down to line work designing if you want to get plenty of work. I realize that there are many amazing professional tutorials out there by master concept artists who create outstanding, exciting imagery, but I have yet to find a company that actually requires that particular type of art and will actually pay you for it. Technology is great but it has its downside when it inevitably replaces peoples talents and passions.

Monitor calibration

The chances are that your monitor is not calibrated, so viewing images in galleries can appear milky or containing odd contrasting black regions.
Laptops are usually the worst culprits, as the default setting is usually set to maximum brightness, lacking contrast and burning the image off the screen.
Cheap computers have difficulty displaying images as they were intended to be seen, struggling to deal with gradients, contrast and subtle changes in color.

My iMac is calibrated, so the images appear amazing and beautifully contrasted, the colors popping out of the screen and immaculate. If I crank the brightness up to maximum the images look weak, milky, and poorly created, as if the artist painted the image whilst downing 4 gallons of vodka and wearing dark shades.

The reason why the default settings are so bad is that most people will be viewing their monitors in a bright well lit room or outside, meaning the only way to for the computer manufacturer to combat all the reflections and glare from the bouncing sunlight is to set the monitor at full brightness. This is just a consequence of the current technology.
Eventually there will be better solutions of course, with non-reflective screens and more built in auto-adjusting contrast according to the particular environmental lighting conditions. However, this is years away before it becomes affordable to the masses, as always.

There is no perfect calibration to suit all conditions - when my iMac was too bright my images were created too dark, and printing them was a disaster, resulting in my images appearing as pages of black ink. Every printing firm seems to have it's own particular settings so the very same image file may produce very different results depending on where I take my files to be printed, regardless of any calibration. It can be hard work, trying to guess the right level of brightness and contrast to add to an image before submitting it for print.

However, none of my images should appear milky or badly contrasted, as calibrated machines also display my images as beautifully as mine - i tested the images at a graphic design firm and they agreed my calibration was spot on.

It may be worth you reducing the brightness of your machine if you are seeing a lot of images appearing milky or ultra bright, however you will have to turn the brightness back up to maximum if the environment you are in is bright. A pain in the arse of course.

Another thing - when uploading images to websites all kind of processing happens to the image, often adding super brightness and making images appear milky as hell. I often have to make my images very dark for certain websites and very bright for others, so that they can be seen properly.

I think it's time I looked into doing a tutorial - gonna find out the best methods.