Analysis of Concept Art

Concept Art

This is from ‘Call of Duty- Black ops 2’.

Concept art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It is emerged as an art movement in the 1960s, and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. It is still created today for games, books, TV shows and movies.

I will be talking about this particular image using the concept of art e.g. line, shapes, tone, texture, form, pattern, colour and composition. These are the elements of art. This is looking at the meaning of the image.

The line of an image (or curve) is a point from A to B. One line can show width, height, length. In art, lines the terminology is called ‘strokes’.  There are helicopters aiming to shoot buildings. There have been vehicles skidding.

Shapes are several lines connected. There are two types’ shapes and they can be ‘organic’ or ‘geometric’. Organic shapes are shapes that are associated with the real world, whereas geometric shapes have perfect measurements like a square or a triangle. The shapes from the above image are organic. Since this is a game, it has to look realistic, to make people play. The organic shapes are the vehicles, people, buildings, trees and road. The shapes here are about to destroyed by the helicopters aim.

A pattern is repetitions that enhance the surface of paintings or sculptures. The patterns of the image would be the ashes, concrete cracks, graffiti, skid marks.

The tone is the shade of the colour. It is related to darkness/light in colour. Its seems to be getting darker, because the sun is setting. It is still shining, but it is still getting darker through time. It seems like it could be after 5 O’clock. The tone will differ between where the light is shining and the shadows the objects leaves.

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Textures are what it may feel like. This includes one of our senses, what do you feel when you touch it. The road is cracked, so walking through it, may feel rough and hard to walk. Even though this is an image, the person who is playing the game is aware of what they are surrounded by, so they know for real what it may feel like for the character they are playing.

The form of a shape is what it looks like. This can include aspects like the volume, of 2D or 3D. It can describe volume or mass. The image is realistic enough, that people, who play this

game, must feel like they are in the game, as the controller. They can smell smoke and they can feel the textures from the wall.

The form is the 3-Dimensional shape, and that would be the buildings, vehicles, and people.

There are three properties to colour and they are: hue, intensity and value. The three properties can depend on the light and reflection. The colours are muted, but there is a bit of bright colours, from the fire, sky and sun.

This is a non-linear structure. It is where there are layers and layers of overlapping. This image has plenty of that.

With the tone and colour, they can have a deep meaning behind them. You can associate yellow with hazard, and orange with warmth. Black can be associated with death. Blue can be associated with sky, calm but also depression. It’s ironic because in the image, it shows death, war but at the long shot we can see beautiful cities, it looks calm. 

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The composition is the whole image. This includes the background, foreground and middle ground. In the background there are helicopters flying, large amount of smoke and a clear blue sky. In the middle ground, there are buildings, cities, destruction. In the foreground there are vehicles, military people. However in a perspective view, there are vehicles and military people in the front, building in the far back and then you’ve got the sky, smoke and helicopters above it all. This image looks like it has been taken before a disaster has been taken place. The obstruction has formed a mess on the road. The plane that crashed doesn’t seem to destroy the road. The car on the right seems to have broken down as you can see the airbag and the bonnet has been opened. The driver of the vehicle has gone. The road seems to be destroyed as you can see cracks and a big crack in front of the vehicle. It seems quite foggy.

The smoke is very thick; I can see this because you can hardly see anything behind it. A plane has blasted a fire and it has crashed onto the road and in this shot, we can see that it hasn’t fully destroyed it, but if this image was shot 5 seconds after we would see a bigger mess. The pillar that was holding the road has been knocked down, it is falling.

There is also a long vehicle that has been rolled over to its side. 

When the road was shattered, the vehicles must have been travelling along that road but broke down because of what the planes have caused. There are ashes at the background which shows where another fire must have taken place.

There are different types of concept art, but the image above shows background art. This type of art is important in gaming because it shows you the environment, you feel like you are in the world of game because you know what the world feels like. It creates an environment and an atmosphere that players will be playing for hours and so it must be interesting enough to hold their attention for such a long period of time.

There is also character concept on here. Every game has characters in it, some allow you to create your own character and a name for it. Characters that have been made for the game, are given weapons and clothing to match the game environment they are in.      

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