30 Day Concept Art Challenge!
In addition to toys and stuff, I also really would love to get to do work in the themed entertainment industry. Something I really admire in the industry but don’t think I have the chops to do is concept art. So to improve my drawing skills I’m gonna do a trial by fire and attempt to draw one piece of imaginary concept art every day for the next 30 days. We’ll see how it goes!
Day 1: Aeronauts Academy
Feeling very inspired by Disneyland Paris’s Tomorrowland, wanted to go for a bit of a steampunk fantastical vibe. I’m happy with the colors and the mashup of architectural styles, not so sure I’m digging the oil pastel textures though. Hoping my line work will improve as I get more comfortable drawing on the screen and figure out a good workflow.
Day 2: Merlin Mines
Felt like doing a bit of a spin on the well established wild west theme. Maybe some sort of underground roller coaster experience or drop tower is housed inside. Pros: I like the green color as I feel like that’s usually not associated with the wild west theme. Makes a pretty bland building feel a little more special. Things to improve: Maybe don’t try blurring the background like that again, and start to establish more of an environment for these show buildings to exist in.
I’m hoping that after a few more of these I’ll start to find a sort of style that I draw best in. It doesn’t need to be a technical perfectly drawn perspective, I’d rather capture the exciting essence of an attraction at the expense of straight lines than get straight lines but miss the essence.
Day 3: Cheese Wheeeeeeeel!
Worth a shot, but I don’t think the blocky gel pen is the best look. The more natural texture there is, the more the eye will fill in details that then I don’t have to worry about drawing.
I do like that this piece is a bit more kinetic, kinetics is a huge theme park fundamental so it’s definitely important that concept art includes a feeling of movement.
Day 4: Manor Von Mortal
Okay I’d like to now formally apologize for Day 3. Today I gave myself a bit more time, and tried a workflow that forced me to take my time and get things looking right. First pencil sketching, then painting in grey to get the contrast and shading looking good, then adding colors one at a time so I could adjust my lighting accordingly. Then I went over everything with a white pencil for detailing which really made the details pop.
Something else I tried on this one was embracing a more warped perspective, which really gave the drawing a lot more character. I wound up using the warp tool quite a bit at the beginning to keep pushing the angle steeper and steeper, which I think paid off in the final piece. I really enjoyed drawing this one, I’m going to try to use this workflow going forward and continue to take my time at each stage so I don’t draw another cheese world.
Day 5: Witchy Rapids
Today I wanted to go all out with the painting and not have any visible sketch outlines in the final piece. I’m really happy with the lighting and color on this one. I maybe could’ve spent a bit more time on the initial composition and drawing the people sitting in the raft.
The big lesson today (and yesterday) is time. This piece took almost 3 hours to create. The more time I can put into embellishing something and playing around with something, the happier I’ll probably wind up with it. Hopefully as I continue practicing I’ll be able to get a piece of art at this level of quality in less and less time.
Day 6: Aliensville
Today I tried using just the acrylic brush on Procreate. I didn’t really like it, it didn’t lay down color super well. It seems like the opacity of the brush is directly related to its size, so it wasn’t great for painting tiny details. That being said, I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out. I wanted to try another daytime piece after doing two dark and dramatic pieces. And once again it took like 3 hours to paint everything.
Aliensville is actually a concept I’ve had in my head for a while now. The idea is a small town, probably in a 1950’s Americana style (like Main Street at Disneyland), that happens to be where aliens first landed on Earth, and is now an alien tourist destination. So many themed lands are based around the premise of [American] tourists going to exotic locales (Adventureland, Galaxy’s Edge, Pandora), I think it’d be fun to develop a land where those [American] tourist’s hometown is the exotic locale. (Dinoland USA kinda does this, but this would push it to a further extreme).
Day 7: Jungle Falls
I didn’t have as much time today to work on my drawing so I decided to try for a less is more rough sketch and see how I liked it. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out, I like the detail of the collapsed scaffolding alongside the flume track. I feel like that helps justify why a flume track would even be built amidst jungle ruins in the first place.
I am seeing a pattern that I’m having trouble drawing trees I’m happy with. You’d think they’d be easy…but no, trees are tough to do. Overall though I like the composition, I like the texture, and I like the small details I worked in there that help imply a greater world for this environment.
Day 8 - Fantasy Fountain
For this second week, I want to try practicing drawing with a slightly wider lens, so showcasing larger themed environments as opposed to singular buildings. Today’s drawing suffered from a major time crunch. But for only an hour of sketching it’s not so bad. I was trying the watercolor brush which gave me some unexpected results as well.
I might want to return to this drawing on a later date to try coloring it in with greater detail and seeing how that goes.
Day 9 - Big Eye!
Ooh such mystery and suspense. What a big eye! I kinda wish I hadn’t started off intending to make the eye so human…this might be one to revisit later. Could be cool to make it more monster-y and then give it a comic book style shading.
Spent a fair amount of time on this one tweaking scale and perspective after most of the assets had been drawn. It’s amazing how much just simply having everything be scaled properly can either throw off or spruce up a drawing.
Day 10 - Golem Double Whammy
Today’s a daily double! I’m currently taking a 3ds Max introduction course with the Themed Entertainment Creative Workshop Series and one of our assignments for the week was to sketch a series of thumbnail sketches and a final drawing for our proposed ride dispatch station. I’ve come up with a ride set in a 1700’s storybook town and retell the Jewish myth of the Golem through sets that look like shadow puppets and pop-up books, so I thought the loading room/dispatch booth could look like a mobile traveling library based out of a cart. This should be a nice challenging design to model, but if I can get all the shapes and textures right I think it’ll turn out really great.
Day 11 - Whoops
Day 12 - Rocket Boy
Didn’t have time to draw until very late today so more of a quick sketch than a full blown piece of concept art. I’ve been eyeing the halftone/vintage dot brushes in Procreate and would like to use them more on future pieces, so I decided to make today about playing around with them a bit. Also playing a bit with canvas shape and presentation, not everything has to be the same wide rectangle.
I’m starting to feel the idea well run dry, tomorrow I’m really going to try to take time and draw a full image again and hopefully be happier with the outcome.
Day 13 - Aliensville Attack
Struggled for a bit to come up with a concept for today, but then decided to revisit the Aliensville idea I’ve been holding onto for a while. While on the exterior Aliensville seems tranquil and at peace, maybe it’s all a front for aliens trying to eat humans for lunch. So maybe our guests get recruited to go fight back.
Today I really wanted to do some sort of Kuka ride vehicle, I think a Kuka arm/shooting gallery ride could be a really fun combo one day, if not a tad overwhelming.
Day 14: Redwood Playground
I want to see if I can leave the land of stark black outlines. This was an okay effort…trying to figure out how to paint less and say more. Didn’t give myself enough time today to fully dive into it.