Wikipedia Deep Dive

Concept art

11 min read

Before a single frame of a blockbuster film is shot, before a video game character takes their first digital breath, before an animated world springs to life, someone has to imagine it first. Not in words, but in images. That someone is a concept artist, and their work is the visual foundation upon which entire fictional universes are built.

You've seen concept art even if you didn't know what it was called. Those gorgeous paintings in the "Art of" books sold alongside major film releases? Concept art. The early sketches of beloved characters that look almost, but not quite, like their final versions? Concept art. The sweeping vistas of imaginary worlds that appear in behind-the-scenes documentaries? Also concept art.

The Art of Imagining What Doesn't Exist Yet

Concept art serves a deceptively simple purpose: it shows people what something could look like before that thing exists. A film director might have a vision in her head for an alien planet, but she can't build the sets, design the costumes, or direct the visual effects artists until everyone on the production agrees on what that planet actually looks like. Enter the concept artist, who translates nebulous creative visions into concrete images that an entire team can work from.

The Walt Disney Animation Studios coined the term back in the 1930s, when artists would create paintings and drawings to establish the look and feel of upcoming animated features. These weren't storyboards, which map out the sequence of events in a story frame by frame. Concept art is more about world-building, about defining the visual vocabulary of a project. What does this castle look like? What color is the hero's cloak? How does the light fall in this enchanted forest?

The distinction matters. A storyboard artist is essentially a visual storyteller, laying out how scenes will unfold. A concept artist is more like a visual architect, designing the spaces and characters that the storyboard artist will then put into motion. Both are essential, but they require different mindsets and skills.

Iteration, Iteration, Iteration

Here's something that surprises people outside the industry: concept art is almost never right the first time. Or the second. Or sometimes the twentieth.

The process is fundamentally iterative. An artist might produce dozens of variations on a single character design, exploring different silhouettes, color schemes, costume details, and facial features. Directors and creative leads review these options, provide feedback, and the artist goes back to the drawing tablet to refine, revise, and explore new directions.

This makes concept art as much about communication as it is about artistic skill. The images aren't ends in themselves. They're tools for conversation, ways of externalizing ideas so that teams can discuss them, debate them, and ultimately converge on shared visions. A concept artist who produces beautiful work that doesn't respond to feedback, or that doesn't help move conversations forward, isn't doing their job effectively.

The best concept art also serves a diplomatic function. When a director describes something vague or contradictory, when clients can't articulate what they want, when investors need to be convinced that a project is worth funding, concept art provides a common visual language. It's much easier to get everyone aligned when there's an actual image to point at rather than just words bouncing around a conference room.

The Economic Reality

Being a concept artist sounds glamorous. You get paid to imagine dragons and spaceships and post-apocalyptic cityscapes. But the reality involves tight deadlines, demanding clients, and creative constraints that can feel suffocating.

Subject matter is often beyond the artist's control. You might be passionate about designing elegant science fiction interfaces, but your current project requires you to create seventeen variations on a medieval tavern. You might have strong opinions about a character's design, but ultimately you're executing someone else's vision, not your own.

The financial picture has improved considerably over the past decade. In 2017, concept artists in the video game industry earned between sixty thousand and seventy thousand dollars annually in the United States. By 2024, entry-level positions ranged from sixty thousand to ninety-five thousand dollars, with the average salary climbing to around one hundred twelve thousand dollars. That's a significant jump, reflecting the explosion of demand in digital media.

And demand has genuinely exploded. The United States video game industry grew from nineteen million dollars to thirty-seven billion dollars between 2009 and 2012. In China, the mobile gaming market expanded from 240 million yuan to 37.48 billion yuan between 2008 and 2016. These aren't incremental changes. They represent the emergence of entirely new entertainment ecosystems that require vast armies of artists to build.

Today, roughly sixty-five percent of video game development staff are artists of various kinds. Concept artists represent a specialized subset of that population, sitting at the beginning of production pipelines and setting the visual direction that everyone else follows.

The Digital Revolution

Traditional concept art was created with the same materials fine artists have used for centuries: oil paints, acrylics, markers, pencils, whatever medium suited the artist's style and the project's needs. Some of the most iconic concept art in film history was painted on actual canvases.

That world is mostly gone now.

The shift to digital tools has been nearly total. Programs like Photoshop and Corel Painter have become industry standards, alongside more specialized applications like Procreate for tablet-based work and Manga Studio for artists with backgrounds in sequential art. Graphics tablets, which allow artists to draw directly on pressure-sensitive surfaces while viewing their work on computer screens, have become as essential to concept artists as brushes once were.

The reasons for this shift are pragmatic rather than aesthetic. Digital work can be edited infinitely. Colors can be adjusted instantly. Elements can be copied, moved, scaled, and transformed without starting over. When a director decides that the spaceship needs to be blue instead of gray, a digital artist can make that change in minutes. A traditional painter would need to start from scratch.

Speed matters enormously in an industry where deadlines are often measured in days rather than weeks. A concept artist might need to produce a highly polished piece overnight. Digital tools make that possible in ways that traditional media simply don't.

But here's an important nuance: proficiency with traditional media still matters. The best digital painting software is designed to simulate how actual paint behaves, how colors blend and layer on real surfaces. Artists who understand those physical processes intuitively, because they've worked with actual paint, tend to create more convincing digital work. The tools have changed, but the underlying principles of color, composition, and light remain the same principles that artists have studied for centuries.

Genres and Specializations

Concept art has always been associated with the fantastic. Science fiction and fantasy dominate the field, and for good reason. When you're creating realistic contemporary settings, you can photograph references. When you're designing alien worlds or magical kingdoms, someone has to invent them from scratch.

The field has expanded considerably as video games have matured as a medium. Today's games span every genre imaginable, from hyper-realistic military simulations to stylized puzzle games to historical recreations. Concept artists must be equally versatile, adapting their styles to match whatever project they're working on.

This versatility is genuinely difficult. An artist might be hired to create photorealistic environments for one project and then need to switch to a cartoonish aesthetic for the next. The underlying skills transfer, but the visual language is completely different. Many studios value artists who can move fluidly between styles over those who excel at only one approach.

Within the field, specializations have emerged. Character designers focus on inventing the people, creatures, and beings that populate fictional worlds. Environment artists design the spaces those characters inhabit, from intimate interior rooms to sweeping outdoor vistas. Some artists specialize in vehicles, others in weapons, others in architecture.

Industrial applications have also expanded the field's boundaries. Retail designers create visual concepts for store layouts and product displays. Fashion designers use concept art techniques to develop clothing lines before producing physical prototypes. Architects commission concept art to visualize buildings before construction begins. The skills that originally developed to serve Hollywood now find applications throughout the commercial world.

The Blue Sky and Beyond

Production artists speak of the "blue sky" phase, that early stage of a project when anything is possible and nothing has been decided. This is when concept art is most exploratory, when artists produce rapid sketches and "speed paints," quick studies completed in hours rather than days, to explore a wide range of directions.

The images produced during this phase are deliberately rough. The goal isn't polish but proliferation, generating enough options that creative teams can identify the most promising directions to pursue. A concept artist might produce fifty character sketches in a week, knowing that forty-nine of them will be discarded.

As production progresses and decisions get locked in, concept art becomes more refined. Matte paintings, which create photorealistic backgrounds for live-action compositing, represent the most polished end of the spectrum. These are essentially finished artworks, detailed enough to appear in final films, though they're typically used as starting points for digital effects work rather than appearing on screen unchanged.

Even after production wraps, concept art finds new life. Marketing departments repurpose production art for advertising campaigns, posters, and merchandise. The "Art of" books mentioned earlier have become a genre unto themselves, allowing fans to glimpse the creative evolution behind their favorite films and games. Concept art that was once purely functional has become collectible.

The Artist Behind the Art

What does it actually take to become a concept artist? The honest answer is: a lot.

The foundational skills are the same ones that art schools have taught for centuries. Anatomy, because you can't design convincing creatures without understanding how bodies work. Perspective, because spatial relationships make or break environmental designs. Color theory, because palette choices establish mood and direct attention. Lighting, because nothing looks real without convincing illumination. Design principles, because effective concept art communicates clearly even at thumbnail size.

On top of that foundation, concept artists need the skills of commercial designers. They need to work quickly, meet deadlines, incorporate feedback gracefully, and subordinate their personal preferences to the needs of projects. The romantic image of the artist as solitary genius doesn't apply here. Concept art is fundamentally collaborative work.

Paths into the field vary. Some concept artists start as fine artists and migrate toward commercial work. Others come from industrial design, where they learned to visualize products before manufacturing. Animators sometimes transition into concept art, as do special effects artists. What these backgrounds share is intensive training in visualization, in making the imaginary visible.

The industry's rapid growth has prompted educational institutions to adapt. Art schools now offer specialized programs in concept art and digital painting. Some educators argue for curricula that mirror industry practices, preparing students for the fast-paced realities of production work. Others push for traditional foundations first, reasoning that software changes constantly but artistic principles endure.

Workshop programs have also emerged to train practicing artists in new digital tools and techniques. The field evolves quickly enough that continuous learning isn't optional. Artists who mastered the software of five years ago may find their skills partially obsolete today.

The Invisible Art

There's something poignant about concept art. It's created specifically to be superseded. The most successful concept art disappears into the final product, its purpose fulfilled when it guides the creation of something that audiences actually see.

When you watch a film or play a game, you're not supposed to think about the concept art that made it possible. You're supposed to be immersed in the finished world. The concept artist's job is done when you forget they existed.

This invisibility makes concept art fundamentally different from gallery art, which exists to be looked at and appreciated as an end in itself. Concept art is instrumental, valuable for what it enables rather than for what it is. The most brilliant concept painting in the world is a failure if it doesn't communicate effectively to the team that needs to use it.

And yet the work has its own beauty. Those "Art of" books sell because people genuinely want to see the creative evolution behind finished products. There's fascination in watching ideas take shape, in seeing the paths not taken alongside the paths that were. Concept art reveals that the fictional worlds we love weren't inevitable. They were choices, made visible through thousands of images that gradually converged toward the visions we know.

The next time you watch a film with otherworldly imagery or play a game set in an invented universe, spare a thought for the concept artists who imagined it first. Before the cameras rolled, before the code was written, before the voice actors recorded their lines, someone sat down with a digital brush and asked: what could this look like? Their answers, refined through countless iterations, became the foundations of worlds.