What is Concept Art?

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by Ralph McQuarrie

C is for concept art

Since this blog is focused on concept art and storyboarding, I figured I should probably explain what it is. I'll start with concept art and explain storyboarding later.

Wikipedia describes it this way:

Concept art is a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in films, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design. This term can also be applied to retail design, set design, fashion design and architectural design.

This is kind of vague, so I thought I'd take a crack at it.

Basically, a movie script gets bought and its moved into production. At some point, before the movie starts filming, artwork is produced to help people visualize aspects of the film. It can be the producers, directors, actors or special effects artists.
So, there you have it. Concept art and illustration explained. In the end, its art and that's the most important part.

Now, go enjoy the artist's work.

Does this make sense? How would you define concept art?
[Update: Concept Illustrator Dawn Brown kindly gave some clarification for this post]

You have read this articleconceptart / Ralph_McQuarrie with the title What is Concept Art?. You can bookmark this page URL http://rarwrites.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-is-concept-art.html. Thanks!

Write by: Arek - Monday, April 4, 2011