Concept art

They are worth watching for the order of work, not for the particular character. Character design does not start with the face or with the armor: first you make a series of quick thumbnails, one of them gets chosen, and only that one is taken further. In the workshop with the female character the choosing happens out loud, so you can see what a sketch is rejected for and why the winner is not the most finished one. After that the costume is assembled over a constructed figure, not in place of it.

The failure that most often keeps a concept from working is not in the drawing, it is in the sequence. Somebody opens a large canvas, spends an hour on a detailed head and finds that the character does not read: the silhouette is vague, the pose is arbitrary, the costume hangs on nothing. With creatures there is a second trap. A ghoul and a super mutant are built as normal anatomy deliberately broken in a few places, and if you do not have the underlying anatomy of the head in reserve, there is nothing to break — you just get an incorrectly drawn human. So in the workshops the skull and the set of the head are built in full, and only then does the stylization go on top.

Take the female character first: it is a full cycle with a clothed figure, so you see both the construction and the way the costume sits on the anatomy. The super mutant head works as a separate study of form and is a good choice when time is short. The ghoul is the loosest of the three, more about character and the gesture of the pose than about accuracy.

Three classes are more honestly called a look at the process than a section. There is no environment concept here, no vehicles and no prop design, and no talk of the studio pipeline, briefs or building a portfolio. If you were looking for how to draw a character concept and to watch somebody’s work all the way through, from sketch to paint, these six hours give you exactly that. If you need a program with assignments and reviewed work, the catalog does not have one yet.