Design Concept Art – Pablo Carpio shares some insight into his profession: what big companies expect from concept artists today, where to start, what references to use and more.
Pablo Carpio: I am a Spanish conceptual artist. I currently live in Jaen, a small town in the south of Spain, very close to the sea.
Design Concept Art
I have been working as a conceptual artist for the past five years. Art has always been a part of my life. When I was a child, I painted and drew everywhere. At some point in my life I decided to live with it or at least try to. So I started focusing on fine and traditional arts. I went to art high school and then studied art at university. It was everything to do with traditional art – hand drawing, oil paintings, sculpture, a lot of light theory, art history, composition, photography and things like that.
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In 2010, when I was studying traditional art, I also learned about digital art. Video games and movies like Star Wars have always been my passion. So I saw that there was a connection between all these passions: video games, cinema and art. Then I learned about the work of a concept artist, who creates and designs things for movies and video games. I started learning it myself. While studying at the university, I went to tutorials, learned to work with a graphics tablet, tried different programs such as Photoshop, ZBrush, Octane Render, Blender. I studied at university for almost 5 years while developing my portfolio with a focus on conceptual art.
In 2015, I started taking my work online and met more people on social media. I started traveling, trying to contact people at art events to get a job, and in 2016 I got my first one. I started working for companies like Ubisoft, then I worked for MPC, which is a VFX company like ILM. I have also worked for ILM, Pixar, Marvel, Riot Games, Insomniac Games, Warner Brothers. I am currently working with HBO.
In 2015, One Pixel Brush artist, Shedi Safadi, gave a speech at GDC titled “Concept Art is Dead”. I think Shady’s way of presenting is violent, but I agree with him. The point is that we have to separate conceptual art as work and conceptual art as art. As a work, concept art is solving problems for a film or video game. Art itself is an art that you can develop throughout your life. In my daily work, I almost never pick up a pen or pencil, I always work with images, paint on them, mixed with something else. Sometimes I don’t even need to touch Photoshop, which works great with 3D. At the same time, you must deliver your work to the production designer or art director within a few hours. I usually send new work to my clients every day. Sometimes you only have five hours to apply some changes to an image. So it’s true that spending five days on a piece to make it look perfect in the traditional way is no longer possible due to the speed of production.
I remember when I was doing Captain Marvel, we were planning about twenty spaceships a day. They were all random cat bumps, placing the 3D pieces in different positions and putting them together. Everything was very bad. In the end, it doesn’t have to look pretty, but it has to convey an idea. Something clicks in the director’s mind and he’ll say, “Yeah, I want to do something along those lines!” So, you take it and only then you start polishing it.
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If you don’t know 3D or photobushing, it’s almost impossible to get a job at a company like ILM these days. These companies receive new candidate resumes every day. When we looked at their portfolio, the first thing we asked was, “Is he fast? Can he get it done on time? Can he get the job done in 3 hours or a day?”
The process is definitely changing. When Lord of the Rings was filmed in the 2000s, they spent about eight years in production developing all the designs. No longer available! Now each team spends no more than two years before the release of the film. On Captain Marvel, for example, we spent nine months in pre-production when they were already shooting the stars. Concept art, which takes 1-2 months, usually happens during filming, and then you go into post-production, which is designing anything like explosions, all the VFX, matte paintings and things like that. Even the time you spend there passes so quickly that you can’t do it with acrylics on canvas. It would certainly be nice if we could continue to do this, but the consumption of this type of entertainment is growing so quickly that it is impossible to keep up with the quality of the art and work. So we have to find different ways to create and entertain people.
First of all, communication is key. But talking to artists isn’t the same as talking to a director who may never have done anything, or an executive producer who just puts money into a project—maybe doesn’t even know how to use a computer. It’s the same with a production designer, he thinks about the schedule, the money, the budget, whether something can be done in 3D or not. During the production you meet different types of people and each of them speaks a different language.
For me, the most important part of the brief is to know from the beginning that the person you are working with is open to different ideas. If your boss, whether it’s a production designer or a director, tells you that he’s open to ideas, it gives you room to try different things. Or he may tell you he wants something very specific and you literally copy his idea. Sometimes the production designer tells me something like, “Have fun in the first few weeks, and then we’ll start designing everything.” Sometimes I get someone who says, “Paint these two pictures, I want something in the middle.” Depending on the cases, I will ask for more or less references.
Working As A Concept Artist In The Fast-paced Film Industry
I’d say a good short description of what the project is is a keyframe scenario. For example, if it’s the design of a vehicle, I ask, “Who’s driving it?”, “How many people are inside?”, because I need some general idea of its size. Another thing to achieve is the level of detail or some references to other spaceships that the director would like. Any artwork that will connect with what he’s thinking. It can also refer to an entire genre of art, such as Russian Constructivism. (That’s something I’m really interested in, by the way! I’m a big fan of that kind of brutality in architecture.) That’s what I’ve always put into my work. Even if you are drawing a spaceship, it can refer to a building or something that reminds you of its shape.
You also need to adapt to all kinds of scenarios. It won’t always be easy. You won’t always get what you want. Some people don’t even know what they want until you give them different ideas. Some people are sure of what they are looking for and will give you everything you need. It may vary from one plan to another.
I’d rather spend a week researching the idea, send my reference to the director, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking.” And then we started putting it together. But if someone wants something specific, I’ll ask for more stuff, even a super rough drawing or some photos and references that the director likes. These can be buildings, textures, colors, other people’s artifacts, anything else and more.
A lot of my inspiration doesn’t come from any particular place. There’s a difference between taking a specific building, vehicle or character and, say, Star Wars or Halo in general. Instead of talking about something physical, I think about things like gravity, size, texture, and light.
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I don’t like to call myself super original, but if there is one place where my originality shows, it can be in the way I use the camera, the composition, the shadows, the colors. If you look at my portfolio, most of my images are super low camera, and I often use an Ultra Panavision type canvas as well. in