Tetsuya Nomura

Tetsuya Nomura is a japanese character designer, I remember him for his work in Kingdom Hearts. His distinctive style appeals to me with it being a mixture of anime and realism with a touch of disproportional body parts. Tetsuya started as a character designer for Square Enix, he then moved up the line to be lead designer and eventually he became the director of the company.

The main characters in Kingdom Hearts have a really cartoonistic style partly because the game involved Disney characters and places.

Tetsuya's characters all follow a pattern in their style, such as: spiky hair, big feet, clean faces and thin limbs.

The characters seemed to carry large weapons but because of the thin limbs it looks like they cannot possibly hold it.
They also have a large quantity of zips and straps. 

Todd Mcfarlane

Todd Mcfarlane is an artist more remembered for his character 'Spawn'. Todd also worked with various video game companies with games such as Lord of Vermilion and Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning.


Todd worked for several comic books including The Incredible Hulk and various Spiderman comics. He also worked on many Spawn comics due to him creating it.


With the characters Todd has created, it seems he likes having a sense of mystery to the character's identity by adding a mask of some kind. He seems to lean towards the theme of evil and chaos which is often considered 'cool' and personally better than goodness and heroic.

"Edge tone"

I have been studying this piece of work to understand how the artist made the clouds go from a dark tone to a light tone in a very short space.

The artist blended a slight mid-tone with the darker tone and turned straight to the light tone to indicate some form of "edge tone".

"Edge tone" is what I call the change in tone to suit the behind of the object. If there is a light source behind the object, then there is a bright edge tone. If it's a shadow, then there's a dark edge tone. This technique is sometimes used in movie posters where the character is shown as a silhouette. 

What is the purpose of concept art?

Concept art is an idea in the form of an illustration to be used in an upcoming game. Many different designs of the idea would be created to pick the best possible creation. The chosen design would be perfected and eventually used in the final product. The designs whch didn't get picked could even be used inthe final product for something different. The designs are commonly drawn onto paper and then coloured on Adobe photoshop.

The earliest uses for concept art is for designing automobiles, Disney also used concept art for their work.

One concept artist I have been looking at is Daryl Mandryk. His latest work was being the Lead Concept Artist for DIS' Tron Evolution the video game in 2010. He has also worked for companies such as EA, Lucasfilm, Hasbro and Radical Comics.

The link to his personal site as follows.
http://members.shaw.ca/dmandryk/index.htm

He has made over 100 pieces of concept art and can be viewed in the gallery.
My favourite piece of work from then is titled "dragon_rider_low_res" and is in the 2004-07 folder. It is of a dark dragon perched over a rock, with an armoured warrior mounted on the dragon's back.

I like it because it suits my favourite genre (fantasy), the lighting and shading are realistic and the detail in everything is amazing. Even the rock it is standing on is well detailed. The part I don't like is the far background, Daryl seemed to have become lazy and just used clouds and rain.

 This artwork is really good because his facial expression is perfect. The blood at the bottom really stands out and incorporates the 'forth wall' to the picture. The picture has a sense of grittiness to it, it actually feels like a battle. I don't like how Daryl has drawn the fur of the lion, it doesn't look soft and realistic.

This piece is really good as it shows off the jungle environment really well. The laser piercing the dino's back looks amazing and gorey. The main character is detailed very well as you can see even the small items on his belt. The laser's light actually reflects on the dino's side and is drawn really well.