Intro
What is concept art?
Concept art is like a visual idea for a story. It's used to show how characters, places, and things might look in a comic book, movie, video game, or other type of project. It helps everyone involved in the project have a clear idea of what the world will be like, and it also works as guide for the art director and art team to follow and keep things consistent.
Here’s my silly little attempts at concept art:
The first one is a concept art of a war battle that would happen in a DND campaign, the second one is a concept of a card for the death, a scary character.
And each process can go through:
1. Brainstorming and Research
• Gather inspiration: Look at reference materials, such as books, movies, games, or real-world examples. Research information about the setting, characters, or technology.
2. Thumbnails
• Quick sketches: Create small, rough sketches to explore different compositions and ideas.
3. Character Design
• Develop characters: Design the appearance and personalities of the main characters.
4. Setting Design
• Create environments: Design the world or locations where the story takes place.
5. Props and Objects
•Design elements: Create objects and props that are relevant to the story.
6. Color Palette
•Choose colors: Select a color scheme that complements the mood and atmosphere of the story.
Remember: Concept art is an iterative process. You may need to go back and revise your ideas as the project progresses. The goal is to create a strong visual foundation for your story.
Some of my character designs concept art:
A mage, a fish and a clow:
How is it used in comics/webtoons?
Do you have a story you're working on? Characters, places, props, maybe a fantasy world or a steampunk dystopic future.
If you do, I'm sure you already struggled to compose your story buiding into art right? And get that nice and consistent art style/aesthetic in your panels, whevener it's for Graphic novel, traditional comic or webcomics, concept art plays a important rule in your world building, because it will be the recipe for your story visuals:
So if you feel like something is missing, let's use Clip Studio and concept art to solve this problem!
We will be following this three main steps for each process:
Concept
Compose
Refine!
Assets materials for concept art assistance
Clip Studio Assets is a platform where you can find and download additional resources for use with Clip Studio Paint, we will be using these resources to assist in our world buiding concept art, some of the stuff we can find there that will be very useful are:
Brushes: A wide variety of brushes designed for different purposes, such as painting, sketching, or inking.
3D models: Pre-made 3D models of people, animals, objects, and environments that you can use as references or incorporate into your artwork.
Textures: Textures can be used to add depth and realism to your drawings and paintings.
Color palettes: Pre-made color palettes that you can use to color your artwork.
Line art: Pre-made line art that you can use as a base for your drawings.
How to use it?
You can find all assets in this link below:
Or you can go directly to your home section inside Clip Studio and it will take you to the assets automaticaly:
If your CSP version is compatible, you can download the asset and it’ll be located in your material library:
You can find your assets library clicking in this icon:
For tools, you gonna click, hold and drop it on the sub tool detail pallete.
For materials, you gonna do the same but on the canvas:
Character design
This section was drew by my friend @imfkdying on X please check her out!
Character design is from far the most fun and important part of creating your story, it’s usually the most required in the market too, but the process can be kinda challenging when you’ve been keeping your character in your imagination forever and still didn’t try to come up with a concept for them. (guilty)
But this simple process might help you a bit.
Concept
The heart of your character, the concept, we will start by gathering lots of references, such as time setting, cultural background, age, job, theme, clothing style etc.
After putting it all together we can start working on the character’s personality, their personality type will depend a lot on their story background, relationships, traumas and culture, so take care of these things first before designing the character.
For our process character, I want to introduce you to Doris, she was a little girl living in a post-apocalyptic setting, being one of the last survivors, she became friends with a monster who took her body after she passed away because of an illness, and now, the monster uses her body as it’s own, nothing is left of the poor little girl:
1: Start by sketching several different versions of your character, trying to include most of what you found so far in your research. As for Doris, Imf wanted her to have a lolita vibe, something resembling an old doll that was forgotten in a cold closet.
Doris also has a monster inside her, so Imf decided to make quick sketches of the monster as it’s an important part of Doris’ character.
Some might be discarded in the end, but it’s a natural part of the process, should you try it yourself?
The color composition for Doris played in the Dark academia/Vintage pallete themes, it would remind the viewer of the harsh reality she lived in, a cold, colorless world, keep it in mind when choosing your colors.
Composition
2: Choose between your favorite designs or details to gather them all in a single design, and here we have the final composition, using a 3d model from CSP assets you can easily sketch your final composition on top of that.
Refining
3: Having a front and back view of your character will make it easier to replicate its details in the comic, lineart the front and back of your character clearly and add some notes on important details if necessary, so you won’t miss any of them in the final version.
4: Colorwork and personality traits: when coloring the character, keep in mind that different colors evoke specific emotions and associations. Use colors that align with your character's personality.
Consider the overall color palette of your character design. Ensure that the colors complement each other and create a visually pleasing composition.
5: Here we have the final version, this is the concept art that will be our guide while developing this character in a comic book page, which is our final goal for this tutorial.
Background design
Usually, when we’re working on a story, lots of different places where your scenes happen come to mind, places you know, places in real life, or fictional places, whenever it is, we always set our story somewhere, and with this “somewhere” I mean a literal world where your characters live and interact.
And lemme tell ya, the physical setting is one of the most important parts of world-building, but how am I supposed to come up with literal places for my characters to exist? Well, concept art comes to the rescue, literally, concepting your backgrounds.
1: references: I hope that by now you got your references set, but one interesting thing about Clip Studio is that they have several background and 3d models that are useful to use as references, some search keys include:
3d background
Background paint
Background Image material
Having products that are “ready to use” is pretty convenient, but even if you have a standard process to finalize your image materials, you can run into style and esthetic inconsistencies, making your work seem amateur or “rough”, breaking the “immersion”.
So then, I will show you how you can design a background from zero, without suffering too much.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the materials mentioned, for the contrary, use them as much as you like, as a base, or just as references, but make sure to have your world’s aesthetic set beforehand.
Concept
2: Sketch living space blue prints: Whether it’s a bedroom, a important park, a castle in the sky, make sure to have a layout of the place, so you can localize your characters and objects in it:
By using this asset, you can have a pretty easy storyboard layout for your blueprints:
While sketching the important bgs your story takes place, don’t forget to add objects and details to the minimaps, stuff you can easily download from CSP assets to use once you start to compose your background.
3: gather assets materials and brushes: to make the process easier, we gonna be using several material such as dirt brushes, square pencils, spray brushes etc, to finalize we will also be using some texture effects and general effects, so keep up with the catalogue:
Composition
4: It’s time to compose our background, I’ll be using one of the hall blueprints I did for this concept art, it’s a post-apocalyptic setting, so the place is abandoned and in ruins, a rough sketch will be enough for me to work on top of that, I won’t be doing lineart because it would double the work, unnecessarily.
Sketching brush:
The Blueprint I've choosen was the first one, abandoned hall corridor, and the red point is where my character will be located:
Here is some additional details about my composition, I used some key objects and aspects from the blue print to create a livid place, where you can feel there were people here before, such as broken lights, missing person posters and overgrow grass indicating no one is taking care of that place in a long time, when creating your background, be sure to make it feel like people existed in that place at some point.
5: Now it’s time to gather the color bases, Clip Studio assets have a lot of good “ready to use” color palettes so you shouldn’t suffer too much to choose the colors if you download some palettes from there, the key search word for it is “color set” plus your desired theme, try it out!
Color sets I used:
Refining
6: After applying the color base, we gonna start drawing the main structures of the corridor using the square brush we downloaded, in this case, the walls, breaking points of the walls and edges, after that, you can start refining the details using the same square watercolor brush, this is the time we also compose the scene adding details for each object placed in the background.
Details:
7: Now, using the complementary brushes, we gonna add more texture and details to the backgrounds, such as dirt, stains, mold etc, after all it’s an abandoned place.
You can use this lasso tech asset to easily draw base shape fills, in this case, I used it to draw vegetation.
And if you find it difficult to draw wall cracks, you can try this brush:
Heymo texture brush set has a ton of nice textures for concept art making, specially if you’re looking for something morbid or apocalyptic
Here’s where I used it to texture the details in the walls and objects:
This leaf brush was perfect to do this background detail, its flat simple and with a light outline around:
Then, to make the ground process easier, I decided to download some tiles to add to the concept art, and here’s the process I did to make it fit in the perspective I choose:
After adding, set the transform mode to: Free transform or perspective and lay down the tiles this way:
Then, rasterize and cut the extra egdes, when turning the mesh tranform on, it might look like this:
Right in the mesh transform tool, distort the control points to create some curves around, try to edit until it follows your chosen perspective:
Erase the edges and voyla: our ground is ready:
After adding the objects again, it might look like this, feel free to add some green mold and stains everywhere:
Now its time for the shading, using the square brush I drew some shadow around, without the mutiply filter it might look like this:
The square brush might do the work all by itself so you don’t need to worry too much about the tecnique, a basic shading like this might do, and with the mutiply on:
Now add some spray highlights, in a strong blue tone, when hit with the add glow/screen/add effect it will light up the place nicely.
Filter on:
8: we finish it off with auto action and effects then voyla, a background concept that you can also use diretly in your colored comic.
Prop design
Concept art can aply for any kind of objects, houses, vehicles, creatures, all of them follow the same process of creation, but for this section I’ll be showing you how to use some CSP assets to create prop concept art, usually when your project is not playing in the current modern world setting, It’s hard to match the current world object aesthetics with your own, specially if it’s a fantasy/antique set or futuristic/distopyan one.
Prop design can also be kinda tricky when you don’t have strong anatomy skills, so this tip with assets might come in handy, but for world-building, having your prop/houses/vehicles/creatures properly designed and in the same style theme is extremely important.
Quick process
When you don’t have strong anatomy skills, It’s hard to properly design an object in a specifc scenerio or setting, so let’s say I wan’t to create a custom sword for a fantasy drama, or a broken forgotten mirror for a distopyan horror, or maybe even a futuristic tablet for a cyber punk adventure, how can I do it?
1: gather references of what you’re looking for, in real life pictures and art, you might easily find references all over the internet if you really look into it.
2: Using clip studio assets, let’s download 3d basic models of what were looking for, in my case, I needed a sword, a mirror and a tablet:
3: After placing our models, let’s sketch our ideas on top of each model, adding the references we gathered along our research:
4: Now, for a faster process, let’s use this close and fill tool you also can find on assets to color base our props:
5: Now using the same brush assets we used in the background process, let’s give them a quick rendering to finalize it.
The awesome part of working with 3d is that you can place your objects in any position you want, so it can come in hand when drawing them directly in the comic page.
Speech bubbles design + comic page
When it comes to page composition, speech bubbles play an important role in leading the viewer’s gaze in the right direction, making its reading more dynamic and fluid, helping them interact with specific parts of your composition that might be more important first.
Concept
Because of that, speech bubbles happen to also be an important part of the concept as a whole, and they also can be specifically designed in graphic novels and colored comics to match the style and improve the overal artistic appeal, of course, you still can stick to the basic simple speech bubbles, but designing them is fun as well.
The basic shapes of speech bubbles: Talking, thinking, shouting, monologue and whisper.
There’s variations of course, like trembling, slight shout, horror, you can even be creative and come up with your own emotion in the speech bubbles, but now, let’s focus on these 5.
Using this as a base, we can come up with several diferent designs for our speech bubbles, and some assets can even help us too, to finalize it:
This asset for example, can put cute tones inside or behind your speech bubble:
You can even download a specific brush to create your bubbles with more texture:
In any case, you can be pretty creative with colors and decorations, adding gradients, overlaping your base color, adding textures:
Composition
But, for my main speech bubbles I’m going to use these 3 assets to create it, I’ve decided on a solid dark blue bubble for my page, to match the style and stand out from the grayish blue colors:
To set the bubble tool, I’m going to select the soft pencil chalk I downloaded as a preset in sub tool detail>brush shape>Add to preset (in your selected tool).
Then go to the bubble tool sub detail>select soft chalk pencil>aply blush shape.
After changing the colors and the details in all bubble tools, they should work as you intended within the canvas.
Now we draw the basic shapes of our bubbles using the bubble tools and pencil:
Add a texture on top:
Finalize with details using the gouache brush:
Refining
Now we sketch our characters and monologues inside our comic page, on top of the background we made:
Now we add our newly designed speech bubbles:
Line and color base all your sketchs, usually I start by the ones I’m more excited about, whichs the girl standing.
I used a asset as a base to draw this foot, its way faster than struggling for hours trying to get the anatomy right, you can find several of these around csp assets, but never skip your anatomy practice!
Finalize your art with a simple render, utilizing the brushs you downloaded to just add a little more details on top of the flat render along with a correction color or auto action layer:
Conclusion
And we are pretty much done, if you came all this way, tell me about your characters and world buiding settings! I’d love hear about them and give my opinions on your creativity process, and if you happen to use my tutorial as a base to create a comic page, tag me or my friend in the bird and camera social medias: @imfkdying @yorutea, I would love to see it!
Bye!
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