Visual Design: Insect Concept Art

For this assignment we had to create a character concept based on an insect design. I instantly gravitated towards some sort of armoured warrior bug. Their exoskeletons drew me straight towards that line of thought and many of them have built in defence mechanisms that empower them in the natural world.



I created a mood board with the sort of colours, textures and shapes I was looking for. Asymmetry, spikes and curves really drew my eye. I wanted to create something sleek and fast looking. Think about how quickly a wasp can go from friend to stinging you in the neck. That sort of reflex action.

I started roughing out character designs based on the shapes that I liked. I found that the more I exaggerated the features, the more I deviated away from what I was trying to achieve. The majority of these looked more like a creature from the depths of hell in Doom as opposed to an insect based concept. I took a few separate elements from these designs and incorporated them into something far more obviously bug-like.

 Next up was the design of a model sheet. This is hugely important in the industry as it gives 3D artists the 360 degree imagery they need to begin rendering characters in software such as Maya.

And finally with that done, it was time to start rendering this bad boy. A big challenge was creating a believable exoskeleton. The insect kingdom has an incredibly wide range of textures and colours so I tried to create a raised look based on research. I went with the tried and tested Feng Zhu method of crafting values out of a strong silhouette. I find this works excellently with organic concepts more often than not. It also allows me to paint in greyscale and worry about colour elements later on, as it is very simple to just drop a colour layer over the top of everything in Photoshop and experiment.

Below is the final piece along with some other colour concepts as many hives have different workers for different tasks AND games love a colour variant on the same model to represent a stronger character! As I reflect and study the finished piece, I do think it looks a little generic and I could have pushed the forms a lot further. Asymmetry works really well in designs and I failed to bring that in to this character concept. The colours turned out really well though as my values were quite solid in the black and white stage. Still I have to be very careful with turning to rim lighting so quickly.