Concept Drawing

Are you an artist? Maybe? Well I'm not. I could do what that baby can do. I can even choose nice colors, like Green!! If you're an artist, you most likely already have your tricks of the trade. Like what tools you prefer. If you're not the artìste then I would suggest starting off on paper. At least for me, I have more control and freedom when I draw on paper than how I feel drawing pictures on my computer. For a lot of people ideas feel more fresh when they are recorded with a pencil and paper. I sometimes do my psuedo-code on paper too. It is like the diner napkin cliché. Some person down on their luck had a great idea one day and they first wrote it on a napkin so they wouldn't forget it. Buy a sketchpad and draw what you're thinking onto it. After you have made a drawing the next thing would be to scan the paper onto the computer. From there you can draw over your images and save the copy. The next step would be to invest in a tablet. If you're not doing a lot of the drawing for your game then don't worry about buying one. I don't have an expensive one. Mine was $70 I think. It is a Wacom tablet, but it is the small one (around 4" x 2"). Wacom's come with nice pens with digital erasers and they seem to be the top tablet brand. I also have a copy of Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk. I started off using Photoshop, but I realized that Sketchbook Pro felt a lot more natural to use. So after I brought over my scanned pictures, I had a nice program that allowed me to draw in layers and sketch over my drawings. The finished product usually came out a lot nicer compared to the first draft.

Concept drawing is the ideal way to show your team what you pictured in your head but couldn't easily put it into words. I know that seems more like common sense, but a lot of people don't think visually like that. Take 10 people and give them all a pen and paper. Tell them to tell you their favorite car using the pen and paper, 9 people will give you a written description and 1 will have drawn a picture. As adults we tend to rely more on our left/logical side of our brain compared to using the right/visual side. The reason is because when you were a kid you didn't know how rockets worked. So you used your imagination until you learned the truth.

So the next time your boss, teacher, professor, business partner, or whomever asks you for a new idea or to rehash an old one. Give them a concept drawing, put some work into it, and make it show off your imagination. A picture is worth a thousand words.