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Character Concepting Workflows for Games in Photoshop

by Eric Chiang

In this Photoshop tutorial we will look at the basic principles of designing a video game character utilizing Photoshop as a drawing and painting tool. Software required: Photoshop CS5.

What you'll learn

In this Photoshop tutorial we will look at the basic principles of designing a video game character utilizing Photoshop as a drawing and painting tool. We'll learn about subjects such as sketching, design, rendering techniques and orthographic models sheets. We'll begin with the exploratory sketching phase, which is a stage where the concept artist produces loose grayscale sketches to communicate ideas to the team. We'll then take that sketch from a rough idea into a fully realized piece of concept art. From there, we'll take the design into a key part of video game character concept art: the orthographic. By the end of this tutorial we will have taken a look at a typical video game studio pipeline and learned numerous tips and techniques for how to be efficient in a video game production environment. Software required: Photoshop CS5.

About the author

Eric Chiang is a concept artist based out of Los Angeles, CA. After graduating from the Art Center College of Design, he has worked in the video game and film industry for the past 6 years designing worlds and the characters that inhabit them. His clients include Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, THQ, Liquid Entertainment, Dreamworks, and The Aaron Sims Company. Some of his credits include Rise of the Argonauts, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Transformers 3, and Sorcery. He is cu... more

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